This issue overview describes the essays as seeking alternate approaches to unresolved social conflicts or unfulfilled human rights obligations. Although some ideas are admittedly speculative, we hope to encourage thinking that will genuinely promote social justice. Such efforts may help to restore mediation and diplomacy, not "humanitarian war" and defense build-ups, to their rightful place in addressing regional conflicts and human rights abuses, or correct the imbalance between education and prison construction locally.

Key words: human rights

Shank's commentary examines the logic behind NATO's "humanitarian intervention" in Kosovo, which failed in terms of preventing a humanitarian disaster, but not in terms of reducing Yugoslavia's military and industrial capacities to rubble and reinvigorating the U.S. military-industrial complex. This war set troubling precedents by enlisting human rights organizations and traditionally pacifist or antimilitarist parties and organizations in support of a policy of military intervention, and by imperiling crucial arms control agreements through the nondefensive use of an expanded NATO. Rhetoric promoting the war effort asserted a "moral imperative" to defend human rights over sovereignty. Shank identifies the elite groups promoting the war.

Key words: war and peace/military and defense issues Europe -- foreign relations -- United States, human rights, international law, Kosovo -- politics and government, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, United States -- foreign relations -- Europe, United States -- military policy, world politics, Yugoslavia -- politics and government

Rita Maran examines Amnesty International's (AI) campaign on the United States, which takes aim at the deep-seated, widespread pattern of human rights violations in the U.S.: police brutality and the prison system's widespread pattern of physical and sexual violence, as well as the racially biased and arbitrary application of the death penalty. She also outlines the salient human rights mechanisms and procedures of the United Nations system as they relate to AI and to the United States, as well as the pertinent U.S. human rights policies, practices, and formal obligations.

Key words: prison conditions, death penalty, human rights, politics [practical] -- Amnesty International, United Nations -- human rights

Dhir interviews Eva Herzer, the president of the International Committee for Lawyers for Tibet. Herzer frankly assesses why China is roundly condemned for human rights violations and yet not a single government in the world recognizes Tibet as a country entitled to independence. She also discusses how population control policies implemented by the Chinese in Tibet fall within the Genocide Convention. Nevertheless, the interview stresses the importance of expanding trade and other relationships with China.

Key words: human rights, China -- foreign relations -- Tibet, human rights -- Tibet, Tibet -- foreign relations -- China, Tibet -- human rights

Kawewe and Dibie argue that governments, the U.N., NGOs, parents, and human services professionals have failed to significantly curb the cruelty to children, especially the girl child and young women, practiced worldwide. Despite efforts by the United Nations, child neglect and abuse persist internationally under the rubric of cultural and religious freedom. The authors propose ways to strengthen nationally defined goals for eradicating such abuse.

Key words: women, women's rights, children -- child abuse -- third world, Third World -- women's rights, United Nations -- child abuse, United Nations -- women's rights

Dexter takes seriously efforts by conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and the Promise Keepers that use grass-roots politics to recruit families in support of traditional, "profamily" methods that sanction a traditional (male dominated) division of labor through their ministries, radio, publications, tapes, films, and bibles. Dexter takes to task the contention of such groups that they lack a political agenda and reveals the social policies embedded in their primary documents and lobbying efforts.

Key words: gender , Christianity -- Christian right -- sex roles, right [the] -- Christian right -- sex roles, sex role -- Christian right, Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and the Promise Keepers

Logan discusses prenatal substance abuse, focusing on women addicted to crack and their children. She illustrates that the social, legal, and political trends that comprise the nation's response to this problem were largely inspired by racial, gendered, and socioeconomic imperatives, rather than by the blind hand of justice. Stigmatizing and punishing poor drug-addicted black women, she argues, is useful not for preventing fetal harm, but for defending normative standards of gender and motherhood, the resuscitation of public innocence concerning the plight of the black poor, and the legitimization of a status quo characterized by continuing oppression and inequality. If the real imperatives driving the criminal prosecution of crack-addicted mothers were reflected upon, policymakers might begin to devise programs that empower pregnant addicts and allow them to be good mothers to their children.

Key words: drugs, crack babies, African Americans -- mothers, children -- fetal rights, drug abuse -- mothers, minorities -- war on drugs policy, mothers -- African Americans, mothers -- drug abuse, United States -- social policy -- drug control policy

Meisenkothen takes a look at recent legislation that mandates chemical castration as a condition of parole for repeat sex offenders and the discretionary chemical castration of paroled one-time sex offenders. This idea may shock and surprise some, yet the approach (which affects only males), when combined with psychological therapy, could offer a constitutionally novel alternative for treating and effectively rehabilitating paraphiliac offenders, while easing the burden on already over-taxed prison resources.

Key words: punishment, parole, criminal justice -- chemical castration, law -- chemical castration

Bufkin analyzes data on bias crimes committed against women, the homeless, those with disabilities, gay men and lesbians or bisexuals, religious and racial and ethnic minorities, as well as advocates for members of those groups. She suggests that bias offending is undertaken for the purpose of accomplishing a specific form of hegemonic masculinity that can best be analyzed within the framework of structured action theory.

Key words: gender, bias crimes, crime and criminals -- hate crimes and masculinity, sex role -- masculinity and hate crimes

Arrigo and Williams examine the vitality of Michel Foucault's social control thesis in light of contemporary mental health and hospital law, with special emphasis on the psychiatric institution and the system of confinement for the mentally ill. The authors investigate the criteria of mental illness and dangerousness in relation to involuntary civil commitment determinations and seek to demonstrate how chaos theory enhances our understanding of the social control thesis and its implications for medical justice.

Key words: social control, civil rights -- mental illness, mental illness -- civil rights, psychiatry, social theory -- chaos theory, Foucault, Michel

Schehr and Milovanovic seek to integrate new scientific approaches into contemporary conflict intervention strategies. The authors critique the dominant conflict resolution models and propose the development of regional conflict management centers. They stress the need to accept the postmodern precept that conflict and instability are normative aspects of social systems and that we must cultivate ways of building complex understandings at the phenomenal, group, and national levels.

Key words: theory, psychoanalysis -- psychoanalytic semiotics, semiotics -- psychoanalytic semiotics, social theory -- chaos theory, sociology -- catastrophe theory, sociology -- chaos theory, sociology -- conflict resolution strategies

Dirlik describes author Michael Dutton as the most gifted China analyst working today with poststructuralist methods and concepts. The current work, Streetlife China, contains a section on human rights abuses in China, with a focus less on heroic dissident voices being suppressed than on the desultory practices of the hooligans, pimps, prostitutes, and unemployed being extinguished.

Key words: book review, Asia/South Asia, China -- social conditions

Platt looks at four new books on prisons, race, and crime.

Key words: book review, prison, crime and criminals -- race, literature -- prisons, prisons -- literature, race -- crime and criminals

Chincilla considers Edward McCaughan's Reinventing Revolution: The Renovation of Left Discourse in Cuba and Mexico to be a masterful contribution to the study of Latin American social movements and political thought, as well as to contemporary intellectual history.

Key words: book review, nationalism; politics and government; right and left [political science]; socialism; Central America: Latin America; McCaughan, Ed, Westview Press