Sanctioning policies - Australian, American and British cross-national reflections and comparisons

Over the last two decades welfare policies have undergone major reforms in Anglo-Western nations such as the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Central to these reforms have been the revision of welfare recipient entitlements and responsibilities and the emergence of a responsibility and obligations agenda. The essence of this agenda is conditionality and reciprocity, and it includes the threat of punitive sanctions for failing to comply with mandatory participation requirements. This paper highlights the potent influence of the ideas of American conservatives on policy reforms in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia and provides a thematic crossnational comparison of sanctioning policies in these nations

Experiments on free-surface turbulence

Surprisingly little is known about the statistical nature of the shape of a free surface above turbulence and about how this shape depends on the properties of the turbulence. The main focus of this thesis is on experiments in which the statistical properties of both the surface and the turbulence are measured with a number of different techniques. The experiments are done in a free-surface water-channel, in which turbulence is generated with an active grid. This active grid consists of an array of horizontal and vertical rods through the channel, with small wings attached to them. The rods are individually driven by electric motors, according to a certain forcing protocol, thereby adding energy to the turbulence. A major advantage of an active grid is that, by changing this protocol, the properties, such as the intensity and the isotropy, of the generated turbulence can be changed. These properties were measured by means of Laser-Doppler Velocimetry. The turbulence behind the active grid is much more intense than turbulence generated by a more common static grid. The maximum Taylorbased Reynolds number reached with the active grid (at 40 times the mesh size behind the grid) was Re¿= 256, compared to Re¿ = 70 with a similarly dimensioned static grid. Consequently, the active-grid-generated turbulence shows clear Kolmogorov scaling behaviour over a relatively wide range of scales. The stronger turbulence also leads to stronger surface deformations. In order to characterise the shape of the surface, it is essential to measure the surface shape with a high resolution both in space and time. In order to achieve this, a novel technique has been developed, based on refraction of a laser beam that shines through the surface. The de ection of the beam due to the local surface slope is measured by means of an optical position sensing device. The beam is swept along a line by means of a rapidly oscillating mirror (with a frequency of close to 2 kHz). This allows measurements of the surface slope at multiple points along the line as a function of time. This surface scanning technique can be combined with Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), which provides snapshots of the velocity field and the vertical component of vorticity in horizontal planes just below the surface. This combination allows us to simultaneously measure the velocity field and the surface deformations above it. PIV is based on the cross-correlation of the intensity distributions in images of particles suspended in the ow, that are illuminated by a thin laser light sheet. When applying PIV to turbulence, it is important to realise that the velocity field that can be obtained with PIV is a spatially averaged representation of the actual velocity field. The effect this averaging has on measured turbulence properties is investigated by means of kinematic simulations, in which realistic turbulent velocity fields, with a prescribed energy spectrum, are generated. Synthetic particle images derived from these ??elds are evaluated by means of a PIV algorithm and the velocity spectrum is calculated. Comparing this to the prescribed spectrum clearly shows the averaging, and allows us to predict its in uence on other measured turbulence properties. The turbulence generated by our grid is not strong enough to lead to very large deformations of the surface. The measured changes in elevation are less than 1 mm. In that case, somewhat naively, one would expect the surface deformations to be primarily associated with sub-surface vortices. In the core of a vortex the magnitude of the vorticity is high, while the pressure is low. This low pressure causes a dimple in the surface above the vortex. This effect can, for instance, be seen when stirring a cup of tea or in the wake behind bridge pillars in a river. Consequently, in simultaneous measurements of the surface shape and the sub-surface velocity field one would expect to find a relatively large correlation between the vertical component of vorticity and the surface elevation. Indeed, our measurements show that relatively strong vortices in the turbulence do deform the surface. However, the measured correlation coefficients are low (<0:1). Spectra of the surface slope in space and time show that, instead of being connected directly to sub-surface structures, much of the surface actually consists of gravity-capillary waves, i.e. regular surface waves. For surface waves, there is a clear relation between their wavelength and their frequency. This relation can be identified in our spectra. The presence of these waves is somewhat surprising, since resonant wave growth can only be expected to occur if the uctuation velocities in the turbulence are larger than the minimum phase velocity of the waves (˜ 0:23 m/s), while the measured fluctuation velocities in our turbulence are an order of magnitude smaller. A remarkable feature of the waves above the turbulence is that they travel in all directions across the surface. In fact, provided that the turbulence far below the surface is isotropic, the surface shape itself is isotropic as well. In other words, statistically, the waves on the surface are the same in every direction. We can change this by changing the forcing protocol of the active grid such that the turbulence becomes anisotropic. In that case the surface shape becomes anisotropic as well. This is a clear indication that the surface waves are excited locally by the turbulence. We have found evidence to suggest that the waves are excited by the largest structures in the turbulence. As a consequence of this, the surface shape does not re ect the wide range of scales in the sub-surface turbulence, but instead exhibits waves primarily with wavelenghts close to the integral scale of the turbulence

