Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

This article examines the problematic reductionism and decontextualising nature of hegemonic youth justice intervention evaluation and offers a way ahead for a realistic, context-sensitive approach to intervention evaluation in the youth justice field. It opens by considering how the development of risk-based youth justice interventions in England and Wales flowed from and fed into the modernisation and resultant partiality of the ‘evidence-base’, which shaped youth justice practice. It then moves to a critical review of the emergence and continued influence of risk-based interventions and the ‘What Works’ intervention evaluation framework in youth justice. In the closing discussion, this article envisages the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions to mitigate the limitations of current approaches to intervention selection and the evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’.

The Making of an Alliance

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated.

Transformative Contextual Realism

Realist political theory is often confronted with the objection that it is biased towards the status quo. Although this criticism overlooks the fact that realist political theories contain various resources for critique, a realist approach that is strong in status quo critique and contributes, constructively, to the theorising of alternatives to the status quo is a desideratum. The article argues that contextual realism, which sources its normativity from particular contexts, harbours an underexploited potential to establish such a form of political theorising. By drawing on ideas and principles that have guided critical engagements with social and political forms in a particular context, and on widely shared views of need for reform, realists can identify deficits of the status quo and contribute to a debate on how these deficits might be addressed. This article describes and illustrates the idea of a transformative contextual realism, and defends it against some potential objections.

Strictly Human: Limitations of Autonomous Systems

Can autonomous systems replace humans in the performance of their activities? How does the answer to this question inform the design of autonomous systems? The study of technical systems and their features should be preceded by the study of the activities in which they play roles. Each activity can be described by its overall goals, governing norms and the intermediate steps which are taken to achieve the goals and to follow the norms. This paper uses the activity realist approach to conceptualize autonomous systems in the context of human activities. By doing so, it first argues for epistemic and logical conditions that illustrate the limitations of autonomous systems in tasks which they can and cannot perform, and then, it discusses the ramifications of the limitations of system autonomy on the design of autonomous systems.

Unhealthy leadership behavior and employee retention that rocks academic excellence in higher education from a critical realist approach

Unhealthy leadership behavior also known as Toxic leader’s theory. It affects employee base and create environments to be less effective due to stress, devaluation, and potential job loss. And today, this challenge has also rocked academic excellence in higher education. This paper took a giant step to investigate unhealthy leadership behavior and employee retention that affects academic excellence and suggested a coping strategy by adopting a critical realist approach. This approach is used and adopted to understand the significant relationship between unhealthy leadership behavior, employee retention, and academic excellence. The study is centered on 48 head of units of universities both public and privately owned. The findings reveal that lack of job satisfaction and organizational commitment are rampant among higher educators due to unhealthy leadership behavior of which leads to implications on job satisfaction, job retention, and organizational commitment which are key components of organizational productivities.

O002. Factors facilitating the self- and shared-management of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

Background Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) requires some form of lifelong management, with at least one third of children symptomatic in adulthood. Therefore, empowering children to competently self-manage their health and wellbeing across the lifecourse is logical, while supporting families in their shared-management role during childhood. However, there was a limited theoretical basis to the self- and shared-management of JIA across the lifecourse. The objective is to explore the factors facilitating the self- and shared-management of JIA using a realist approach to evaluation. Methods Guided by the Individual and Family Self-management Theory, a three-stage realist approach to evaluation was undertaken: 1) initial JIA self- and shared-management question theories were elicited from literature reviews and stakeholder insights [1]; 2) seven initial question theories were tested using teacher-learner cycle interviews with 20 participants; 3) findings were analysed using a theory-driven approach to thematic analysis, using deductive, inductive, and retroductive reasoning to extend or refute the initial question theories, in order to identify demi-regularities in the data. Results Six refined JIA self- and shared-management question theories emerged: 1) meaningful and bespoke self-management support across the life course for children and young people with JIA; 2) recognised and valued shared-management support for the families of children and young people with JIA, with autonomy in mind; 3) individual healthcare plans as a shared management communication tool to facilitate optimal management of JIA; 4) consistent recognition, value, and encourage of self- and shared-management support from the paediatric rheumatology multi-disciplinary team and associated professionals; 5) child, young-person, and family-focused paediatric rheumatology care and support services across the lifecourse; and 6) bespoke and inclusive approaches by education providers to enable children and young people with JIA to feel safe, supported, and able to fulfil their potential. Conclusion There is an increasing recognition of the importance of self- and shared-management of JIA and other paediatric-onset chronic conditions. However, there is a lack of an overall, cohesive approach to self- and shared-management between healthcare providers, education providers, and patient/parent organisations. The findings from this study illuminate the factors facilitating JIA self- and shared-management at individual, interpersonal, institutional and infrastructural levels, bearing relevance to individuals and organisations involved in caring for, and supporting children with JIA and their families.

Financial Power and Democratic Legitimacy: How To Think Realistically About Public Debt

To what extent are questions of sovereign debt a matter for political rather than scientific or moral adjudication? We answer that question by defending three claims. We argue that (i) moral and technocratic takes on sovereign debt tend to be ideological in a pejorative sense of the term, and that therefore (ii) sovereign debt should be politicised all the way down. We then show that this sort of politicisation need not boil down to the crude Realpolitik of debtor-creditor power relations—a conclusion that would leave no room for normative theory, among other problems. Rather, we argue that (iii) in a democratic context, a realist approach to politics centred on what Bernard Williams calls ‘The Basic Legitimation Demand’ affords a deliberative approach to the normative evaluation of public debt policy options.

ThinkPiece: A Critical Realist’s Reflections on Coupling the Hydrological and Social Systems during a Global Crisis

Hydro-sociology is a recent field of study that aims to couple the human and water systems. It appears to be a response to dualistic thinking within hydrology and sociology that is also reflected in theoretical debates about structure and agency. Reflections about how specific rivers have ignited personal agency and define some of our political and economic structures are shared. Critical realists like Margaret Archer argue that reflexivity is a mediating tool between structure and agency. But what mediating tool is/can be used to mediate between the hydrological and sociological fields and related thinking? This think piece is a reflection on how a critical realist approach to structure and agency may deepen the connection and understanding of hydro-sociology. Keywords: critical realism, hydro-sociology, duality, water, structure and agency

The place of Africa in international relations: the centrality of the margins in Global IR

The Global IR research agenda lays emphasis on the marginalised, non-Western forms of power and knowledge that underpin today's international system. Focusing on Africa, this article questions two fundamental assumptions of this approach, arguing that they err by excess of realism – in two different ways. First, the claim that Africa is marginal to international relations (IR) thinking holds true only as long as one makes the whole of IR discipline coincide with the Realist school. Second, the Global IR commitment to better appreciate ‘non-Western’ contributions is ontologically realist, because it fails to recognise that the West and the non-West are dialectically constitutive of one another. To demonstrate this, the article first shows that Africa has moved from the periphery to the core of IR scholarship: in the post-paradigmatic phase, Africa is no longer a mere provider of deviant cases, but a laboratory for theory-building of general validity. In the second part, the Sahel provides a case for unsettling reified conceptions of Africa's conceptual and geographical boundaries through the dialectical articulation of the inside/outside dichotomy. Questioning the ‘place’ of Africa in IR – both as identity and function – thus paves the way to a ‘less realist’ approach to Global IR.