‘… for peace comes dropping slow’

This article considers Northern Ireland’s history of conflict through a lens that emphasizes conciliation over conflict. It demonstrates how numerous state, social and economic groups actively attempted to avoid, rectify or oppose Northern Ireland’s conflict. In doing so, the article argues that long before (and after) the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was reached subtle changes at the societal level helped both restrain and later ameliorate the conflict there. This emphasis questions the utility of more (para)militarized histories of Northern Ireland’s Troubles by seeing the peace process as the growth of conciliation rather than the attenuation of violence. Applying this to what is widely regarded as the polarization of politics in the contemporary United States, the article highlights how the emphasis on violent events in the public mind can actively obscure a more consistent, if gradual, current flowing in a different direction.

Personalizing Moral Reframing in Interpersonal Conversation: A Field Experiment

Organizations in the contemporary United States face substantial challenges with persuading citizens and moving them to take action. Prior research finds that citizens’ views can be changed and strengthened using frames consistent with their moral values. However, it can be difficult for organizations to tailor their appeals to individuals’ moral values given the difficulty in predicting which moral values matter to which citizens. We present a pre-registered field experiment in which canvassers for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (n = 52) sought to overcome this challenge by listening for individual voters’ (n = 1, 034) moral values and then tailoring their appeals to those moral values. In contrast to an earlier study finding no impact of long-form canvassing on abortion attitudes, we find these conversations had large effects on interest in taking action and some evidence of changes in policy attitudes. This experiment provides a template for practitioners and researchers to build on.

Disputes over Genomic Science Are Not Partisan

In the contemporary United States, most important societal disputes have become politicized, with the result that there are Republican and Democratic positions to which partisans largely adhere. Interestingly, that is not the case for societal uses of genomic science; controversies surrounding genomics are largely nonpartisan, or its uses are not even considered controversial. Chapter 3 demonstrates this unusual pattern by examining American elected officials’ unanimous support for forensic DNA databases and their silence on scientific DNA databases, the lack of partisanship in legislation and funding for genomics research, and the absence of controversy in the courts around genomics.

The Global White Snake as Digital Activist Project

There is a long oral tradition and written record for the legend of the White Snake. As a woman, her “original sin” is being a snake. She is a snake who has cultivated herself for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to attain the form of a beautiful woman. Living as a resident “alien” (yilei) in the “Human Realm” (renjian), the White Snake has always been treated with suspicion, fear, exclusion, and violent suppression/exorcism. The White Snake is an immigrant to the human world, whose serpentine identity made her a “resident alien,” the legal category given to immigrants in the United States before they receive their “Green Card” and become a “permanent resident.” The implication of being a snake woman in the human world took on new meanings when the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the existing xenophobia, fear, and suspicion toward minority populations in the contemporary United States and throughout the world. Inspired by the Chinese White Snake legend, the three Anglophone opera, film, and stage projects from Cerise Lim Jacobs, Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri, and Mary Zimmerman, energetically engage with issues relevant to minority activism in the United States and more broadly, through digital media and digital platforms.

What makes violence martial? Adopt A Sniper and normative imaginaries of violence in the contemporary United States

What makes violence martial? Contemporary militarism scholarship, owing to an analytical overdetermination of the role of military institutions, frequently conflates martiality with violence writ large. Drawing upon the illustrative case of Adopt A Sniper, a US military support charity founded by police officers operating during the global war on terror and intended to help supporters ‘directly contribute to the killing of the enemy’, this article interrogates the intuitive ‘line’ between martial and other, particularly colonial, forms of violence. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘normative imaginaries of violence’ – articulations of intersubjective beliefs; political community; spatial geographies; gendered, sexualized, racialized and classed power relations; and logics of legitimation. Through this lens, and informed by the work of Frantz Fanon, the article demonstrates that though coloniality and martiality are deeply intertwined, they are neither reducible to nor epiphenomenal of each other. Through a juxtaposition of the titular sniper with two additional figures invoked by Adopt A Sniper – the militiaman and the vigilante – I outline a novel, genealogical method that enables us to trace the entangled histories of contemporary violences and identify the implicit politics of ordering at work in existing, often fragmented, analyses of political violence.

Pills and Control in the Carceral State

The book review explores Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America by Anthony Ryan Hatch explaining how the contemporary United States’ carceral state—prisons, nursing homes, foster care systems, active duty military, immigrant detention facilities, and schools—is mired in its own self-imposed drug addiction to psychotropic medication to control those in its “care.”

Bill Content, Legislative Outcomes, and State-Level Resistance to National Policies

Recently, scholars of the lawmaking process have urged their colleagues to devote more attention to the potential impact of bill content on legislative outcomes. Heeding their call, this paper builds an original dataset of over 5,000 pieces of state-level legislation addressing issues that span the ideological spectrum. It compares proposals that challenge the authority of the national government in a specific domain to proposals that lack federalism-related implications and finds that the former, all else being equal, make less legislative progress toward enactment. In addition, it categorizes the measures that resist national laws based on the specific nature of the challenge they pose. Its analysis finds that measures that are inconsistent with existing national law but work within the law’s legal framework make more legislative progress than measures that seek to nullify the national law or that vow not to cooperate with it. It also confirms that sponsor characteristics such as majority status, the number of cosponsors, institutional rules such as hearing requirements, and state-level factors like party control of the state legislature affect how much progress proposals make toward enactment. Thus, the paper demonstrates the importance of legislative content as an explanatory factor and sheds light on the nature of intergovernmental relations in the contemporary United States.