Global Human Rights Organizations and National Patterns: Amnesty International’s Responses to Darfur

This article provides an analysis of Amnesty International and its efforts to establish a global, human rights-based narrative on the mass violence in Darfur, Sudan, during the first decade of the 21st century. Interviews show how Amnesty’s narrative resembles that of the judicial field. Respondents insist that justice, once achieved, will help reach other goals such as peace. Relative unanimity in representing the violence supports the notion of globalizing forces highlighted by the world polity school, but national conditions also color narratives, in line with recent literature on national contexts of INGO work and a long tradition of neo-Weberian scholarship. Amnesty workers within national sections are aware of their government’s traditions, interests and policy foci when they seek to influence government policies. They are also mindful of nation-specific carrier groups, cultural sensitivities and business interests, when they attempt to mobilize volunteers and the public and raise funds. Such mindfulness, a precondition for effective work at the national level, resulted in nation-level variations of global human rights-based representations of mass violence in Darfur

Representing Mass Violence

How do interventions by the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court influence representations of mass violence? What images arise instead from the humanitarianism and diplomacy fields? How are these competing perspectives communicated to the public via mass media? Zooming in on the case of Darfur, Joachim J. Savelsberg analyzes more than three thousand news reports and opinion pieces and interviews leading newspaper correspondents, NGO experts, and foreign ministry officials from eight countries to show the dramatic differences in the framing of mass violence around the world and across social fields. “A pathbreaking examination of the multiple international narratives around Darfur by human rights advocates, humanitarians, journalists, and diplomats. Thorough and rigorous—an essential contribution to the scholarship.” — ALEX DE WAAL, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School, Tufts University “Darfur is the modern genocide that refuses to end, and this volume gives this mass atrocity the attention it deserves. It does so in highly original ways, including an unprecedented global analysis of media coverage, activism, and advocacy.” — JOHN HAGAN, John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Co-Director of the Center on Law and Globalization at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago “Joachim Savelsberg’s engagement with the critics of the human rights regime, coupled with his analysis of media representations and their national variations (and similarities), provides a perspective that is more encompassing than anything I am aware of.” — DANIEL LEVY, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University JOACHIM J. SAVELSBERG is Professor of Sociology and Law and Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota. He is the coauthor of American Memories: Atrocities and the Law and author of Crime and Human Rights: Criminology of Genocide and Atrocities

Knowing about Genocide

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Minnesota. Learn more at the TOME website, available at openmonographs.org. How do victims and perpetrators generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, Savelsberg answers this question for the Armenian genocide committed in the context of the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, he examines strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interaction, public rituals, law, and politics. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony, Savelsberg illuminates the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. He reveals counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, with implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence

Turbulence of a free surface

We study the free surface of a turbulent channel flow, in particular, the relation between the statistical properties of the wrinkled surface and those of the velocity field beneath it. For an irregular flow shed off a vertical cylinder, surface indentations are strongly correlated with vortices in the subsurface flow. For fully developed turbulence this correlation is dramatically reduced. This is because the large eddies excite random capillary-gravity waves that travel in all directions across the surface. Both their predominant wavelength and their anisotropy are determined by the subsurface turbulence

Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles

How do victim and perpetrator peoples generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, Joachim J. Savelsberg answers this question in the context of the Armenian genocide committed during the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, Savelsberg examines strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interactions, public rituals, law, and politics. He draws on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony to illuminate the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. Ultimately, this study reveals the counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, demonstrating the implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence.This book was funded through the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) Initiative at the University of Minnesota