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Education is central to creating well-informed citizens capable of participating in social and political life. However, civic education in some liberal democratic societies has often focused on teaching students the mechanics and structure of party politics, overlooking many of the public virtues that help to sustain democratic life. In this article we examine one such virtue, i.e., civility, and its role in party politics. We focus especially on partisan 'civility as politeness,' which entails the norms of politeness and etiquette that regulate partisans' speech and behaviour during electoral campaigns and within legislatures. We analyse partisan civility as politeness and explore its connection with two other dimensions of partisan civility, i.e., 'moral civility' and 'justificatory civility.' We conclude by developing recommendations on how to advance civility in party politics by creating well-informed citizens and politicians who recognize the importance of civility in democratic life.

This article uses new survey data to examine student preferences and experiences with active learning among a graduate student cohort across two key identity markers: international student status and gender. Our survey of students enrolled in a Master of International Relations program suggests that most view active learning favorably and believe it improves learning outcomes. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, international students prefer active learning to traditional lectures at the same levels as domestic students. Our findings also indicate that women prefer active learning as much as, and in some cases more than, men. We discuss potential reasons for these preferences and experiences and conclude with suggested avenues for future research.

John Rawls's political liberalism demands that reasonable citizens comply with the duty of civility, which limits the justification of state action to public reasons. However, many religious citizens in liberal democratic societies reject the exclusion of religious reasons from public debate. What can be done to encourage these citizens to endorse public reason? Rawls proposes the idea of reasoning from conjecture (RC), i.e. directly engaging with someone's comprehensive doctrine and showing them that such a doctrine actually supports public reason. In this article, we argue that reasoning from conjecture faces serious objections and that interfaith dialogue (ID) provides a better and more effective tool to encourage religious citizens to endorse public reason. More specifically, ID provides support to public reason by (i) relying on the principles of equality, sincerity and self-criticism, which are also central to public reason; (ii) leading participants to de-parochialize religion; and (iii) promoting tolerance. Moreover, ID avoids the main objections faced by RC, which undermine the latter's morality and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details a role-playing "citizenship simulation" used in a large graduate seminar offered by the Masters of International Relations (IR) faculty at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While recognizing the need for a more systematic analysis of the relationship between class size and active learning strategies, this article offers an anecdotal reflection on the challenges faced when employing active learning in an IR course with growing enrollment numbers. We describe and analyze a simulation used in the graduate course to evaluate the feasibility and desirability of structuring large IR classrooms to include participatory group activities such as simulations. We also hope the simulation provides instructors with an effective sample design for simulations in their own larger courses.

