The Emerging Threat? South Africa's Extreme Right

In the run-up to South Africa's first non-racial election in 1994, extremist right-wing organizations, and their sympathizers in the state security forces, posed a real danger to the country's future democratic order. After 1994, violent, right-wing extremist activities virtually dissipated. However, during a single night in late 2002, eight bomb blasts rocked Soweto, South Africa's largest black township. An unknown organization, Boeremag (Boer force/power), claimed responsibility for the bombings. Some two dozen alleged Boeremag members, including serving military officers, were subsequently arrested and charged with terrorism-related offenses. The Boeremag makes an interesting case study of how the extreme white right in South Africa mixes politics and religion, and seeks to exploit popular grievances to garner support for the creation of a secessionist Afrikaner state. The South African white right does not have the resources, capacity, or support to successfully execute a coup d'état. The Boeremag serves as a reminder, however, that the extreme right can create instability and destruction on a significant scale in South Africa.     

Post‐Secular Turkey

For 500 years the West was on the rise, culminating in Globalizaiton 1.0—the open system of trade, information flows and the spread of technology on the terms and in the image of the West. The benefits of that system over the last 30 years have led to the rise of the emerging economies. As a result we are entering the new era of Globalization 2.0 characterized by new forms of non‐Western modernity and the interdependence of plural identities. The advent of this new era has been hastened by the fiscal and financial crisis in Europe and the United States. Turkey, with its Islamic‐oriented democracy that has become a template for the liberated peoples of the Arab Spring, and China, with its effective neo‐Confucian form of governance, are the most sharply defined new players in this multi‐polar and multi‐dimensional world. In this section, one of Turkey's most insightful sociologists examines the post‐secular transformation of that nation. One of China's more provocative philosophers proposes a hybrid model that combines what has been learned from the experience of Western and Chinese governance in a way that “enhances democracy” in both systems.     

NETWORKS: REIFIED METAPHOR OR GOVERNANCE PANACEA?

This article will discuss the contribution of Rod Rhodes to the research on networks. I will focus on networks as a typology of state/society relations and as a particular form of governance. It is not only here that Rhodes has left his deepest mark; most research on networks still falls in one of the two sub‐fields. The typology of policy networks, which he developed with David Marsh more than 15 years ago, has become a classic and still forms a major reference point for studies on public policy‐making. Rhodes also pioneered the concept of network governance in the study of British politics to capture the profound changes in the Westminister model since the late 1970s. Regarding more recent developments, Rhodes has been among the first to discuss the reflexivity of networks, introducing some postmodernist thinking into public administration research. Finally, Rhodes has helped advance the ‘ethnographic turn’ in network studies.     

The Family Antecedents and the Subsequent Outcomes of Early Puberty

The purpose of this study was to examine both the family antecedents and the outcomes of early puberty, with a particular focus on factors related to family socioeconomic status (SES). The study employed a comprehensive measurement of pubertal development and longitudinal data from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. The sample (N = 8,440; 49% girls) included four cohorts of children who were followed biennially for 10 years, starting from age 4–11 to 14–21 years. Data were drawn at different years of age from these cohorts of children. Girls whose fathers were unemployed were more likely to experience early puberty than those whose fathers were employed. For boys, those living with fathers who had not finished secondary school were more likely to experience early puberty. Early maturing girls tended to engage in smoking and drinking at an earlier age compared with their peers. These findings provide support for psychosocial acceleration theory and suggest that different aspects of low family SES may act as a psychosocial stress for early pubertal maturation in boys versus girls, which may lead to engagement in drinking and smoking at a younger age, at least for girls.     

Protest,memory, and the production of ‘civilized’ citizens: two cases from Turkey and Lebanon

This article studies the proliferation of discourses of rationality and responsibility among a particular elite social group in Lebanon and Turkey, as they remember student mobilization of their past. I offer these episodes of student mobilization as acts of citizenship that create and make use of rapturous moments in the histories of their countries and institutions. I extend these acts of citizenship to the contemporary context and study the ways in which they become part of discourses of citizenship in unexpected ways. I propose that these narratives draw upon a set of local practices that reflect meanings of citizenship, originating from Western discourses of liberalism, albeit following a different route. In the narratives, violence and irrationality become the defining features of politicized behavior, whereas being civilized epitomizes good manners and rationality. Such boundary-drawing exercises contribute to making conceivable exclusionary social orders based on the idea of a hierarchical distribution of reason and social utility.     

The ‘responsibility to protect’ in natural disasters: another excuse for interventionism? Nargis Cyclone,Myanmar

The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) places the ‘international community’ under an obligation to take coercive action for the protection of lives in the circumstances of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Following the dismal response to the May 2008 cyclone disaster in Myanmar where many affected people were provided with almost no relief assistance by the country's military regime that also hampered external assistance, the idea of military humanitarian intervention under the rubric of R2P was proposed by Bernard Kouchner. However, considering the urgency of the provision of relief assistance in an emergency, which is often a matter of life or death, this paper questions the effectiveness of invoking R2P as a possible response strategy in the aftermath of natural disasters. Therefore, in relation to state sovereignty the paper focuses on the concept of ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ at macro and micro levels as an alternative strategy and having analysed the issue in the wider framework of humanitarianism, the paper concludes with the importance of exploring the opportunities provided by humanitarian diplomacy before invoking R2P in the context of natural disasters.