Boko Haram: understanding the context

Boko Haram insurgency has caused the death and displacement of thousands of Nigerians. Its means of terror has evolved from the use of crude weapons to bombs, kidnappings and the use of children as suicide bombers. Its reach has expanded beyond Nigeria into neighbouring West African countries and it has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaida and Islamic State. To address this security concern, its cause should first be ascertained. This paper argues that to do this, Boko Haram should be located in northern Nigerian historical context/environment. This paper reviews economic greed and grievance, extreme religious ideology and political opportunity in historic insurgencies in northern Nigeria. It finds that while the interplay of different factors shaped these insurgencies; it was political opportunity that ignited their onsets. Finally, the article submits that as long as these factors remain the same, military quelling of Boko Haram will not prevent a re-emergence of its likes.     

‘They treat us like criminals’: urban public spaces and ethnic discrimination in Italy

Mantovan’s article analyses the processes that lead to discrimination against migrants in the public spaces of Italy’s towns. Her analysis is based on a three-year research project conducted in northeastern Italy using mixed methods—ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, a press review, an analysis of relevant documentation and data collection—and remaining constantly in touch with research conducted in various Italian cities. Starting from an idea of a city whose evolution is the product of alliances, conflicts, active networks of individuals and their respective competing interests, Mantovan sheds light on how discrimination against immigrants in Italy’s urban public spaces is the result of a process of social construction implemented by a number of social actors (journalists, citizens’ committees, politicians and police forces) who represent the visible presence of migrants in these public spaces as deviant and unlawful, especially if they are undocumented immigrants and/or of low socio-economic status. She also argues for the importance of taking into consideration the contribution of economic and political dynamics, both global and national, to the generation of these phenomena by interacting with those at the local level.     

The Komi of the Kola Peninsula within ethnographic descriptions and state policies

For more than 100 years, ethnographic accounts have highlighted the non-nativeness of the Komi diaspora to the Kola Peninsula, contrasting it with the indigenous Sami population. Their legal status there has been a vexed issue unresolved by Tsarist administrators, Soviet ethnic policies, present-day ideas of multiethnic civic nation, and global indigenous activism. In the everyday life, however, there are no apparent differences between the two ethnic groups and their traditional lifestyles in the rural area of Murmansk region. Juxtaposing historical ethnographic accounts on the Izhma Komi with my fieldwork experiences among the Komi on the Kola Peninsula, I show how ethnographers uphold dominant ideologies and promote different state policies. The ambiguous ethnic and indigenous categorizations from their accounts reverberate in popular stereotypes, political mobilizations from below, and state policies from above. In this way, they make an interesting case for the practical problems of generalization and essentialism.     

Means,Motives and Opportunities in Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization

Building on the most important theoretical tools from the literatures on social movements and nationalism, we propose a model of the intensity of nationalist political behavior in which a community's means, motives, and opportunities assume the central roles in the initiation and escalation of nationalist contentious politics. We then test this model using multinomial logit on original data from the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain over a twenty-year period. The results demonstrate that the means, motives, and opportunities assume vital, yet nonlinear, roles in determining a community's level of electoral, violent, and nonviolent contentious activity. The findings also show that there are crucial differences in what accounts for the moves to electoral contention, to protest, and to rebellion. Several of these factors are uniformly escalatory on the intensity of contention—especially repression, social mobilization, and regime change—while others, most importantly democracy, have a moderating effect on the generation of conflict. The results further imply processes of a diffusion of rebellious activities and of an organizational-level substitution effect between violent and nonviolent forms of political behavior. At the aggregate community level, however, escalation in contention involves a “cumulative effect” rather than a classic “substitution effect.”     

Hearing the voice of Donbas: art and literature as forms of cultural protest during war

This paper analyzes literary, visual, and street art works of writers and artists from Eastern Ukraine produced during 2014. Two Donetsk artists, Serhii Zakharov and Anzhela Dzherikh, and two Luhansk writers, Serhii Zhadan and Olena Stepova, play with the myth of the proletarian Donbas, on the one hand, and debunk the popular perception of Donbas people as being in consent with the politics of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, on the other. They explore familiar tropes and images of Donbas and use guerrilla tactics (shock effects, provocativeness, and deception) to initiate public reaction to the war. Their works are united by their search for a shared communication space and direct access to the audience on occupied territories. These artists challenge the accepted perception of Donbas as a free but uncivilized space and participate in the creation of a new Donbas text. The interaction between politics, art, and activism makes their voices and vision powerful and infectious and can help achieve civic consolidation in Donbas.     

Reporting beyond the pale: UK news discourse on drones in Pakistan

This article on drone strikes in Pakistan offers a distinctive empirical case study for critical scholarship of counterterrorism. By asking how cosmopolitanism has developed through UK news discourse, it also provides a constructivist contribution to the literature on drones. I argue that UK news discourse is not cosmopolitan because it focuses on risk and places the Other beyond comprehension. US–UK networked counterterrorism operations have complicated accountability, and while a drive for certainty promoted more scrutiny of policy, news media outlets, academics and activists turned to statistical and visual genres of communication that have inhibited understanding of the Other.     

德国反洗钱刑事立法述评与启示

为了遏制和打击洗钱活动，德国通过在刑法典中新增洗钱罪和多次的修订，将洗钱行为犯罪化，逐步建立起反洗钱和恐怖融资的刑事法律体系，并在一定程度上具有自己的独特之处。在国际社会共同打击洗钱活动和我国面临严峻洗钱形势的背景下，有必要介绍德国反洗钱刑事立法的成功经验，这对于完善我国的反洗钱法律制度具有借鉴意义。     

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

In the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.     

MAINTAINING A UNITARY STATE: COUNTER-TERRORISM,SEPARATISM, AND EXTREMISM IN XINJIANG AND CHINA

This essay reviews the history of Uighur related terrorism in Xinjiang as well as elsewhere in China and discusses the political motivations and effectiveness of the Chinese government in suppressing terrorism. The essay assesses both the motivations of the Uighurs engaged in terrorism, as well as the motivations for counter terrorist by the Chinese authorities. A key objective of the essay is to determine what are the political and other reasons that drive the Chinese government’s counter terrorism strategy and tactics and whether these have been effective or counter-productive. The essay assesses the counter terrorism strategy of the Chinese government in Xinjiang Province and across China, the political motivations for the strategy, the impact and success or otherwise. The essay discusses if the government is combatting terrorism, or separatism, or extremism, the confusion of these terms, and whether this has had any impact on the effectiveness of counter terrorism.