Preventing Religious Radicalization in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Role of the BiH Islamic Community

The goal of the paper is to identify the Islamic Community’s methods of preventing religious radicalization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The roots of radicalism and extremism are explained by examining “Islamic revival” and studied within the Bosnian context. Although BiH appears in many international reports as a potential “cradle of terrorism”, the situation on the ground is quite different and there are many instances of combined efforts by the government and religious institutions in preventing religious radicalization in BiH. The analysis focuses on the Islamic community’s efforts to contend the spread of illegal mosques that sometimes promote radical Islam in BiH. Although there are radical individuals with different and sometimes radical understanding of Islam, the majority of Bosnian Muslims oppose any form of religious radicalization. The Islamic Community plays the most important role in preventing the spread of radical Islam in BiH, and this paper analyzes its efforts to homogenize Bosnian Muslims and prevent radicalization.     

Comparison of efficiencies of some symmetry tests around an unknown centre

In this paper, some recent and classical tests of symmetry are modified for the case of an unknown centre. The unknown centre is estimated with its α-trimmed mean estimator. The asymptotic behaviour of the new tests is explored. The local approximate Bahadur efficiency is used to compare the tests to each other as well as to some other tests.     

Automated statistical methods for measuring the strength of block ciphers

A block cipher is one of the most common forms of algorithms used for data encryption. This paper describes an efficient set of statistical methods for analysing the security of these algorithms under the black-box approach. The procedures can be fully automated, which provides the designer or user of a block cipher with a useful set of tools for security analysis.     

Building Social Capability for Economic Catch-up: The Experience and Prospects of the Post-socialist Countries

The post-socialist countries are, by the standards of the EU, poor countries. The major developmental task facing these countries is, therefore, that of catching up with their more prosperous neighbours. The scope for catch-up is defined in terms of the levels of social capability exhibited by these societies and their capacity to establish technological congruence with the leading firms from the advanced industrial economies. S&T systems in the broadest sense are shown to be key factors in relation to both social capability and technological congruence. Detailed analysis of the transition countries indicates that the catch-up process is hampered across the board by specific gaps in social capability and elements of technological incongruence. These can in turn be traced to specific structural trends, in particular in relation to foreign investment, and to specific weaknesses of institutional development, cutting across the public/private dividing line, notably in relation to R&D systems and banking systems. Consideration of all these factors suggests that there can be no assumption that the transition countries will automatically catch up with western Europe, and that some disfavoured transition countries may, indeed, continue to fall behind.     

Two-dimensional Kolmogorov-type goodness-of-fit tests based on characterisations and their asymptotic efficiencies

In this paper, new two-dimensional goodness-of-fit tests are proposed. They are of supremum type and are based on two different types of characterisations. The first type are those that involve functional equations that the distribution function satisfies, while the second type uses independence of some statistics. The asymptotics of the statistics is studied and Bahadur efficiencies of the tests against some close alternatives are calculated. In the process, a theorem on large deviations of Kolmogorov-type statistics has been extended to the multidimensional case.     

The Quest for Government Accountability and Rule of Law: Conflicting Strategies of State and Civil Society in Cambodia and Serbia

This article deals with the social accountability activities of civil society organizations in Serbia and Cambodia. In both countries, they emerged with the conceptual and financial support of international development agencies; yet, the outputs were mediated by the social and political contexts. Still, these activities have some joint features: they (1) boost both understanding and awareness rather than solely mobilizing social interests; (2) target the interests of individual citizens rather than the interests of social-based groups or classes; (3) promote state cooperation instead of confrontation and (3) insist on the use of technical policy-related tools and mechanisms instead of political mobilization. The social accountability initiatives analyzed here have followed a policy-not-politics or depoliticized approach. As a consequence, they were ineffective in mobilizing citizens and social groups in a manner that would efficiently demand more accountability. On the other hand, governments contested civil society and appropriated its accountability discourses and strategies in an effort that can be read as an attempt to resist imposing government accountability and rule of law and pacifying present and future civic activism.     

What Coy Smiles Say About Positive Shyness in Early Infancy

Positive shyness is a universal emotion with the specific social function of regulating our interactions by improving trust and liking, and showing politeness. The present study examined early infant production of coy smiles during social interactions as a measure of positive shy behavior. Eighty 4‐month‐olds were experimentally observed during three types of interactions in front of a mirror in which (1) the infant only sees him or herself, (2) the infant only sees the other person (mother, father, or stranger), and (3) the infant sees both him or herself and the other person. Infants produced more coy smiles during the interaction with a stranger than during the interactions with their mother or their father, or when they could see only themselves in front of a mirror. Infants also produced more coy smiles when they could see their self‐reflection during the interaction than when they could not. Our results support the assumption that coy smiles indicate an early emerging emotional reaction with an important adaptive function during social situations involving novel persons and when special attention is given to the child.     

Partner Choice in Sweden Following a Failed Intermarriage

This paper is based on the assumption that divorced and separated individuals bring with them the experience of a failed union which may shape their future choices on the marriage market. It aims to contribute to our knowledge of intermarriage, and social interaction in Sweden in general, by comparing the repartnering choices of immigrants and natives in Sweden who had made what is still considered an atypical choice of entering a native-immigrant union with the partner choices of natives and immigrants whose previous union was endogamous. The empirical analysis in this paper is based on the Swedish register data from the STAR data collection (Sweden over Time: Activities and Relations) and covers the period 1990–2007. All the analyses in the paper include individuals aged 20–55 at the time of union dissolution. The multivariate analysis is based on discrete-time multinomial logistic regression. The results show that for all four groups defined by sex and nativity (native men, native women, immigrant men, and immigrant women), there is a positive association between the previous experience of intermarriage and the likelihood of initiating another intermarriage after union dissolution. Another important finding is that the magnitude of this positive association increases with the degree of social distance between the groups involved in the union. Gender differences are modest among natives and somewhat more pronounced among immigrants.