Suchergebnisse

Presents an analysis of the experience of South Africa and Uganda in their quest for universal access, with particular emphasis on the role of shared access centres and the factors that affect their performance. This book also examines the relationship between shared access centres, the goal of universal access, and strategies for development.

AbstractThis article considers the way that farmers within a national agricultural advisory programme in Uganda were able to exert influence over that programme's policy and practice. Although the literature has tended to focus on engagement within formal programme structures as a major mode of participation, the analysis of the NAADS case reveals that farmers were able to exert an important influence over programme policy through their roles as political constituents. The brokerage role of supportive programme staff also worked to allow farmers' views to influence the programme, as did the collective weight of decisions commonly made by farmers, and to a lesser extent, the lobbying efforts of national NGOs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Beyond the Lines explores the social underpinnings of rebel adaptation and resilience. How do rebel groups cope with crises such as repression, displacement, and fragmentation? What explains changes in militant organizations' structures and behaviors over time? Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic research, Sarah E. Parkinson traces shifts in Palestinian militant groups' internal structures and practices during the civil war of 1975 to 1990 and foreign occupations of Lebanon. She shows that most militants approach asymmetrical warfare as a series of challenges centered around information and logistics, characterized by problems such as supplying constantly mobile forces, identifying collaborators, disrupting rival belligerents' operations, and providing essential services like healthcare. Effective negotiation of these challenges contributes to militant organizations' resilience and survival. In this context, the foundation of rebel resilience lies with militants' ability to repurpose their everyday social networks to organizational ends. In the Lebanese setting, Beyond the Lines demonstrates how regionalized differences in Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese deployment of violence triggered distinct social network responses that led to divergent organizational outcomes for Palestinian militants.

"How do rebel groups cope with repression, displacement, and fragmentation? Based on ethnographic research among Palestinian militants in Lebanon, this book argues that militants approach asymmetrical warfare as a series of information- and logistics-centric challenges and that groups' adaptability relies upon militants' ability to repurpose everyday networks for organizational ends"--

What is the gap between scholars' expectations of media-sourced data and the realities those data actually represent? This letter elucidates the data generation process (DGP) that undergirds media-sourced data: journalistic reporting. It uses semi-structured interviews with 15 journalists to analyze how media actors decide what and how to report—in other words, the "why" of reporting specific events to the exclusion of others—as well as how the larger professional, economic, and political contexts in which journalists operate shape the material scholars treat as data. The letter thus centers "unreported realities": the fact that media-derived data reflect reporters' locations, identities, capacities, and outlet priorities, rather than providing a representative sample of ongoing events. In doing so, it reveals variations in the consistency and constancy of reporting that produce unacknowledged, difficult-to-identify biases in media-sourced data that are not directionally predictable.

In settings where war, forced migration, and humanitarian crisis have attracted international attention, research participants' prior experiences with journalists, advocacy groups, state security, and humanitarian organizations influence scholarly work. Building on long-term fieldwork in Iraq and Lebanon, this article argues that individuals' and communities' previous and ongoing interactions with these actors affect the content, quality, and validity of data gathered as well as shaping possibilities for ethical academic research. Drawing on observational and interview-based research with humanitarian service providers, journalists, and displaced persons, this article argues that the cross-sector use of "methodological cognates" such as surveys and structured interviews shapes data validity and reliability via four mechanisms: regurgitation, redirection, reluctant participation, and resistance. I contend that these features of the research process should centrally inform academics' research designs, project siting, case selection, and data analysis.

AbstractIdeology shapes militant recruitment, organization, and conflict behavior. Existing research assumes doctrinal consistency, top-down socialization of adherents, and clear links between formal ideology and political action. But it has long been recognized that ideological commitments do not flow unaltered from overarching cleavages or elite narratives; they are uneven, contingent, fraught with tension, and often ambivalent. What work does ideology do in militant groups if it is not deeply studied, internalized, or sincerely believed? How can scholars explain collective commitment, affinity, and behavioral outcomes among militants who clearly associate themselves with a group, but who may not consistently (or ever) be true believers or committed ideologues? I argue that practical ideologies—sets of quotidian principles, ideas, and social heuristics that reflect relational worldviews rather than specific published political doctrines, positions, platforms, or plans—play a key role in militant socialization through everyday practices. Ethnographic evidence gained from fieldwork among Palestinians in Lebanon demonstrates how militants and affiliates render ideas about ideological closeness and distance accessible through emotional, intellectual, and moral appeals. This approach reaffirms the role of discourse and narrative in creating informal mechanisms of militant socialization without expressly invoking formal doctrine.

The last conversations I had with Lee Ann Fujii had nothing to do with violence, research methods, or political science. Called unexpectedly to her mother's deathbed in Seattle after a week of meetings in Washington, DC, Lee Ann was out of clean clothes and preparing to catch a hurriedly-bought flight. And so, on a chilly, drizzly grey morning in Baltimore, I left her in my apartment with a laundry card and ran off to a meeting. Returning home a few hours later, I opened the door to find Dr. Lee Ann Fujii—academic heavyweight, author of burn-it-down speeches, and potential future tenureletter-writer—decked out in snake-print yoga pants and cheerfully folding my laundry as well as her own. Laughing at my abject horror, Lee Ann explained that she found folding freshly laundered clothes calming. And indeed, as our conversations turned to family dynamics surrounding acute illness, the #MeToo movement, and the intricacies of real estate acquisition, the smell of clean laundry soothingly lingered around us as rain pattered against the windows.

Scholarship on militant organizations and rebel movements emphasizes the effects of fragmentation and disunity on military and political outcomes. Yet this scholarship's focus on formal, durable, and externally observable aspects of organizational structure omits the social practices that constitute, reinforce, and reproduce intra-group schisms. How do intra-organizational divisions calcify into permanent cleavages? What processes reproduce factions over time? Using the case of Fatah in Lebanon, I argue that informal discursive practices—e.g., gossip, jokes, complaints, storytelling—contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of intra-organizational factions. Specifically, I focus on how networks of meaning-laden, money-centric discourse structure relations among militants who identify as being "Old Fatah." I demonstrate that while these practices frequently originate in the organizational realm, cadres subsequently reproduce them within kinship, marriage, and friendship networks. This "money talk" between age cohorts within the quotidian realm connects younger members of Fatah to older cadres through collective practices and conceptions of organizational membership. These practices both exemplify an intra-organizational schism and constitute, in part, the faction called Old Fatah. Examining how symbolic practice comprises social structure thus provides important insight into the politics of organizations such as militant groups, social movements, and political parties.