Democratization Processes and Homicide Rates in the Balkan Region,Bulgaria and Romania

The transition of countries from an autocratic to a democratic regime is a complex process characterized by big political, social and economic changes. This process is usually accompanied by an increase in violent crime rates which has been investigated by a large number of studies in the last decades. A special role in this analysis is played by the studies on the former communist countries, especially the ones that stress the relationship between post-communist regimes and the exponential rise of violent crime rates experienced in their transition. The majority of these studies have tried to explain the violent crime booms, but no research empirically tested if violent crime is willing to decrease as democracies consolidated. According to one of the most recent studies by Alvazzi del Frate and Mugellini, the Western Balkan region and a large number of “Non-Western” countries have recently experienced a drop in their homicide rates which has not been empirically analysed yet. This article aims at fulfilling this lack of knowledge by empirically analyzing eight countries of the Balkan region, Bulgaria and Romania. The main hypothesis is that, in terms of reduction of violent crime, there is a benefit in shifting from a transitional to a more democratic regime in post-communist countries. Data on Polity score and homicide rate from 1995 to 2011 were collected to conduct a fixed effect panel data analysis on the level of democracy and violent crime in the Balkan region, Bulgaria and Romania confirming a negative association between the two variables.     

The distribution of conflict and attention across energy infrastructure

Across the world, public administration and policy decisions are related to diverse levels of conflict and attention. However, the degree and variance of conflict and attention remain largely unspecified. This article examines how types of energy infrastructure and characteristics of project location are associated with the distribution of conflict and attention around the energy infrastructure siting process. Our empirical focus is on gas pipelines, electricity transmission lines, solar power projects, and wind power projects across the United States in 2018. Primarily relying on regression analysis and interviews, this article finds differences in the distribution of conflict and attention intensity within and between these energy infrastructure types, with gas pipelines and wind power projects presenting relatively higher conflict and attention intensities. However, conflict and attention are skewed to low intensities across infrastructure types. Characteristics of project locations that are positively associated with high conflict and attention intensity include the proportion of Democratic voters and the level of urbanization in the places where projects are sited. In contrast, the proportion of Black or Hispanic residents is negatively associated with high conflict and attention intensity.     

“It's a Silent Trade”: Female Same-Sex Intimacies in Post-Colonial Ghana

While in many places same-sex cultures revolve around politically charged subcultural understandings, this paper explores conceptualizations of female same-sex desire beyond constructions of lesbian identity. It looks at a set of practices forged by women who are involved in intimate same-sex relationships in southern Ghana and examines how their self-understandings resist and intersect with the derogatory media representations that frame them. A key term to these representations is the term supi. It implies a close friendship between two adolescent girls, whether or not their relationship has a sexual dimension. In spite of rising tides of homophobia that impact such female intimacies, two factors still allow for the creation of niches for same-sex intimacy: first, southern Ghanaian cultures draw on norms of verbal indirection and discretion, which allow for the concealment of non-normative sexual conduct. Secondly, homosocial spaces of intimacy provide an environment in which female same-sex bonds are expressed through a language of allusion rather than a specialist, subcultural vocabulary. Erotic context is formed through practice and performance and is not discursively named or understood as a social identity. Rather, these understandings of female same-sex passions revolve around the notion of secrecy and are based on tacit but vibrant forms of knowledge.