Do Natural Disasters Open a Window of Opportunity for Corruption?

This study explores the link between natural disasters and corruption at the local government level. We examine whether a natural disaster affects official households more favourably than non-official households. We find that natural disasters decrease nonofficial household expenditures significantly, however, they have negligible effect on official household expenditures. Meanwhile, both kinds of households experience similar reduction in incomes, and have much the same disaster coping strategies. Together, the results imply that local officials may receive unobserved monetary compensation – we define as corruption – in the aftermath of natural disasters.     

Natural Disasters,Gender and Handicrafts

Using original post-disaster household survey data gathered in rural Fiji, this article explores the disaster–gender nexus. Female-headed households are disadvantaged, not because of bias against them in disaster damage or relief, but because of a newly emerging gendered division of labour for dwelling rehabilitation that tightens their constraints on intra-household labour allocation. Female-headed households with damaged dwellings resort to female labour activities connected with informal risk sharing – augmenting production of handicrafts for kava rituals in exchange for male-labour help. Female-headed households without male-adult members resort to such activities more than those with them, because of their distinctly different decision-making processes.     

Local government’s disaster management capacity and disaster resilience

ABSTRACT

The questions in this research are as follows: How does the disaster management capacity of local governments affect the disaster resilience of local communities? The research distinguished local communities by type according to their level of exposure to natural disaster hazards and the analysis compared the impact of the disaster management capabilities on disaster resilience by the type of natural disaster exposure. The analysis results are as follows: While the frequency of disasters local communities experience is low, the magnitude of disasters experienced is large; external network and manual had a positive effect on disaster resilience. When disaster frequency experienced by local communities is high, the magnitude of disasters experienced is small, and internal network and public relation contribute to increased disaster resilience. In conclusion, this research will help expand the externalities of disaster management discussed in the fields of public administration and policy.     

Economic Consequences of Forced Displacement

Over 42 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced from their communities, though little is known about the impact of this movement on livelihoods. I use a panel data set and exploit a geographic discontinuity to explore the effects of displacement in Uganda. I find that displaced households experience a significant initial decrease in consumption. Two years after households returned home, displaced households still lag behind. However, households in the top quartiles of pre-displacement assets have recovered some of their consumption, though with significantly reduced education and wealth levels. There is likely little or no recovery for the poorest households.     

Map of Central Asia,Western and Eastern Sectors

After first outlining the notion of anti-Semitism, the predominant survey method used for researching it, and the history of the presence and the current (near) absence of Jews in Poland, this article gives the results of different surveys of various kinds of anti-Semitism in this country, including the authors' own, and discusses the findings of their qualitative study – focus group interviews with members of three different Catholic communities from three different cities. The qualitative study confirmed the hypothesis that imagined and stereotypical rather than real Jews are the objects of modern anti-Semitism in Poland, while real historical and stereotypically perceived Jews are the objects of its religious and post-Holocaust variants. The roots of religious anti-Semitism lie in the not entirely absorbed teachings of the Catholic Church on the Jewish deicide charge. Religious anti-Semitism supports modern and post-Holocaust kinds of anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism is rooted in poor education, lack of interest in the Jewish history of Poland, lack of inter-group contact, and persisting stereotypes of Jews. Among the various Catholic communities of Poles, there are considerable differences in attitudes to Jews. The qualitative study also revealed a methodological deficiency in the standard survey questions intended to measure anti-Semitism, which are sometimes understood as questions about facts rather than about opinions.     

Resilience and disaster risk reduction: reclassifying diversity and national identity in post-earthquake Nepal

This paper discusses disaster resilience in the context of disaster risk reduction. It focuses on how the Nepali state, through disaster risk reduction and resilience strategies, is reinventing the ‘diversity’ question in Nepal. Disaster risk management and disaster risk reduction are being used to create a specific form of national identity that paradoxically both segregates and excludes ethnic and traditional communities through a variety of strategies of paternalism and inclusivity. The emerging state-led use of exploiting and capturing ethnic and indigenous ‘traditional knowledge’ is part of the government’s disaster risk strategy. This is sanctioned by multilateral bodies, which further legitimates subtle practices of exclusion through state-led monitoring. This has wider implications for contested narratives on Nepali democracy and federalism.     

Civil Service and Civil Society Collaboration: A Comparative Analysis of Disaster Management Results in China and the United States

This article explores the way natural disasters provide an opportunity to address relations between civil society and the state as mutually empowering. Such opportunity can be reinforced when civil servants help to mobilize the interests of marginalized communities into disaster management and collaborate with active civil associations in seeking to reduce disaster vulnerabilities. This requires that public administration be able to respond to disaster in an effective and equitable way. Civil servants should be capable of being socially reliable by building and maintaining trust in relationships with communities and civil organizations. Using the Gulf Coast Hurricanes (United States) in 2005 and the Wenchuan Earthquake (China) in 2008 as case studies, this article comparatively addresses the significance of public administration's role in developing mutual empowerment in state and civil society relations in the face of adversity. Given the fact that civil service capacity becomes a crucial factor in determining state-civil society relations, it also has important implications for the potential of democratization in China.     

