Caught between the urgent and the comprehensible: professionals’ understanding of violent extremism

The present article focuses on how 13 professionals in key organisations in Sweden – all commissioned to design social and pedagogical efforts to prevent recruitment to terror groups that commit violence in the name of Islam – understand and reason regarding the root causes of recruitment and possible measures to counteract it. The 13 informants’ reasoning is analysed through critical discourse analysis, the aim being to investigate discursive practices that influence the construction of a Swedish discourse on the “prevention of violent extremism”. The analysis shows that in the informants’ reasoning, a conflict can be found between security-driven doctrines that strive to individualise the issue of “violent extremism”, and their understanding that segregation is the primary, though indirect, factor sparking “radicalisation”. This conflict seems to impair the use of a professional language to describe and talk about the practical methodology that the informants are developing.     

Political sophistication affects how citizens’ social policy preferences respond to the economy

Theoretical and empirical accounts of public opinion show that people’s social policy preferences are affected by the state of economy. According to the countercyclical view, economic downturn increases citizens’ demands for social policy whereas the procyclical view states that citizens demand less social policy during economically tough times. This article argues that individuals’ differences in political sophistication and, specifically, the commonly associated social-psychological characteristics are part of the micro-foundations for those different responses. People acquire and process information differently, which influences their political preferences. Public opinion and macroeconomic data from Europe during the economic crisis support the argument. The results show that people with lower levels of political sophistication tend to be procyclical, whereas this relationship weakens and moves towards countercyclical opinion structures with increasing levels of sophistication. These findings help to explain social policy preferences in response to the economy, and they offer insights into the origins of social policy preferences.     

Debating War and Peace: US Congress and the Domestic Legitimization of Military Interventions

This article investigates how members of US Congress legitimized their votes in four cases of military interventions after the Cold War (Iraq 1991, 2002–2009; Somalia 1993; Libya 2011). Using an original dataset on congressional rhetoric, the qualitative content analysis highlights that the domestic legitimization of military interventions hinges on members of Congress’s perception of external threats and national interests. So far, international relations research focused on the executive and the war powers literature offered mainly quantitative accounts on voting patterns within the legislative branch―especially for the US case. The relevance of national interest arguments within congressional debates confirms the expectations of neoclassical realism while contradicting previous studies about a dominant discourse in US society, which legitimizes interventions with universal values, such as democracy promotion or human rights.     

State formation as it happens: insights from a repeated cross-sectional study in Afghanistan, 2007–2015

This paper contributes to an empirical understanding of state formation. Based on an original household-level data set, we provide a detailed picture of the process of state formation in Afghanistan over the last decade. State formation happens when state and society engage in reciprocal relations. Central to this relationship is an exchange of services for the acceptance of authority and increased legitimacy. Our data allows us to assess state-society relations across different dimensions. We focus on the provision of services, on the responsiveness of the state, on conflict regulation and on taxation. As a result we find more evidence of state formation than expected, but also see this as a contested process that unfolds unevenly and with different speed across different sectors.     

Comparing the autonomy of international public administrations: An ideal‐type approach

International Public Administrations (IPAs), that is, the secretariats of international organizations, are important actors in global governance. This article develops a new typology of IPAs that captures the potential influence of these bureaucratic bodies on international policy‐making. The main argument is that when conceptualizing the varying roles and potential policy impact of IPAs, it is useful to distinguish between their ability to develop autonomous preferences (autonomy of will) on the one hand, and their capacity to transform these preferences into action (autonomy of action) on the other. Based on this premise, the article introduces four distinct ideal‐types of international bureaucracies and suggests indicators to locate a diverse sample of 20 administrations within the four‐fold typology. The results reveal the empirical diversity of IPA autonomy and allow for a first empirical assessment of the factors behind this pattern.     

Comparing Different Sequential Mediational Interpretations of Beck’s Cognitive Model of Depression in Adolescents

