Negotiating Symbolic Boundaries in Conflict Resolution: Religion and Ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict

This article is an inquiry into understanding why supranational religious identity often fails to act as a conflict resolution tool in religiously homogenous ethnic conflicts. Narrowing its focus down to the role of religious elites as potential peacemakers in such conflict zones, it proposes the divergence in their conceptualizations of religious and ethnic identities as an explanatory factor. Building on 62 in-depth interviews conducted in Turkey with Sunni Muslim Kurdish and Turkish religious elites, it identifies a three-fold typology of religious and ethnic identities, as conceptualized by these elites: 1) religio-ethnic; 2) ethno-religious; 3) religious. After exemplifying each category with interview data it demonstrates the role these distinctions play in preventing the successful implementation of “Muslim fraternity” as a solution to the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. With these findings, the article contributes to both the literature on religion in conflict resolution and that on identity formation and boundary making. While it invites the former to turn its gaze from macro-level structural factors to meso- and micro-level cultural factors in analyzing religious elite involvement in conflict resolution, it invites the latter to stop employing “ethnicity” as an all-encompassing term (that covers a vast array of identity markers including religion) and focus, instead, on the gradations between religion and ethnicity as sources of identity.     

Polarization and the Limits of Politicization: Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral and the Politics of Cultural Heritage

Qualitative Sociology - This article examines a recent controversy over the Catholic Church’s registration of Cordoba’s iconic Mosque-Cathedral as official Church property in 2006. In...     

‘Eternal grumblers’: V.S. Naipaul and the uses of South Africa

The essay studies the uses of South African characters and motifs in V.S. Naipaul's fiction and non fiction.     

Hakan Seckinelgin. International Security,Conflict and Gender: ‘HIV/AIDS is another war’

This article does not have an abstract     

Emblem for the International Year of the Family: A Symbol of Life and Love

This is an official IYF emblem. The simple design, created by Catherine Littasy-Rollier, the Swiss-born artist who now resides in Vienna, consists of a heart sheltered by a roof and linked to another heart. The design symbolizes life and love in a home full of warmth,     

Respect and Protection:A Review of the Implementation of the Law of the P.R.C. on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women

JIANG Zemin, President of the People's Republic of China, once said: "Respecting women and protecting women is an important sign of social progress. It should become a civilized society's legal provision and moral concept." On October 1, 1992 the Law of the P.R.C. on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women was put into effect, which was considered a major accomplishment for China and Chinese women. More than two years have passed since the implementation of the law. How well has the law been     

Durkheim,Competitive Interaction,and the “Best”: Explaining the State-Origins of U.S. Olympians

Abstract

Durkheim's theory of the causes of specialization in society proposes that the best performers should come from places with the most competitive interaction. This paper tests this proposition in an arena where interaction is highly competitive and where performance can be objectively measured, organized athletics in the United States. Four state-level indicators of competitive interaction (population, population density, average school size, and racial diversity) are used to predict the number of Olympic athletes developing in each state for the Olympic years 1956, 1968, 1980, and 1992. Net of controls for opportunities in athletics, results show that the number of Olympians developing in states increases exponentially with population, average high school size, and racial homogeneity, as Durkheimian theory suggests. These findings are robust even with controls for unmeasured state differences. I conclude that holding constant opportunity, states with more interaction among athletes produce more of the “best.”     

African Political Thinkers,Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Exile,c.1850–1970

This essay aims not only to detail the early history of African refugees in Britain but also to look at the political culture, ideas, writings, activities and organisations which African refugees and exiles from Africa and the diaspora developed while they were in Britain, and how this culture influenced wider political culture. It argues that further study of the histories of African migrants in Britain is required not just in order to provide an historical context to more recent concerns with transnational activities and diasporas but because to ignore the existence, struggles and political culture of those of African origin impoverishes and distorts our understanding of British political culture and Britain's historical past.     

Sociology’s Sacred Victims and the Politics of Knowledge: Moral Foundations Theory and Disciplinary Controversies

The field of sociology has long been subject to critique for alleged ideological bias and left-wing groupthink linked to its social justice mission. Critics contend that the construction of “sacred victims” by progressive intellectuals hinders their ability to objectively appraise the circumstances of such vulnerable groups. To address this criticism, we survey 479 sociologists in national universities and colleges in the U.S. regarding three sensitive controversies: urban poverty in the black community; gendered differences in occupational choices; and immigration. We find significant patterns in the data. Commitment to the field’s “moral mission,” preferred research paradigm, gender, and especially political orientation are all significant predictors of sociologists’ views. The results, we suggest, can be understood by conceptualizing the field of sociology as an “emotive community.” In doing so, we draw upon current social psychological research on moral foundations theory developed by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues.     