What Secular Age?

After asserting that the title of Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age is misleading—since around the world religious communities of belief are still quite robust—this paper argues that the most important tension in contemporary societies, is not, as Taylor thinks, that between believers and so-called unbelievers, but rather that between monists and pluralists, between advocates of closed communities and advocates of open communities, be they religious or secular.     

A Pact with the Devil? Elite Alliances as Bases of Violent Religious Conflicts

This article aims at explaining religious conflicts on the basis of an elite-centered theoretical model. Violent movements can only pertain on the long run if political elites organize and coordinate them centrally. The same holds true for the religious dimension of many conflicts. Religious elites have to persuade the believers of the religious nature of their struggle. Hence, in many cases religious conflicts can be traced back to alliances of religious and political elites. The first try to protect their religious communities and hope to expand their religious influence. The latter try to use religion as a resource for mobilization.     

Religious Institutions and Authoritarian States: church–state relations in the Middle East

The churches in the Middle East are generally perceived to be supportive of the authoritarian states in the region. The motivations for this strategy and its successes and limitations in the context of the authoritarian environment and the religious heritage of the region are explored. The article argues that the approaches pursued are determined by the structure of the community in relation to the majority and other Christian communities as well as by state policies towards the community. The overriding aim of church leaders of protecting their communities has led to a modern variation of the historical millet system, which provides them public status in exchange for their acquiescence in regime policies. This security guarantee, combined with wariness towards other potential political actors and the desire to protect their privileged position from communal challengers, has resulted in the hierarchies' preference for the authoritarian status quo rather than encouraging democracy promotion.     

Resurgent religious terrorism: A study of some of the Lebanese Shi'a contemporary terrorism

Abstract

This study introduces the concept of geocultural immobility. A minority's geocultural immobility is identified as an imposed low geographic mobility within a nation with low cultural pluralism. It establishes the Lebanese Shi'a geocultural immobility, to which it attributes their religious resurgence. This Lebanese Shi'a religious resurgence is proven in this research to produce the zealots needed by religious terrorist organizations. This study also introduces and defines religious terrorism as violent acts performed by elements of religious organizations or sects, growing out of a commitment to communicate a divine message. It makes distinctions among religious terrorism, secular terrorism, and fighters for religious freedom, which are based on the actors' motives, affinities, and consciousness of the maliciousness of their acts. The primary and secondary data and the quasiexperiment in this research support its special hypotheses. They indicate a statistical correlation between eight Lebanese Shi ‘a cultural and religious attributes.     

Greek-Cypriot teachers’ perceptions of religious education and its contribution to peace: perspectives of (in)compatibility in a divided society

This paper explores the ways in which a group of primary school teachers in Cyprus interprets religious education and its contribution to peace. In particular, this phenomenological exploratory study: first, examines how teachers perceive religious education and whether this conceptualization is considered to be (in)compatible with peace in the context of a conflict-affected society; and, second, shows some of the tensions that exist in the aims of religious education between the desire to encourage mutual understanding and exposure to religious pluralism, on the one hand, and the political demands for entrenching ethnic cleavages, on the other. Although these tensions are largely contextual, they nevertheless raise two important issues that are worthwhile to consider for religious education and peace in conflict-affected societies: first, the ‘naturalization’ of religion and religious instruction, on the one hand, vs. the recognition that some models of religious instruction (i.e. confessional teaching) might actually limit the space within which teachers can make contributions to peace, on the other; and, second, the tension between the different models of religious education within a conflict-affected society and particularly which model would strategically and politically serve best the purposes of peace in the short- and long-term.     

DISCUSSION - Agricultural Policy Reform and Rural Livelihoods in Central Mexico

This contribution examines the impact of profound changes to agricultural policy implemented since 1988 on the livelihoods of Mexico's rural population. Detailed studies in four villages show that rural incomes are very unevenly distributed within communities leaving half of households in poverty. During the last decade key factors affecting village economies have been international and national, rather than specific changes to farm policy. Most changes have been to the detriment of the communities studied, but peasant households have adapted and survived, at a price. If the worst fears about the consequences of economic liberalisation have not been realised, neither have the hopes. Depressed markets for basic goods and services have limited the growth of the rural economy. Private investment and provision of services have not been stimulated.     

