On the appeals of extremism to the youth of affluent,democratic societies

Abstract

This is a study of the appeals of political extremism to those who would appear to have no objective reasons for being attracted to it, namely, a portion of the upper‐middle‐class and upper‐class youth of modem, affluent, democratic societies.

It is felt that this appeal is based mainly on psychological factors resulting from problems created by the modern world reacting with the special temperament of youth, particularly young persons going through the modern form of adolescence in the partly artificial environment of the universities. The paper notes how conformism patterns prevailing in this special environment will spread the popularity of extremist views once they have become established among some key groups in it.

The paper also discusses the factors that have made left‐wing extremism far more popular than right‐wing extremism during the post‐World War II period, the reasons why significant student extremism came to the United States later than to Europe, and the hypothesis that student extremists may be merely voicing in a much stronger form political views learned in the home.

The research for the paper consists of a review of literature in this area.     

Crisis,violence and political succession in Africa

This article examines African leadership succession and the effect of crises on the orderliness of succession. The data set consists of 102 successions from 1963-1988, using the African Contemporary Record as our major source. We divide 102 successions into those which are 'regulated,' or rule-directed, and those which are not. We find that about a third of all successions were regulated, and that the presence of a political crisis is the critical obstacle to a regulated succession, more important than either economic or cultural crises. We also find that economic performance is a significant long-term factor in a country's succession record.     

Globalisation and resistance in post-cold war Mexico: Difference,citizenship and biodiversity conflicts in Chiapas

In the post-cold war era changes at the global, regional, national and local level are altering earlier ways of understanding and practising citizenship. In Mexico the decline of the state-guided national development project (1930s-70s) has been accompanied by the transformation of corporatist forms of political control. This article uses examples of recent biodiversity conflicts in the state of Chiapas to illustrate this process in terms of a struggle between competing models of 'market citizenship' and 'pluri-ethnic citizenship'. By focusing on the actions and demands of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and other indigenous organisations, the article highlights how resistance to globalisation in the Lacandon rainforest of Chiapas is related to struggles for collective rights and a more inclusive form of democracy in Mexico. This also raises important questions regarding the future shape of national identities and the scope of democratic rights around the world in the post-cold war era.     

Globalisation and climate change in Asia: the urban health impact

Asia's economic development successes will create new policy areas to address, as the advances made through globalisation create greater climate change challenges, particularly the impact on urban health. Poverty eradication and higher standards of living both increase demand on resources. Globalisation increases inequalities and those who are currently the losers will carry the greatest burden of the costs in the form of the negative effects of climate change and the humanitarian crises that will ensue. Of four major climate change challenges affecting the environment and health, two—urban air pollution and waste management—can be mitigated by policy change and technological innovation if sufficient resources are allocated. Because of the urban bias in the development process, these challenges will probably register on policy makers' agenda. The second two major challenges—floods and drought—are less amenable to policy and technological solutions: many humanitarian emergency challenges lie ahead. This article describes the widely varying impact of both globalisation and climate change across Asia. The greatest losers are those who flee one marginal location, the arid inland areas, only to settle in another marginal location in the flood prone coastal slums. Effective preparation is required, and an effective response when subsequent humanitarian crises occur.     

Investment penetration,agrarian change,and political conflict in developing countries

This research employs a cross-national design to explore the association between direct foreign investment in agriculture, changes in the agricultural labor force, and political conflict and violence in developing countries. The results reveal different patterns of relationships for Latin American, African, and Asian societies. In Africa, foreign agricultural investments are related to higher employment in the agricultural sector, which in turn is associated with lower levels of political protest. In Latin America, Foreign agricultural investments were directly related to more protest, suggesting a xenophobic nationalist reaction to foreign penetration in this sector. There were no apparent relationships between these variables among Asian states. These results challenge the often-found contention that economic disturbances in the agricultural sector are a fundamental cause of violent uprisings and rebellions. John M. Rothgeb, Jr. is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami Univeristy in Oxford, Ohio 45056. He is the author ofDefining Power: Influence and Force in the Contemporary International System (St. Martin’s Press, 1993),Myths and Realities of Foreign Investiment in Poor Countries (Praeger Publishers, 1989) and numerous articles in professional journals. His current research interests include the study of the international and domestic implications of interdependence and the analysis of how economic resources may be used to exercise power in international relations.     

Inequality,earnings and participation among the poor in rural India

Emphasising that there is a relative dimension to deprivation, an attempt is made here to decompose income inequality among the rural poor into inequality in earnings per worker, in participation rate and covariance of earnings per worker and participation rate. From this decomposition, the effects of (small) changes in inequality in earnings per worker and in participation rate on income inequality are evaluated. The analysis is based on a cross‐section of rural households in 1970–71. The samples of poor cultivating households and poor casual agricultural labour households are analysed separately for each of two regions, based on a classification of villages in terms of technological advancement.     

