The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations

Does political violence leave a lasting legacy on identities, attitudes, and behaviors? We argue that violence shapes the identities of victims and that families transmit these effects across generations. Inherited identities then impact the contemporary attitudes and behaviors of the descendants of victims. Testing these hypotheses is fraught with methodological challenges; to overcome them, we study the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 and the indiscriminate way deportees died from starvation and disease. We conducted a multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatars in 2014 and find that the descendants of individuals who suffered more intensely identify more strongly with their ethnic group, support more strongly the Crimean Tatar political leadership, hold more hostile attitudes toward Russia, and participate more in politics. But we find that victimization has no lasting effect on religious radicalization. We also provide evidence that identities are passed down from the victims of the deportation to their descendants.     

Using Tomorrow's Headlines for Today's Training: Creating Pseudo-reality in Conflict Resolution Simulation Games

This article introduces the "pseudo-reality" method of constructing and conducting conflict resolution training workshops. This method focuses on creating a backdrop against which participants engage in building negotiation and mediation skills using real-life events and facts — but only to the extent that these events and facts promote the learning process. By creating pseudo-reality, trainers can overcome strong preconceptions or biases that can interfere with the learning process while at the same time preserving the advantages of working within a familiar, realistic environment. This method is meant to be used when the main goal of a workshop is skill building rather than imparting substantive knowledge of a specific conflict. The article illustrates this method by describing its use at a workshop conducted recently in Cyprus, in which the Israeli–Palestinian conflict served as a backdrop for conflict resolution skill building. Finally, the article describes a model designed to help conflict resolution trainers create pseudo-reality in their own workshops.     

Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina

Scholars disagree about the nature of party attachments, viewing partisanship as either a social identity or a rational maximization of expected utility. Empirically, much of this debate centers on the degree of partisan stability: findings of partisan fluctuations are taken as evidence against the social‐identity perspective. But drawing such conclusions assumes that the objects of identity—parties—are fixed. If we instead allow party brands to change over time, then partisan instability is consistent with a social‐identity conception of partisanship. To demonstrate this, I develop a branding model of partisanship in which voters learn about party brands by observing party behavior over time and base their psychological attachment to a party on these brands. The model suggests that convergence by rival parties, making their brands less distinguishable, should weaken party attachments. I test this implication using a survey experiment in Argentina and find evidence consistent with the model.     

Domestic terrorism: Notes on the state system of oppression∗

Abstract

Twenty‐five years after the Watergate affair culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon, the country continues to be animated by the spirit of scandal—even if the alleged offenses against William Jefferson Clinton involved sexual misconduct rather than illegal bombings, break‐ins, and other non‐"crimes and misdemeanors.” In this article, Noam Chomsky discusses a more basic threat to the Constitution than Watergate found in the pattern of FBI break‐ins and illegal actions first revealed to the public in 1973. (Illegal actions by the national police are known to have continued in the 1980s as a tactic used against activists in the Central America solidarity movement.) Not only does Chomsky locate a pattern in the FBI's actions since the founding of the Bureau, he discusses historical antecedents in the Alien and Sedition Acts, the judicial murder of the Haymarket anarchists, and the Palmer raids. For Chomsky, the real meaning of these actions is that the system routinely works to stifle dissent using means far more problematic than those employed by the Watergate burglars. In Chomsky's view, the purpose of these criminal actions is to frustrate preliminary stages of organization before more advanced forms of “revolutionary radicalism” can develop.     

Acute poisoning involving the pyrrolidinophenone-type designer drug 4'-methyl-alpha-pyrrolidinohexanophenone (MPHP)

A 36-year-old woman consulted the medical emergency unit of a private health center for abdominal pain and gastroenteritis of 5 days duration. Acute right pyelonephritis was diagnosed. Five hours after admission she became unconscious in a state of clinical shock. She was transferred to an intensive care unit but resuscitation attempts were unsuccessful and she died 3 h later. Three days after death, she was buried in the family vault. Five days after the burial, her husband lodged a complaint with the public prosecutor because he had not received a clear explanation from the physicians concerning the cause of his wife's death. After analysis of the medical records of the deceased by two forensic pathologists, a medicolegal autopsy was ordered by the public prosecutor. The corpse was exhumed and autopsy performed 9 days after death. Massive hemoperitoneum was diagnosed with a macroscopically ruptured subcapsular hematoma. Pathological study confirmed acute right pyelonephritis and demonstrated the precise cause of the hemorrhage: rupture of the hepatic artery at the hilar part, following infectious arteritis which was probably secondary to the acute pyelonephritis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first published report of such a case.     

Women in mystical Islam

Women played a positive role in Sufism. Even though the early ascetics were rather negative in their statements about women, it was a woman who introduced the concept of pure love into Islamic mysticism, and has been venerated for this reason throughout the centuries. One meets women in almost every avenue of Sufism. They act as patrons of Sufi khānqāhs and as shaykhas of certain convents. They have been venerated as saints and accepted as spiritual guides. The symbol of the woman-soul who embodies the highest ambition of the God-seeking human being, has been popular in the Sufi tradition of Indo-Pakistan. As mothers, many mystically inclined women have deeply influenced their sons who in turn became leading masters of the Path thanks to their early education. The role of women for the expansion of mystically tinged Islamic thought in the countryside and down to the lowest levels of population cannot be overrated; they were the most important depositories of mystical lore and the simple, unassuming faith in God and the Prophet.