A Community-Level Comparison of Terrorism Movements in the United States

The aim of this article is to identify characteristics of communities where persons indicted under terrorism charges lived, planned, and prepared prior to carrying out a terrorist act. Guided by a model of community deterioration and using data from the Terrorism and Extremist Violence in the United States database, findings indicate: (1) half of all census tracts where terrorists planned and prepared for attacks were located in the western United States; nearly one fourth were in the Northeast; (2) nationally, terrorist pre-incident activity is more likely to occur in census tracts with lower percentages of high school graduates for Al Qaeda and associated movements (AQAM) terrorism but not for far-right terrorism, higher percentages of households living below the poverty level, more urban places, and more unemployed; and (3) communities with terrorist pre-incident activity are different types of places compared to those where there was no pre-incident activity, generally between different regions of the country, and specifically in terms of differences across far-right and AQAM terrorist movements.     

Organizing Democracy: How International Organizations Assist New Democracies

Scholars in the environmental security tradition have sought to explicate the links between environmental scarcity (or degradation) and the onset of different forms of political violence and how these are mediated by institutional mechanisms. The Malthusian trap here is not a direct deterministic relationship, but rather a possibility, where environmental scarcity when it coincides with socio-economic processes of rent-seeking and exclusion triggers political conditions ripe for violent struggles. This a priori attention to scarcity as causal mechanism blurs our understanding why violence occurs in some and does not in other places. Our research strategy is therefore different: we study a case of non-violent relations between resource users under conditions of environmental scarcity (due to drought) and political instability and look into the crucial role of local institutions in governing competing resource claims. Our case from the violence-prone Somali Region, Ethiopia analyses how agro-pastoralist communities develop sharing arrangements on pasture resources with intruding pastoralist communities in drought years, even though this places additional pressure on their grazing resource. A household survey investigates the determinants for different households in the agro-pastoralist community, asset-poor and wealthy ones, to enter into different types of sharing arrangements. Our findings suggest that resource sharing offers asset-poor households opportunities to stabilise and enhance their asset-base in drought years, providing incentives for cooperative rather than conflicting relations with intruding pastoralists.     

Employment of Displaced and Non-Displaced Households in Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasti

Abstract

This essay investigates the employment of displaced and non-displaced households in a region next to the conflict zone. We show that the casually observed average 0–5% difference in employment between displaced and non-displaced household heads conceals positive selection into displacement. Relative to locals, internally displaced persons are positively selected based on observable as well as unobservable factors. After controlling for personal characteristics, the structure of the household, location, non-labour incomes and endogeneity of displacement, heads of IDP households are still 20% less likely to be employed two years after resettlement.     

Long Live Democracy: The Determinants of Political Instability in Latin America

We investigate the underlying causes of political instability in a panel of 18 Latin American countries from 1971–2000. We test whether regime type, regime durability, factionalism, income inequality, ethnic diversity, ethnic discrimination, regional spillover effects, urban growth and macroeconomic variables matter for instability. We find several important results: (1) democracy has a significant negative effect on instability that is robust to several alternative specifications; (2) factionalised political systems experience higher instability; (3) income inequality, ethnic fractionalisation, and urban growth have important nonlinear effects on instability; and (4) of the macroeconomic variables we study, only openness to trade has a significant negative effect on instability.     

Catastrophic New Age Groups and Public Order

This article examines the recent emergence of separatist, countercultural groups observing a disaster-prone view of the future shaped by variations of New Age religion. While these groups have not uniformly adopted violent strategies against outsiders, the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo case should alert authorities to the potential for violent activism that exists in some New Age collectivities during periods when the group is experiencing an episode of stress. Particular attention is given here to the psychodynamic shift which took place in a Montana-based New Age religious movement as its visions of a forthcoming earthly disaster mobilized the membership to prepare for a cataclysmic event. It is likely that law enforcement agencies will encounter more cases of millennial excitement in catastrophic New Age groups in the near-term future as the approach of the year 2000 stimulates the apocalyptic imaginations of these countercultural movements.     

Surviving Chernobyl in America

Abstract

This paper fills an informational gap for multidisciplinary providers of services to the former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrants in the United States, highlighting the long-term medical and mental health consequences of this group's pre-migration exposure to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The international literature is selectively presented together with recent findings of Chernobyl mental health sequelae in a cohort residing in the United States. Guidelines for service providers, as well as Russian language health service resources in US cities populated by significant FSU communities, are also furnished.     

Escaping poverty and becoming poor in 36 villages of Central and Western Uganda

Twenty-four per cent of households in 36 village communities of Central and Western Uganda have escaped from poverty over the past 25 years, but another 15 per cent have simultaneously fallen into poverty. A roughly equal number of households escaped from poverty in the first period (ten to 25 years ago) as in the second period (the last ten years) examined here. However, almost twice as many households fell into poverty during the second period as in the first period. Progress in poverty reduction has slowed down as a result. Multiple causes are associated with descent into poverty and these causes vary significantly between villages in the two different regions. For nearly two-thirds of all households in both regions, however, ill health and health-related costs were a principal reason for descent into poverty. Escaping poverty is also associated with diverse causes, which vary across the two regions. Compared to increases in urban employment, however, land-related reasons have been more important for escaping poverty in both regions.