Earnings inequality and skill mismatch in the U.S.: 1973–2002

This paper shows that skill mismatch is a significant source of inequality in real earnings in the U.S. and that a substantial fraction of the increase in wage dispersion during the period 1973–2002 was due to the increase in mismatch rates and mismatch premia. In 2000–2002, surplus and deficit qualifications taken together accounted for 4.3 and 4.6% of the variance of log earnings, or around 15% of the total explained variance. The dramatic increase in over-education rates and premia accounts for around 20 and 48% of the increase in the Gini coefficient during the 30 years under analysis for males and females respectively. The surplus qualification factor is important in understanding why earnings inequality polarized in the last decades.     

NGOs, Global Governance and the UN: NGOs as “Guardians of the Reform of the International System”

The role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the United Nations (UN), as well as in world politics in general, is increasingly gaining the attention of scholars of international law, political science and social anthropology. Using extensive earlier research on NGO-UN relations and on the concept of global governance, it is concluded that although NGOs are becoming increasingly influential actors on the international arena, several problems impede their influence from growing within the UN. Once the inefficiencies of NGOs participation in United Nations’ bodies and institutions have been described, we propose some modalities of reform of this Organization, with the purpose of improving the involvement of world civil society in UN decision-making processes, and increasing its democratic profile. Finally, the study suggests several areas that require future research and more in-depth study in order to make predictions about how NGO-UN relations will evolve in the coming decades.

U.S. ratification of the CRC and reducing child poverty: can we get there from here?

If the United States finally ratifies the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), will it improve the country's to effectively combat child poverty and thereby improve child well-being? This article addresses this and related questions in two ways. First, the authors examine how ratification of the CRC has influenced the efforts of other wealthy Anglophone countries to reduce child poverty. Second, they draw on lessons learned from these other countries' efforts to generate predictions about America's postratification future. The authors conclude that, while the CRC is a compelling, practical tool, a communications strategy and business plan are necessary complements to achieve desired results.     

Publicizing the Law of the P.R.C.on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women

More than 50,000 women in Qianxi County have learned about the law.     

When is the State's Gaze Focused? British Royal Commissions and the Bureaucratization of Conflict

Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state‐centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are “made legible” in routine policy processes – as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent – have remained less clear. I explore these issues through an analysis of the shifting analytic terrain of national‐level commissions of inquiry, an historically powerful form of government organization designed to combine publicly‐engaged and “objective” explanation with recommendations for concrete policies of governance. Drawing principally on 19^th and early 20^th Century British Royal Commissions, I show how investigations into three fields of social conflict – involving prisoners, the working class, and colonial populations – were characterized by cyclical drives to bureaucratize conflict. Yet strikingly, only two of the three substantive fields – prisons and labor – achieved relative bureaucratic closure. Evidence from commission reports is marshaled to explain why some types of conflict have been resistant to incorporation, while others are more readily absorbed into an apparatus of governance.     

Trends in the covariance structure of earnings in the U.S.: 1969�C1987

We examine the increasing variance of earnings of white men over the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on changes in the covariance structure of earnings. Using data from the Michigan PSID from 1969–1987, we find that about half of the increase has arisen from an increase in the variance of the permanent component of earnings and half from an increase in the variance of the transitory component, where the transitory component is composed of serially correlated shocks that die out within 3 years. We thus find that increases in the variability of earnings are of equal importance to increases in the dispersion of permanent earnings in explaining recent increases in earnings inequality.     

“Settlers” and Zimbabwe: Politics,Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms During a Time of Crisis

This article examines the contested politics surrounding the participation of white farmers in the national public sphere in Zimbabwe. It examines how farm workers have acted as an “interior frontier” to white farmers and how this has helped to shape the public identification of white farmers in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. In so doing, the differential use of the term settlers and the memory of colonialism within the current violence surrounding land reform and democratization are analyzed. Through addressing some of the engagements with this ambiguous identification of white farmers, the politics of analysing “settlers” within anthropology and postcolonial studies is raised.