Suchergebnisse

As Ohio goes -- The company is your family -- Uh oh, now what? -- Done everything I could -- Sweating through your boots -- Not a desk job -- In America, you pay for your teeth -- So goes the nation

Survey research can generate knowledge that is central to the study of collective action, public opinion, and political participation. Unfortunately, many populations—from undocumented migrants to right-wing activists and oligarchs—are hidden, lack sampling frames, or are otherwise hard to survey. An approach to hard-to-survey populations commonly taken by researchers in other disciplines is largely missing from the toolbox of political science methods: respondent-driven sampling (RDS). By leveraging relations of trust, RDS accesses hard-to-survey populations; it also promotes representativeness, systematizes data collection, and, notably, supports population inference. In approximating probability sampling, RDS makes strong assumptions. Yet if strengthened by an integrative multimethod research design, it can shed light on otherwise concealed—and critical—political preferences and behaviors among many populations of interest. Through describing one of the first applications of RDS in political science, this article provides empirically grounded guidance via a study of activist refugees from Syria. Refugees are prototypical hard-to-survey populations, and mobilized ones are even more so; yet the study demonstrates that RDS can provide a systematic and representative account of a vulnerable population engaged in major political phenomena.

Much of the media reporting on Syrian refugees highlights their humanitarian struggles, or else their admirable resilience. Both approaches are understandable and realistic but what is missing from these two perspectives is the mundane. Boredom is the passage of days with little to do but dream of the past and fear for the future. Televisions, neighbours and babies punctuate the silence, but barely. To highlight boredom in displacement is not to suggest that Syrian refugees are so comfortable that they enjoy some privileged tedium. Even if they could, few people care to depend solely on assistance. Many venture to work but because the government prohibits them from doing so, the employment is irregular. Another cause of marginalisation is the sense of estrangement born of being an outsider. Individuals have varying interactions with Jordanians, so their impressions are mixed. Peel back these layers of restrictions and marginalisation, and you will find a daily life that is insufferably boring. Adapted from the source document.

Occupation and colonization are terms that evoke an era of empires and great powers. Yet for two peoples, occupation and settler colonialism are not remnants of a time foregone; they remain the reality of everyday life. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is a high profile example of modern colonization, whereas the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara draws considerably less attention. This paper seeks to show that these two cases of colonialism over two Arab peoples have much in common. Both originated from colonial fumbling and produced significant refugee populations that would carry the mantle of their liberation movements. Morocco and Israel each maintain their occupations, however, utilizing similar means of control and eluding continual resistance from their occupied populations. International politics has contributed to the protracted nature of the conflicts, in the form of military and moral support from the United States to the occupying powers and, more significantly for Israel, in the United Nations' bestowal of legitimacy on Zionism as a suitably nationalist project. That, along with the salience of Palestine as an Islamic holy place, has caused the Palestinian-Israeli case to be more prominent than the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.