美国孟菲斯市通过预防、介入和执法减少青少年暴力行为

美国田纳西州孟菲斯市的“消除青少年暴力工程”以减少青少年暴力行为为目标,以预防、介入和执法为方法,市长和市民共同参与,全市范围的活动有声有色,其设立社区行动组,开通少年接听热线,创办青少年警校等做法对我国的青少年犯罪预防工作不无借鉴意义。     

Political violence in Ecuador and the AVC

Abstract

Since its return in 1979 Ecuador's civilian constitutional government has been marred by continuous political violence. The newest and most dangerous challenge to regime stability has surfaced over the past few years in the domestic terrorist organization, the ¡Alfaro Vive, Carajo! (AVC). Beginning as a small, student‐led subversive group in 1983, the AVC now appears in coordination with the neighboring Colombian M‐19 and Peruvian Sendero Luminoso guerrillas and in cooperation with regional narcotraficantes. Determined government efforts, supported by the United States, have failed decisively to uproot and destroy the AVC.     

Stealing from the past: Globalisation,strategic formation and the use of indigenous intellectual property in the biotechnology industry

Biotechnology has proven itself to be one of the most promising and volatile sectors in the world economy. From genetic engineering to the mapping of human cell lines, biotechnology is now a multibillion dollar venture. As a result the trade in biological specimens has increased, with researchers continually seeking new sources for specimens. The goal of our research is to explore two fundamental questions related to the biotechnology industry: (1) what has been the driving force behind the relatively recent explosive growth in the biotechnology industry; (2) what has been the impact on the developing world - which houses the natural resources that are the bases for many of these new biotechnology discoveries? We argue that globalisation has pushed governments, biotechnology firms and universities into strategic alliances that have unfairly included another partner in the creation of these new products: the developing world.     

Contextualized violence: politics and terror in Dagestan

Despite the escalating terrorist actions, there is no polarized constellation in the Islamic politics of Dagestan. Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) officers regard the corrupt Dagestan authorities to be significantly responsible for the massive conversion of youths to terrorism, and began to contact with moderate Salafis to isolate the “forest brothers” (armed Salafis) in 2010. Exploiting the FSB's soft strategy, secular intellectuals requested to reform the Muslim Spiritual Board of Dagestan by electing a legitimate mufti. Having seen the incompetence of intra-Sufi opposition (non-Avar sheikhs) in the War on Terror, the Spiritual Board jumped on the bandwagon of dialog strategy in 2012. The secular authorities of Dagestan, indifferent to intra-Muslim politics, limit their activities to the call for dialog between the secular authorities and the forest brothers. In this way, political actors hijack the master narrative of the “War on Terror” and these narratives are imported to local politics.     

Southern voices in peace education: interrogating race,marginalisation and cultural violence in the field

Three gaps seem to be present within the literature of peace education: relatively little self-critique of the internal workings of the field; a dearth of studies featuring the personal narratives of peace educators; and an underrepresentation of peace educators from the Global South. To address these three gaps, this qualitative investigation explores the personal narratives of Latin American, Asian and African peace educators and critiques certain assumptions and norms underlying the field. We primarily draw on Galtung’s concept of cultural violence, Bajaj’s critical peace education and Connell’s Southern Theory to make our critiques. We examine 13 semi-structured interviews using grounded theory analysis. Three themes relating to cultural and structural violence emerge from these interviews: discriminatory hurdles for Southern peace educators, intercultural tensions in the classroom and linguistic inequality in opportunities for professional mobility. These may or may not reflect the experiences of other peace educators from the Global South or minority practitioners working within the Global North. But by discussing these forms of violence, we hope to show the value of foregrounding the perspectives and lived experiences of underrepresented groups – not only in peace education but also in academia more broadly.     

Privatisation and economic growth in developing countries

This article re-examines the relation between privatisation and economic growth. Previous studies that have attempted to measure this relationship have concluded that privatisation has had a sizeable positive effect on economic growth. Our study uses data for 63 developing countries over the time period 1988–97. It uses the framework of an extreme-bounds analysis (EBA) to conduct a cross-country growth regression analysis. Our findings contradict earlier results, but reaffirm the view that effective competition and its regulation may need to accompany privatisation to make a positive impact on economic growth.     

State power, state embeddedness, and national development in less developed countries: A cross-national analysis

In this article, we test the prevailing statist argument about the state’s contribution to economic development in less developed countries (LDCs). State power in terms of centralized control of societal resources has been long considered a primary factor for economic growth. From the embeddedness perspective, the state’s effective embedding in the economy advances productive growth, while state power actually operates as a structural precondition of such policy action. Featured in our measurement are representative and financial embeddedness (operationalized as the central government’s tax income and its lending to the private sector and local states, respectively). The empirical testing is based on a pooled cross-national data of sixty-one underdeveloped countries. As indicated from modeling both manufacturing growth and increase in GNP per capita as dependent variables (during the period 1975–1990), the state power variable does not produce expected growth outcomes. However, two embedded state measures display significant but sectorbiased growth effects only for manufacturing production. Herein we further compare strong state power countries with weak ones, concluding that state power serves as a structural prerequisite so that late industrialization for LDCs can benefit from the growth coalitions in which the central state collaborates with (rather than dominates) actors at the subnational level of society and authorities. Ming-Chang Tsai teaches sociology in Taiwan. He was Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Social, behavioral, and Economic Research, University of California at Santa Barbara (1998–99). He wishes to thank professors Diane Davis and Ian Roxborough for invaluable comments. An earlier version of this article was presented in the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 1997, Toronto.