The South Asian revolutionary potential

Abstract

When India, Pakistan and Ceylon gained home rule more than two decades ago, their leaders set forth certain goals for their futures. Among them were control of their own political and economic destinies, increased productivity and improvements in livelihood, education and health, mixed private and state-planned economies, some cooperative institutions of production and distribution, and movement toward socio-economic equality. Land reform and industrial development were central to these goals. All three nations were to be western-style party democracies with progressively broadening franchise in elections at national, provincial and local levels.     

Actor Fragmentation and Civil War Bargaining: How Internal Divisions Generate Civil Conflict

Wars within states have become much more common than wars between them. A dominant approach to understanding civil war assumes that opposition movements are unitary, when empirically, most of them are not. I develop a theory for how internal divisions within opposition movements affect their ability to bargain with the state and avoid conflict. I argue that more divided movements generate greater commitment and information problems, thus making civil war more likely. I test this expectation using new annual data on the internal structure of opposition movements seeking self‐determination. I find that more divided movements are much more likely to experience civil war onset and incidence. This analysis suggests that the assumption that these movements are unitary has severely limited our understanding of when these disputes degenerate into civil wars.     

Transitions through Out-of-Keeping Acts

Within a negotiation, when an act by one party is out-of-keeping with the previous moves and underlying logic of the interaction, the act and those that follow hold the potential for creating a transition to a new logic of interaction. In this paper, we investigate the presence and role of seven distinct types of transitions resulting from out-of-keeping acts across ten complex legal negotiations. The data reveal that a critical feature differentiating across the types is the abruptness/gradualness of the transition. We explore the combination of relational, informational, and procedural acts comprising the transitions and find that all three components are present across transitions, but in different proportions and orders. Understanding the role of out-of-keeping acts in negotiations facilitates a more complete picture of the microprocesses involved in the creation of critical moments in negotiations.     

“Soul Murder”: Investigating Spiritual Trauma at the Royal Commission

ABSTRACT

During its five-year tenure, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse established that faith organisations, with inadequate practices of organisational transparency and accountability, hierarchical structures of power, and patriarchal cultures, have poor track records in child protection and high levels of child abuse. Evidence from the Royal Commission hearings identified spiritual trauma as an outcome of child sexual abuse across several religious organisations including the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Salvation Army, the Yeshiva Jewish School in Melbourne and Sydney and the Satyananda Ashram in NSW. The Catholic Church had the highest levels of institutional child sexual assault and was the site of most of the narratives of spiritual suffering. This article examines existing research on spiritual trauma with regard to child sexual abuse, applies a five-point classification model developed by Kenneth Pargament and colleagues for identifying and analysing spiritual damage, and examines the evidence from both survivors and expert witnesses that was heard during relevant public hearings involving the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission. Institutional responses to spiritual injury will be considered and it will be argued that the Catholic Church is a distinctive institution that has produced a powerful culture of spiritual identity and belonging, where the impact of child sexual abuse has resulted in a loss of faith for many survivors, families and communities.