Scholars recognize the important role that diasporas play in conflict dynamics, including efforts to build peace in conflict-affected communities. Broader academic research emphasizes a focus on local conditions and actors, as well as site-specific understandings of peace and peacebuilding practices. This focus on specific communities and contexts often draws on qualitative, narrative-driven data, predominantly collected through interviewing. This article identifies some of the core challenges related to data collection encountered during semi-structured interviews in a study of Somali diaspora members in Melbourne, Australia. We emphasize how issues associated with cross-cultural and gendered understandings of concepts related to peacebuilding can affect each stage of a research project, from the preliminary collection of data to the analysis and discussion of research implications. Specifically, we address challenges related to instances of conceptual dissonance that occur when researchers employ cross-cultural and gendered concepts—in this case, peace, peacebuilding, and leadership. The findings will benefit conflict researchers who work with socially distant groups and ethnically divided populations more broadly, along with those who employ interpretivist methodologies that focus on how meaning making might ultimately influence peacebuilding practices and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracism has become a topical issue in democracies around the world, eliciting debate in political theory and philosophy regarding its normative and practical implications, especially its potential negative effects on democratic systems. In this article, we analyse conspiracism through the lens of civility. The public virtue of civility plays a key role in democratic politics and in public life more generally, by helping to sustain democratic institutions and facilitating social interaction despite disagreement. If conspiracism undermines civility and contributes to incivility, as we argue in this article, that might have distinctively deleterious effects on democratic life. We begin by unpacking the concept of civility into three key dimensions: (a) civility as politeness, (b) moral civility and (c) justificatory civility. We then illustrate how conspiracism can contribute to incivility and harm democracy in each of the three dimensions but also how it can sometimes be harmless or even helpful for democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments implemented social distancing requirements, lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. These caused unprecedented disruptions, especially in industries that often rely heavily on the labour of temporary migrants. As a result, temporary migrants were particularly disadvantaged by measures to safeguard population health. We critically scrutinise government policies related to temporary migrants in Australia during the pandemic. The Australian Government provided financial safety nets to individuals and families who were citizens and permanent residents, while deliberately excluding temporary migrants from such support. In contrast, efforts were made at the state level to compensate for this hardship. We trace how the Victorian Government ultimately came to provide financial support for temporary migrants. The case highlights how the interests of precarious members of society can go from being ignored to receiving the attention necessary to produce a policy change to meet their needs. With its emphasis on the role policy narratives play in shaping outcomes for temporary migrants, the analytical approach utilised here could inform future studies of migrant treatment in other contexts as well as studies focusing on other vulnerable and politically marginalised members of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incivility in parliaments is always prominently displayed in media reports, often with the implicit or explicit commentary that the situation is getting worse. This paper processes and analyses the records of verbal interactions in the Australian Parliament for over 100 years to provide a first approximation on the evolution of civility. It provides a framework for understanding the multidimensional nature of civility that examines both 'politeness' and 'argumentation', with the latter grounded in notions of public-mindedness. The analysis focuses on the interactions between parties of the orators and the party in power, the chamber of utterance, and the year. The results indicate that instances of impoliteness have increased since the 1970s but only modestly and remain highly infrequent. Minor parties, particularly those representing right-wing and Green politics are more likely to use dismissive or offensive language than the dominant centre-left and centre-right parties, although direct insults and swearwords are the particular remits of right-wing 'system-wrecker' parties. All these minor parties, nonetheless, also display higher levels of argumentation in their interventions. This combination of aggressive language and increased argumentation highlights the pressures on minor parties to convey their points in a forceful way, a challenge that is particularly pressing in two-party systems like the Australian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes whether climate disasters and climate-induced food scarcities influence individuals' willingness to fight for the state in a pro-government militia in the Philippines. We find that experiencing a disaster or subsistence loss corresponds to an increased willingness to join, even when accounting for other prominent explanations in the literature. This outcome, we argue, reflects the impact of climate change on the opportunity costs of conflict participation, especially in regions dependent on agriculture for income and food production, as diminished livelihood opportunities and subsistence resource access increase the viability of conflict participation as a strategy for livelihood diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining militia relationships with the government and civilian populations can help scholars and policymakers better assess differences in militia form, function, and behavior. In this article, we examine the Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Units (CAFGU), a pro-government militia in the Philippines, to better understand how militia participants view insurgents, politicians, state security forces, and civilians based on their experiences serving in the group. We argue that analyzing these beliefs is critical to understanding how militias influence civilian security and the risk of political violence in conflict-contested areas, as well as the trajectory of civil conflict in states like the Philippines that rely on militias to perform core security functions. We base the analysis on surveys and interviews with CAFGU members and civilians living in the Eastern Visayas, a region of active and ongoing conflict, where insurgents and other armed militants advance their aims through acts of violence and terrorism. In doing so, we contribute to a growing literature on the role that militias play in civil war, as well as the implications that follow when states choose to arm "civilians" to aid in counterinsurgency and conflict suppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for civility feature prominently in public discourse, and the concept has received growing attention by political philosophers recently. But what does it mean to be civil? The existing literature distinguishes between two main understandings of civility: civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness. The objective of this article is to show that these conceptions and the different normative claims associated with them can all fit together. We argue that civility and incivility should be disaggregated in order to uncover fruitful connections between different aspects of the concept. We introduce a distinction between two dimensions of civility as public-mindedness (moral and justificatory), as well as a new distinction between the means and ends of civility. We examine the complex connections between the different dimensions of (in)civility and show that the disaggregation of civility and incivility tells us what kind of (in)civility matters, as well as when and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What motivates civilians to fight in a progovernment militia? This article draws on survey and interview data from active members of Citizen Armed Forces Geographical Units (CAFGU), a progovernment militia in the Philippines, to evaluate why individuals enlist. We find poverty and unemployment to be key drivers of group membership, and the biggest attraction a steady paycheck. This situation presents a moral hazard for the Philippine government and other states that rely on impoverished citizens to wage counterinsurgency: while doing so can be cost-effective, the need to keep costs low might also impede efforts at socioeconomic or political reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State security forces have been locked in an ongoing struggle with the Communist Party of the Philippines – New People's Army (NPA) for nearly fifty years. Over the course of the conflict, thousands of civilians across generations have taken up arms and participated in the counterinsurgency campaign. Citizen Armed Force Geographical Units (CAFGU) and other pro-government militias have played a key auxiliary role in combatting the insurgency and providing community security. This article draws on survey and interview data collected from CAFGU participants to examine the factors that influence decisions to join, as well as their implications for sustained participation and counterinsurgency strategy. Existing research on joining armed groups recognizes how environmental conditions, group processes, and individual motives interact to help explain participation. We shift our focus to the realm of the household and highlight how considerations related to that site affect participation. Our findings suggest that the need to avoid economic disaster and ensure a secure subsistence can have a notable influence on decisions to enlist and individual experiences as CAFGU. These effects, in turn, have implications for how the Philippine government carries out its counterinsurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I identify and evaluate numerous reasons why torture became common practice during the state counterterrorism campaign in Peru between 1980 and 2000, despite international and domestic legal obligations to protect human rights. I describe common structural conditions, organizational factors, and individual-level explanations often associated with torture practices. I then identify seven logics and motivations behind torture use in counterterrorism campaigns. I describe and analyze actual torture use in Peru using quantitative incident-level data, and I provide descriptive statistics concerning variation in the frequency and methods of torture. Finally, I examine specific incidents of torture to illustrate and assess the different logics and motivations for torture. I draw heavily from testimonies collected by Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I also rely on personal interviews carried out during fieldwork in the Junín and Ayacucho regions of Peru. I find that aggregate torture incidents generally coincide with political developments and shifts in violence levels and that the various state security forces used torture differently. A review of testimonies regarding specific incidents of torture suggests that multiple logics motivate state security forces, even for a single incident of torture, complicating academic efforts to formulate a parsimonious causal explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]