DON'T MENTION THE (AFGHAN) WAR: BRITAIN'S CURIOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH PAKISTAN

The article is based on Professor Lieven's recent book, Pakistan: a hard case. He starts by contrasting British and American attitudes, emphasising that Pakistan is far more important to Britain than Afghanistan as a result of the sheer size of the diaspora. And British officials and soldiers spent decades dealing with the North-West Frontier. They would not have been surprised by the shifting loyalties of the tribes, which are simply a fact of life. But the basic point of the book is to explain how the Pakistani system works. Pakistan is a troubled, but not a failing state. It is tougher than we think. But the very reasons for its toughness inhibit change. The military are over-powerful and the tax system is grossly inadequate. Cooperation over the terrorist threat to the West is good, but Afghanistan is another story. Pakistan is making its calculation on the basis of a western withdrawal, which would be welcomed by the average Pakistani. At some point the West will need to cut a deal with the Taliban and only Pakistan can get them to the table.     

“Do Unstructured Routines Modify the Link Between Social-Psychological Strain and Adolescent Offending?”

In this article, based on Agnew’s General Strain Theory (GST), main as well as interactive effects of social-psychological strain and unstructured routines in the explanation of petty crime and serious delinquency are studied in a general adolescent population. Data signify that family and school strain does relate to adolescent offending. However, chances of these types of strain leading to adolescent offending are highest amongst youth who do not engage in unstructured routines, which indicates that individual- and situational-based causes of offending have a great potential of being studied together. Strain resulting from a beloved person getting ill or passing away, on the other hand, only relates to adolescent offending through unstructured routines. Finally, it was found that strain mechanisms are more important in the explanation of serious delinquency than petty crime. Implications for further research as well as for the future of GST are discussed.     

Wolfish Wilsonians: Existential Dilemmas of the Liberal Internationalists

There are limits on America's ability to bring democracy to deeply divided societies with little or no history of democracy, and many American liberal internationalists have succumbed to intellectual and moral paralysis about America's right and ability to spread its system in the rest of the world. The principles of law-governed freedom are in fact important and nearly eternal principles, but they are best spread by America's setting the example as a peaceful democracy. The messianic approach to democracy-promotion adopted by the Bush administration and its liberal allies, rooted in faith in the “American creed” and an emerging “global civil society,” can only damage both American power and the cause of democratizing the world. The American approach to democratization needs instead to be governed by rigor of the intellect and generosity of spirit.     

Exploring the Relationship Between Offending and Victimization: What is the Role of Risky Lifestyles and Low Self-Control? A Test in Two Urban Samples

The present study explores the strength of the relationship between offending and victimization among young adolescents. We focus especially on the role background characteristics such as gender, immigrant background and family structure and causal mechanisms such as risky lifestyles and low self-control as many scholars have argued that the correlation between offending and victimization may be caused by common characteristics of offenders and victims. The article build upon two large-scale self-reported delinquency studies in Sint-Niklaas (Belgium) and Halmstad (Sweden). The correlation between offending and victimization is strong, even when controlling for demographics, lifestyles and low self-control. However, the lifestyle and low self-control model predicts offending better than victimization and the independent effect of offending on victimization is larger than the independent effect of victimization of offending. The same pattern is found in both samples, suggesting the stability of findings. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Differential Online Exposure to Extremist Content and Political Violence: Testing the Relative Strength of Social Learning and Competing Perspectives

The present study applies Social Learning (Differential Association) Theory to the explanation of political violence, focusing on exposure to extremist content through new social media (NSM) and controlling for key variables derived from rival theories. Data are gathered using (a) a paper-and-pencil study among high school students, and (b) a web survey targeting youths between 16 and 24 years old. A total of 6020 respondents form the dataset. Binary logistic regression is used to analyze the data. Results show that even when controlling for background variables, strain variables, personality characteristics, moral values, and peer influences, the statistical association between measures of extremism through NSM (ENSM) and self-reported political violence remains significant and fairly constant. The most persistent effects are found for those measures where individuals actively seek out extremist content on the Internet, as opposed to passive and accidental encounters using NSM. Furthermore, offline differential associations with racist and delinquent peers are also strongly and directly related to self-reported political violence, as are some mechanisms from rival perspectives. This indicates that political violence can only partially be explained by social learning and suggests that the impact of ENSM is mediated by real-world associations and that the offline world has to be taken into account.     

Party system(s) and electoral behaviour in Belgium: From stability to balkanisation

Belgium has one of the most fragmented party systems of any modern democracy. This article asks the following questions: is party fragmentation linked to the importance of the ethno-regionalist vote or to the rules of the electoral system? Has party fragmentation also produced centrifugal or polarised multipartyism (between the regions, but also within Flanders, given the spectacular rise of the Vlaams Blok)? What explains the difference in party fragmentation between Flanders and Wallonia? What are the dimensions of party competition in each community and what are the socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics of the different electorates? Which steps have the political elites taken to cope with the increasing fragmentation of the party landscape and growing voter volatility? To what extent has the increasing divergence between the regional party systems led to the building of asymmetrical coalitions at the federal and regional levels of government? The splitting of the Belgian party system into two, albeit still fragmented, party systems has further complicated the problems of coordination within a polarised, multi-cleavage and multilevel system that seriously undermines the stability of the entire political system.