Suchergebnisse

In response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and war in Afghanistan, the Fulbright New Century Scholars program brought together social scientists from around the world to study sectarian, ethnic, and cultural conflict within and across national borders. As one result of their year of intense discussion, this book examines the roots of collective violence — and the measures taken to avoid it — in Burma (Myanmar), China, Germany, Pakistan, Senegal, Singapore, Thailand, Tibet, Ukraine, Southeast Asia, and Western Europe. Case studies and theoretical essays introduce the basic principles necessary to identify and explain the symbols and practices each unique human group holds sacred or inalienable. The authors apply the methods of political science, social psychology, anthropology, journalism, and educational research. They build on the insights of Gordon Allport, Charles Taylor, and Max Weber to describe and analyze the patterns of behavior that social groups worldwide use to maintain their identities. Written to inform the general reader and communicate across disciplinary boundaries, this important and timely volume demonstrates ways of understanding, predicting and coping with ethnic and sectarian violence. Contributors: Badeng Nima, David Brown, Kwanchewan Buadaeng, Patrick B. Inman, Karina V. Korostelina, James L. Peacock, Thomas F. Pettigrew, Wee Teng Soh, Hamadou Tidiane Sy, Patricia M. Thornton, Mohammad Waseem

Case studies in justice and mercy -- Race and class: Race, class, and the development of criminal justice policy / Marc Mauer -- Domestic violence: Complicity or justice and mercy? sexual violence challenges, the criminal justice system, and the churches / Lois Gehr Livezey -- Death penalty: Echoes of grace : from the prison to the state house / Ernie Lewis -- Sentencing: Recapturing the good, not merely measuring harms : rehabilitation, restoration, and the federal sentencing guidelines / Jonathan Rothchild -- Law and society: A place for mercy / Albert W. Alschuler -- International law: Why international law matters in God's world / David Scheffer -- Critical response to David Scheffer / David Little -- Approaches to justice and mercy -- Scriptural approaches: Samaritan justice : a theology of "mercy" and "neighborhood" / Matthew Myer Boulton -- Political theology approaches: The way of the cross as theatric of counterterror / Mark Lewis Taylor -- Critical response to Mark Lewis Taylor / Sarah Coakley -- Theological ethics approaches: Criminal justice and responsible mercy / William Schweiker -- Phenomenological approaches: Fallibility and fragility : a reflection on justice and mercy / Kevin Jung -- Social ethics approaches: Justice and mercy : the relation of societal norms and empathic feeling / Peter J. Paris -- Historical theology approaches: Criminal justice and the law of love : reflections on the public theology of Reinhold Niebuhr / W. Clark Gilpin -- Critical response to W. Clark Gilpin / William C. Placher -- Postscript / William Schweiker

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents. Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism. Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization.

AbstractAfter the war between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army (1986‐2006), 90 per cent of the displaced rural population in Northern Uganda returned to small‐scale farming on their ancestral lands and their systems of communal land stewardship. At the time, there was much debate about transitional justice interventions to address war's violence, but in that same period over 85 per cent of Acoli chiefdoms saw affiliated clans, or kin‐based political communities (kaka), negotiate to write down their Indigenous governance constitutions for the first time. Acoli Kaka's return to their ancestral lands and small‐scale farming, and subsequent engagements with tekwaro – Indigenous knowledge – through constitution writing, served to strengthen Indigenous governance and law after their weakening in contexts of war and displacement. It is argued here that these engagements and negotiations rooted in the land, regardless of their outcomes, served to orient relationships away from the fragmenting, unprecedented, forced Acoli‐on‐Acoli violence experienced during the war. A resurgence of Acoli Kaka's Indigenous law and governance rooted in communal land stewardship is linked to relational repair and supports calls for transitional justice processes to nurture and respect Indigenous land rights. These ethnographic arguments also lend support to kaka's ongoing efforts towards clan unity (ribbe kaka) and to secure communal land sovereignties.