Depression is a developmental phenomenon with significantly increasing rates during adolescence. As Beck’s cognitive model of depression has been commonly accepted to explain the development and maintenance of depression, it is crucial to understand how and when cognitive vulnerabilities predicted in this model begin to interact. Three sequential interpretations of this model were compared. The causal mediational interpretation identifies dysfunctional attitudes as most distal to depressive symptoms, followed by cognitive errors, cognitive triad, and negative automatic thoughts, with each construct successively more proximal to depressive symptoms. In the symptom model the causal chain is reversed, with depressive symptoms as the most distal construct, followed by negative automatic thoughts, the cognitive triad, cognitive errors, and then dysfunctional attitudes. The bidirectional model merges both interpretations in which the activation of cognitive constructs causes the development of depressive symptoms which in turn trigger and reinforce already existing dysfunctional attitudes. Further, while Beck’s model of depression proposes full mediation, empirical studies identified repeatedly partial mediations. Thus, the causal meditational, the symptoms, and the bidirectional model were each tested as full and partial mediation models. Finally, sex differences in the associations between variables were studied. In the 3-wave longitudinal study, 518 high school students (62.7 % female, average age: 15.09 years) completed questionnaires measuring all mentioned elements of Beck’s model. The bidirectional model with partial mediation fits the data best. Cognitive errors emerged as the main mediator in the bidirectional model with partial mediation and significant sex differences in the strengths of associations were identified. The findings demonstrate the relevance of adolescence as developmental period during which the examined associations develop into the network they form in adulthood. Further, psychological interventions focusing on cognitive errors promise to be most effective.     

The influence of sense of coherence,self-care and work satisfaction on secondary traumatic stress and burnout among child and youth residential care workers in Switzerland

The present study aimed to investigate the incidence of post-traumatic and secondary traumatic stress as well as burnout symptoms among child and youth welfare workers in residential care in Switzerland and to assess the predictive value of sense of coherence, self-care, and job satisfaction. A sample of 319 child welfare professionals in Swiss child and youth residential care was assessed using questionnaires that addressed sense of coherence, perceived collective efficacy, self-care, and work satisfaction, as well as symptoms of traumatic stress and burnout. Linear regression analyses were conducted to determine the influence of sense of coherence, self-care and job satisfaction on symptoms of burnout and traumatic stress. Enhancing sense of coherence, work-related self-care and work satisfaction could reduce stress symptoms and increase the well-being of child and youth welfare staff. The authors discuss how child and youth residential care institutions could improve these factors among their staff.     

Migrating Within “the Gender-equal Nordic Region”: Icelandic Migrants in Norway and the Gendered Division of Work and Care

Migration is a gendered process that shapes the lives of men and women differently, because they generally occupy dissimilar positions within the household, the labour market, and society. This article examines gender and migration within a Nordic context, between two countries that are often presented as gender-equal in cross-national comparisons. The focus is on how the gendered division of labour is manifested in the experiences of Icelanders who migrated to Norway in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis of October 2008. The results are based on interviews with people who migrated to Norway both with and without their families. In our analysis, we show how the gender-segregated labour market and gender norms lead to different positions and opportunities for men and women at times of economic crisis and migration. For study participants who migrated with their families, the relocation was often organized around the labour-market position and opportunities of men. Those who migrated without their families emphasized their roles as providers for their families. However, only the women described how their absence was perceived as a failure to fulfil childcare responsibilities. The findings highlight the resilience of the notions of men as providers and women as primary parents within “the gender-equal Nordic region”, and indicate how these roles may facilitate or discourage the migration of men and women.     

Material Feminism and Epigenetics: A ‘Critical Window’ for Engagement?

ABSTRACT

While there is increasing interest in gender and sex issues in the medical field, most research in medicine can still be defined as operating with a binary of sex/gender. Epigenetics presents a marked challenge to such binaries as it operates across many tightly held boundaries, blurring the lines between the biological and social. Feminist scholars are paying attention to this new field and reconsidering relationships between the politics of matter, biologies and the social in new ways. The aim of this article is to investigate how theoretical insights from material feminism might enhance epigenetic research. Rather than repeat important critical arguments that point to the dangers of reductionism and biological essentialism, we make a case for examining the ways that material feminism can engage with epigenetic research by broadening ideas of reproduction (beyond in-utero effects) to relational and political views of gender and sex within a materialist framework. In conclusion, we suggest that a focus on material-discursive co-formations has the potential to contribute to an established body of feminist theory and science work; increasing awareness of the intra-action of gender and sex in relation to exposures, and increasing political leverage in supporting health-enhancing environments.     

Raymond Williams,Romanticism and Nature

This article discusses the important British social, literary and cultural critic, Raymond Williams, in his relation to Romanticism, seen as a broad movement of protest expressed in many cultural fields against the conditions of life in capitalist modernity. After exploring the Romantic dimension of Williams’s major works, including Culture and Society [Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York: Harper & Row], The Country and the City [Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press] and several works of the 1980s, the article focuses on his trajectory from the ecological point of view, in terms of his attempts to deal with cultural attitudes towards Nature on the one hand and threats to the environment on the other.