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A review essay on books by (1) Naguib Ayubi, El Islam Politico: Teorias, Tradiciones y Rupturas ([Political Islam: Theories, Traditions and Ruptures] Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 1991); (2) Rachid Benzine, Les nouveaux penseurs de l'Islam ([The New Thinkers of Islam] Paris, Albin Michel, 2004); & (3) Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Boston: Harvard U Press, 2002).

This article argues that the authoritarian bias often seen in Muslim countries is not the outcome of any inherent contradiction between Islam & democracy. On the contrary, this bias -- which is empirically confirmed here -- seems to be the result of the over-representation of rentier states among the Muslim countries. The list of countries where over half the population is Muslim includes many of the biggest oil & fuel exporters on the planet. The rents coming from these natural resources allow governments to lower tax burdens whilst increasing public expenditure. This helps to disarticulate the demands of certain social groups for greater freedom & transparency. Tables, Graphs, References. Adapted from the source document.

En este artículo exploramos el impacto del rendimiento escolar (conocidocomo efectos primarios) y la estructura de costes y beneficios a los quese enfrentan los individuos de distinta clase social de origen (efectossecundarios) cuando afrontan la transición entre la educación obligatoriay no obligatoria en España. Ambos predictores de las trayectorias operana través de un efecto de interacción contribuyendo a la reproducción dedesigualdades educativas. Esta interacción parece sugerir que elrendimiento escolar no es interpretado de la misma forma por losindividuos de distinto origen social. En concreto, existe un efecto decompensación por el que los estudiantes de clase alta tienen unaprobabilidad mayor de alcanzar estudios secundarios superiores ouniversitarios con respecto a los estudiantes de clase baja, cuando sus«notas» son malas. Por lo tanto, la desigualdad por clase social de origenes máxima entre los peores estudiantes.

This article explores the educational performance and careers of the children of immigrant families and those of French natives in secondary schooling in France. Using a rich longitudinal dataset (the 1995 Panel of the Ministry of Education), we compare the parents' educational expectations with the school careers of their children. We identify higher educational expectations among immigrant parents than among natives from a similar social background. Although immigrant students begin the collège with a poorer school performance than native students, they tend to shorten this distance with the simple passage of time. Besides, most of this disadvantage is explained by class-related factors. Among the working class, there are few differences in the educational careers of children of immigrants and those of French-born children in upper secondary education. Nonetheless, students from a North African ancestry seem to be less able to materialize their aspirations than the descendants of Portuguese immigrants, and thus express more frequently their dissatisfaction with their orientation in the vocational or technological track.

Much has been said about the institutional determinants of transitional justice (TJ), yet scholars still know little about the determinants of citizens' attitudes toward restorative policies aimed at addressing human rights violations of the past. This article draws on an original survey of a representative sample of Spanish citizens conducted in 2008. One year earlier, the Spanish socialist government had approved the so-called Law of Historical Memory, aimed at providing restitution for victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). We analyze individual-level attitudes toward a set of TJ policies (i.e., truth commissions, trials, and symbolic reparations) in a comprehensive overview of the field. We study the effects of different sets of variables: individual sociodemographic and ideological factors, family and socialization variables, and context-related factors. Individual ideology, family victimization during the dictatorship, and regional context appear highly relevant in explaining individual attitudes toward TJ policies.