AbstractFollowing South Sudan's independence in 2011, a myriad of local, regional and global actors have flocked to its capital city, Juba, to influence and benefit from the ongoing state‐making process. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Juba between 2012 and 2015, this article demonstrates how urban 'space' in Juba is rendered into 'place' through everyday practices of naming that articulate urbanites' contrasting experiences of the Sudanese civil wars, the city's tumultuous history, and their position within its—and the new nation's—present and future. This is most visible in a growing and contested Juba neighborhood that has come to be called by two different names, each tied to distinct experiences of conflict and displacement within and beyond the city. These and other namings and place‐makings index historically‐rooted ethno‐spatial understandings of South Sudan, memories of violence, and the sense of differential access to the city's economic potential in the face of ongoing upheaval. Urban naming and place‐making in Juba (and in other cities similarly impacted by conflict), it is argued, is a central domain through which urbanites disrupt official mappings and mitigate disorienting violence. These discursive practices are a vital means by which people forge stable lives and productive futures in the face of a precarious political present.

The democratic-reconstruction measures that were employed in Afghanistan following the USled invasion in late 2001 were riddled with problems, one of which related to the composition of the new government. The inclusion of warlords in the nation-building process, although it made strategic sense for the fledgling government, resulted in the reproduction of cycles of violence and was particularly detrimental to the interests of women, whose supposed liberation was at the centre of the War on Terror discourse. This paper examines this phenomenon through the eyes of Malalai Joya, who, in her memoir A Woman Among Warlords provides an insightful account of the radical, misogynist warlords who occupied positions of power in the newly formed government. As a young female politician in a historically male domain, Joya is a rare voice of resistance against her government and the American military. In raising her voice against the power holders, Joya subverts the dominant narrative of the war, especially pertaining to the liberation of Afghan women. She argues that by colluding with the warlords, the US and the Karzai administration were complicit in allowing violence to continue in political and social spheres. This paper argues that the US-led invasion largely failed to make any concrete ideological transformation and instead aided the reestablishment of oppressive power structures, especially in Afghanistan's provinces.

"Since the fall of 2016, Cameroon has been the scene of a fratricidal and separatist conflict in its English-speaking part known as North-west and South-west (NWSW). This war has to date caused more than 3,000 loss of human lives, 700,000 Cameroonian refugees, and the closure of nearly 80% of schools. This conflict, orchestrated by a group of secessionist fighters known as ""Amba-boys"", which constitutes the ""Ambazonian movement"", has made the English-speaking regions the most militarized part of Cameroon. At the same time, a protest movement against the capture of power by the Biya regime has been formed since 2018 within the Cameroonian diaspora: the Anti-Sardinards Brigade (B.A.S). The objective of this work is therefore to understand the logic of action and the protest strategies of these two movements. To achieve this, we used a qualitative research method. It appears that these movements are fighting against a common adversary, namely: the regime in power for 40 years. However, their divergence lies at the ideological level and in their conflicting strategies. The Ambazonian movement advocates, through direct violence, secession in order to promote Anglophone sovereignty. While the B.A.S fights for the socio-political change of the country, through indirect violence. Keywords: conflict strategy, protest, movement, Anti Sardinards Brigade, ambazonien movement, conflict, secessionist, sociopolitical change "

AbstractObjectiveWe propose that citizens navigate an increasingly complex social and political world using a "cultural toolkit" shaped by firearms and gun violence. Young people in particular have experienced more mass shootings than any previous generation and have witnessed a lack of government response to these massacres. This article explores the attitudes that members of the Massacre Generation express about mass shooting prevention.MethodsWe analyze data from several public opinion surveys conducted following major mass shootings in the United States using logistic regression. These surveys were fielded and sponsored by a variety of organizations and asked a nearly identical question about whether mass shootings can be prevented by societal and governmental action.ResultsWe find that the Massacre Generation is indeed more likely to think the government can prevent mass shootings by implementing stricter gun control laws. We find evidence of these attitudes in multiple public opinion surveys from 2012 to 2018. Furthermore, we find no age effect in multiple surveys conducted between 1999 and 2011, suggesting that these attitudes are a relatively new phenomenon.ConclusionYoung people today express that government regulation (i.e., stricter gun laws) can prevent gun violence, placing them at odds with older generations. We discuss the implications of our findings for gun policy development and the future of the gun debate.

