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Abstract
As a growing number of contemporary American novelists take the world and its socio-cultural and geopolitical complexity as their subject matter, the contemporary novel's form and sense of worldliness are shifting. Twenty-first century US fiction challenges normative models of the world proposed by theories of cosmopolitan relationality by projecting fragile worlds of strife and trauma, in which violence accompanies geopolitical turbulence. In these novels, discourses around human security—the everyday security needs of vulnerable populations—are increasingly prominent. Accordingly, contemporary US fiction often incorporates within its geopolitical imaginary such issues as human rights, humanitarian interventions, development, and how life is disabled by prejudice, civil war, scarcity, and health or other crises. In this essay, I range across a number of works by contemporary American novelists such as Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Denis Johnson, Dana Spiotta, and Bob Shacochis in which state failures as well as human and geopolitical security concerns impact on the form given to the world by these novelists. In their novels, narratives concerning human security as well as threats to geopolitical stability produce transnational geographies in which global interconnections and circulation intensify feelings of insecurity.

The ANIP Research Report From IDEA to practice assesses Indonesia's electoral justice system post-1998. Part I begins with a background identifying International IDEA's position in the International Relations human rights field, in which electoral justice systems are a subset, and International IDEA's response to the dilemma of exceptionalism. Part II then introduces the 12 International IDEA electoral justice principles, comprising of structural and procedural guarantees drawn from the International IDEA publication Electoral Justice: The International IDEA Handbook. The author then expands on each guarantee principle to develop corresponding benchmark indicators sets. Part III then locates these guarantees in an Indonesian context. Following an introduction and Chapter 1 overview of Indonesian electoral justice post-1998, the report undertakes a more detail examination of the electoral justice system and its role as an alternative to legislative power in Indonesia. This examination comprises of Chapter 2, which selectively assesses elements of the five structural guarantees, and Chapter 3, which repeats this process for the procedural guarantees. The report concludes by noting that the consistency and predictability underpinning a high performing electoral justice system in Indonesia remains under development.

This paper examines the issues of front‐line workers within residential childcare, giving their feelings on how recent government sponsored quality enhancement initiatives have impacted on service delivery. Residential childcare has been at the forefront of government sponsored quality developments since the early 1990s. It reflects many of the problems and dilemmas faced by the wider personal social services sector when applying performance enhancement techniques. It has low status, is poorly resourced, and provides a service for "customers" who have multiple needs, but have little say in relation to their referral for provision. The findings from this study give support to the contention that for front‐line workers, many of the government's quality initiatives are limited or irrelevant to the "real" task of providing a service to residents – continuous improvement requires the practical benefits of a structured and planned performance enhancement culture, and the appropriate resources to achieve that goal.