The pious or the doctrinaire? who supports suicide terrorism in Indonesia?

ABSTRACT

Indonesia is generally viewed as a moderate Muslim nation that episodically struggles with terrorism. Between 1981 and the end of 2016, Indonesia experienced 156 attacks from some 15 Islamist militant groups. However, the lineaments of popular support for Islamist militancy in Indonesia remain understudied. In this paper, we expand upon the existing literature on popular support for Islamist violence in Indonesia by replicating and extending the empirical framework for modeling the relationship between support for various conceptualizations of Shari’a and support for Islamist violence offered by Fair, Littman and Nugent (2018) for Pakistan and extended to Bangladesh by Fair, Hamza and Heller (2017). To do so, we conduct ordered logistical regression analysis of Pew survey data which includes information about respondents’ religious beliefs and practice as well as support for Islamist violence. We find considerable evidence that their framework is useful for understanding support for violence in Indonesia.     

Dimensions of Politics in the European Parliament

We investigate the dimensionality of politics in the European Parliament by applying a scaling method to all roll-call votes between 1979 and 2001 in the European Parliament. Contrary to most existing studies using these methods, we are able to interpret the substantive content of the observed dimensions using exogenous measures of national party policy positions. We find that the main dimension of politics in the European Union's only elected institution is the classic left-right dimension found in domestic politics. A second dimension is also present, although to a lesser extent, which captures government-opposition conflicts as well as national and European party positions on European integration.     

Migration decision from Bangladesh: permanent versus temporary

More than 50% of the total migration from Bangladesh occurred from Sylhet, located to northern part of the country since the middle of the last century. This paper provides an empirical distinction between the temporary migrants (Bangladeshi citizens engaged in earning aboard) and the permanent migrants (those who have the dual citizenship) based on their cost conditions, earnings, and utilization of remittances in their country of origin. Temporary migrants’ educational status, per capita income allocation to family members, work experience before migration, source of income and income range are much lower compared with the permanent migrants. But, the dependency ratio, contribution to the family, remittances, risk etc. are higher for the permanent migrants than the temporary migrants. Cost of migration and the migration decision are inversely related. Migration costs determine individual’s decision to migrate permanently or temporarily. Our results suggest that higher migration cost reduces the probability of permanent migration.     

Fixprice-flexprice industries among Malaysian agrobased manufacturing: An input-output approach

Industries can be classified into fixprice sectors according to their pricing behaviour. Although Hicks and Morishima have broadly classified manufacturing industries into fixprice and the rest of the economy into flexprice, using cost-based input-output models, the present paper reclassifies Malaysian agrobased manufacturing into flexprice and nonagrobased manufacturing into fixprice categories. By compiling annual sectoral price indices, both for intermediate and primary inputs, the model estimates sectoral residual profits of 1978 and 1983 vintage technologies.     

Data integration in IoT ecosystem: Information linkage as a privacy threat

Internet of things (IoT) is changing the way data is collected and processed. The scale and variety of devices, communication networks, and protocols involved in data collection present critical challenges for data processing and analyses. Newer and more sophisticated methods for data integration and aggregation are required to enhance the value of real-time and historical IoT data. Moreover, the pervasive nature of IoT data presents a number of privacy threats because of intermediate data processing steps, including data acquisition, data aggregation, fusion and integration. User profiling and record linkage are well studied topics in online social networks (OSNs); however, these have become more critical in IoT applications where different systems share and integrate data and information. The proposed study aims to discuss the privacy threat of information linkage, technical and legal approaches to address it in a heterogeneous IoT ecosystem. The paper illustrates and explains information linkage during the process of data integration in a smart neighbourhood scenario. Through this work, the authors aim to enable a technical and legal framework to ensure stakeholders awareness and protection of subjects about privacy breaches due to information linkage.     

What you sell is what you lend? Revealing complexity of <Emphasis Type="Italic">riba</Emphasis> in loan contract

The purpose of this paper is to resolve and examine the possible modus operandi of riba on selling and loan contract according to the Sharia’s precepts. This paper investigate the Qur’an, hadith, and juristic views on such relevant issues based on the survey done on the several sources, i.e., previous studies, Al-Qur’an and Al-Hadith and juristic views and deviate from the existing studies in two aspects, i.e., the selling and buying of goods do not involve riba and also the banks provide loan without riba. The findings of this paper are: First, the concept of interest in lending is widely accepted both in theory and practice. Second, riba exists in selling and lending. Third, the categorization and application of extensive and complex subjects of riba in economic life bring all speculative and usurious transactions under the rubric of riba prohibition. This paper important because express and disclosure riba in both exchange of goods and loans, also the social and economic developments. This is an original undertaking of this paper.     

Impact of the Stand Your Ground law on gun deaths: evidence of a rural urban dichotomy

We explore the impact of the Stand Your Ground (SYG) law on gun deaths by degree of urbanization. Unlike firearm homicides the definition of firearm deaths does not depend on the broadening of the self-defense provision that the SYG law represents. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that the SYG law had no impact on gun deaths at the state level. However, once the U.S. states are disaggregated into portions by degree of urbanization—central city, suburb, small urban area and rural area—we find that the law increased gun deaths in the central cities and the suburbs, and had no impact in smaller urban areas and rural areas. These findings are consistent with the fact that there is a great divide between urban and rural areas in terms of ownership and usage of guns, attitudes towards guns, and the implications thereof. The finding of increased violence in the suburbs is of particular interest in the historical backdrop whereby the growth of the suburbs, to a large extent, may have been motivated by a desire to escape crime and violence.