Abstract. The article focuses on the cycle of protest that developed in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some hypotheses on the evolution of the repertoires of action are tested with the aim of explaining the emergence of political violence during a cycle of protest. Newspaper-based data are presented on the proportional presence of violent forms of action, on the social and ideological groups involved in political violence, and on the grievances expressed during violent protests. The widespread political violence that developed in Italy in the early 1970s is explained as an internally differentiated strategic adaptation within the social movement sector, during a cycle of protests that was disorderly but far from violent. 相似文献
Institutional weaknesses in the criminal justice system (limited court capacity and the increasingly sophisticated armament of splintering drug trafficking organizations) limit the effectivity of Mexican states to deter organized crime style homicide. Court capacity, expressed by increasing sentencing rates in states where the oral court system was institutionalized, remains insufficient against the post-2006 organized crime related homicide epidemic. The illegal arms market, combined with long-standing deficits in firepower between organized crime and municipal police forces, limit the state’s capacity to alter the arms balance toward policing forces. Taken together, limited court capacity and the tactical imbalance of weapons held by drug trafficking organizations create a vicious cycle which continually perpetuates state ineffectiveness to deter and punish organized crime style homicide.
At its dawn, democracy was a social movement, but little attention has been given to social movements in recent (mainly American) theorizations of democratization.1 The reason for this seems to be the division of labour in the social sciences as well as the bad press that movements gained between the two world wars and in the cold war years. As a result, most theorists have emphasized the role of elites in transitional cycles and largely ignored the role of social movements. Since the 1960s, advances in social movement theory and research both in Europe and North America allow a fresh look at the role of movements in transitional cycles. In this article, three aspects coming from this tradition ‐ the structure of political opportunity, the relations of elites and citizens, and the problem of organization ‐ are applied to three episodes of democratization: the failed transition to democracy in Italy after the First World War, the successful transition in Spain in the mid‐1970s and the incomplete transition in East‐Central Europe since 1989. The article closes with a brief reflection on the role of learning from past transitions in democratization cycles. 相似文献
From mid‐1999 to mid‐2001, the authors carried out a qualitative study in rural Vietnam to explore relationships between gender equity and reproductive health. One of the study's objectives was to develop culturally appropriate indicators of women's empowerment, specific to the Vietnamese context. This paper describes the process of developing, testing, and refining the empowerment indicators, presents some of the findings, and discusses the methodological challenges that need to be addressed. The paper concludes by recommending a set of Vietnamspecific domains for assessing women's empowerment in the socio‐economic sphere as well as in reproductive health. 相似文献