AbstractAt least 1 million people died during the Mozambican civil war (1976/7‐92). Unfolding after gaining independence from Portugal (1975) and alongside experiments with Afro‐socialism in the 1980s, the war, despite its brutality, has not been subjected to global templates of reconciliation processes. Thus it comprises a unique case to probe what irreconciliation might mean – both as a political horizon and as an analytical concept. This text juxtaposes ethnographic material from rural, central Mozambique from the late 1990s and early 2000s emphasizing reconciliation with material from the same spaces from the 2010s onwards, where I identify what I term a 'politics of irreconciliation'. I will make three arguments. First, informed by Hannah Arendt, I approach irreconciliation as fundamentally about the rejection of a world of violence in search of a world shared in common. Second, drawing on recent anthropological theorizing about temporal regimes and chronopolitics, I argue for the salience of a non‐linear understanding of the politics of irreconciliation to grapple with the fact that civil war violence is understood as dangerously uncontained rather than nominally past. Third, within the context of Mozambique, forgiveness and its other, irreconciliation, are not only intimately tied to the temporally past or present; they are also, as I show, produced by a tangible and intense absence of a productive future.

Buddhist protectionism in contemporary Myanmar revolves around fears of the decline of Buddhism and deracination of the amyo (group/"race"). Buddhist protectionists and Burmese nationalists have declared Islam and Muslims the greatest threat to race and religion, and Myanmar has witnessed widespread distribution of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim content, as well as massive violence against Muslim minority communities, the Rohingya in particular. The Indian neologism "Love Jihad" has scarce reference in contemporary Burmese Buddhist discourses, but, importantly, the tropes of aggressive male Muslim sexuality and (forced) conversion through marriage ("love jihad") have been one of the core issues in Buddhist protectionism in Myanmar. The article shows that such tropes of the threatening foreign male have strong historical legacies in Myanmar, going back to colonial Burma when Burmese concerns over Indian male immigrant workers resulted in both anti-Indian violence and anti-miscegenation laws. Importantly, however, compared to colonial Indophobia and military era xenophobic nationalism, contemporary constructions are informed by new political realities and global forces, which have changed Buddhist protectionist imaginaries of gender and sexuality in important ways. Building on Sara R. Farris' concept of "femonationalism", and Rogers Brubaker's concept of civilizationism, the article shows how Global Islamophobia, as well as global discourses on women's rights and religious freedom, have informed Buddhist protectionism beyond ethnonationalism in the traditional sense.

This article examines what scholars can learn about civilian killings from newswire data in situations of non-random missingness. It contributes to this understanding by offering a unique view of the data-generation process in the South Sudanese civil war. Drawing on 40 hours of interviews with 32 human rights advocates, humanitarian workers, and journalists who produce ACLED and UCDP-GED's source data, the article illustrates how non-random missingness leads to biases of inconsistent magnitude and direction. The article finds that newswire data for contexts like South Sudan suffer from a self-fulfilling narrative bias, where journalists select stories and human rights investigators target incidents that conform to international views of what a conflict is about. This is compounded by the way agencies allocate resources to monitor specific locations and types of violence to fit strategic priorities. These biases have two implications: first, in the most volatile conflicts, point estimates about violence using newswire data may be impossible, and most claims of precision may be false; secondly, body counts reveal little if divorced from circumstance. The article presents a challenge to political methodologists by asking whether social scientists can build better cross-national fatality measures given the biases inherent in the data-generation process.

Xenophobia is a social and political behavior that has been present in our societies since the beginning of humanity. The feeling of hatred, fear, or resentment is present before people from different communities from ours. With the rise of social networks like Twitter, hate speeches were swift because of the pseudo feeling of anonymity that these platforms provide. Sometimes this violent behavior on social networks that begins as threats or insults to third parties breaks the Internet barriers to become an act of real physical violence. Hence, this proposal aims to correctly classify xenophobic posts on social networks, specifically on Twitter. In addition, we collected a xenophobic tweets database from which we also extracted new features by using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach. Then, we provide an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) model, allowing us to understand better why a post is considered xenophobic. Consequently, we provide a set of contrast patterns describing xenophobic tweets, which could help decision-makers prevent acts of violence caused by xenophobic posts on Twitter. Finally, our interpretable results based on our new feature representation approach jointly with a contrast pattern-based classifier obtain similar classification results than other feature representations jointly with prominent machine learning classifiers, which are not easy to understand by an expert in the application area.

The Troubles were a period of crisis and violence in Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century. Loyalists, Unionists, Republicans, and Nationalists brutally fought against each other over the issue of whether or not Northern Ireland should remain in the United Kingdom or join the Republic of Ireland to form one united country. The conflict also resulted in ethnic and religious tensions for many Protestants and Catholics who were compelled to choose sides over this issue, owing to their ties to the deep-rooted history of animosity between the two Christian populations. As a result, the Troubles, which lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, were a violent time that witnessed hate crimes and religious clashes in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. At roughly the same time as passions escalated into violence in the 1960s, a new genre of music was gaining popularity in Ireland. Rock and Roll became an outlet for bands to break barriers, defy norms, and express opinions in a creative and non-violent way. Two bands in particular are illustrative of this point: Thin Lizzy and U2. This thesis seeks to illuminate how these two bands used their platforms as popular Irish rock bands to defy norms, cross geographical and religious borders, and address the political, religious, social, and economic strife in Ireland spawned by the Troubles.

This paper aims to offer a contribution to the debate on urban security starting from the assumption – developed in the Introduction – that the fall of the communist regimes, the end of the Cold War, and the ongoing globalization processes produced a rescaling of authorities, bringing cities back to the centre of the political universe, and to the fore in the competition for the control of coercive resources. In other terms, cities return to be the privileged spaces of mediation between actors that are main players both at the local level and in the globalization processes; and, as a consequence, inside cities, violence turns out to be a fundamental mediator. This evolution is offering violent non-state actors (VNSAs) unprecedented opportunities to compete for the control of the territory, dictating to social sciences a redefinition of the very concept of urban security. The first section of the paper draws on the "foam theory" to outline a model of analysis of the urban spaces; the second section debates the securitization strategies conceived in the past decades, starting from the USA; the third section is intended to attune foam theory with the concept of urban resilience to violence. Finally, the Conclusion adumbrates the advent of a campus architecture, capable of planning spaces suitable for new and alternative forms of urban sociality

Warning about dire effects of climate change on armed conflict is a recent variation of a scenario that has been promoted by environmental pessimists for over two centuries. The essence is that human activities lead to resource scarcities that in turn will generate famine, pestilence, and war. This essay reviews three stages of the argument: first, the original Malthusian thesis that focused on food production. Second, the broader neoMalthusian concern from the 1970s about limits to growth and developing scarcities in a range of necessities. And recently, the specter of climate change. In each phase, the Malthusians have met firm opposition from environmental optimists, who argue that emerging scarcities can be countered by human ingenuity, technological progress, and national and international economic and political institutions and that environmental change is not in itself a major driver of human violence. In the third phase, the Malthusian case appears to be stronger because human activities have reached a level where they have a truly global impact. Environmental optimists still insist that these problems can be overcome by human ingenuity and that the long-term trend towards less violence in human affairs is unlikely to be reversed by climate change. The stakes seem higher, but the structure of the debate remains largely the same.