Malawi’s land problem and potential for rural conflict

Government agricultural policies which favour large-scale agriculture and rapid population growth on a limited land area have combined to create a situation of land poverty in many parts of Malawi, especially in the southern region of the country. The government’s response to land poverty has so far been focused on the creation of resettlement schemes. As such initiatives are expensive, they have tended to be piecemeal and benefit only a small fraction of land poor families. Frustrated land poor families have now resorted to land encroachment on privately held land. The emergence of movements dedicated to the restoration of estates to families with ancestral claims to the land marks a new stage in land relations which could have unwelcome consequences.     

Social Movements within Organisations: Occupy Parties in Italy and Turkey

This paper analyses a little-studied phenomenon: movements within parties. While parties and movements are often assumed to be separate entities, the borders between the two have proved to be more fluent. Parties frequently play a pivotal role in movement politics, and movements influence parties through the dual militancy of many of their members. The article presents two cases of Occupy movements taking place within major left-of-centre parties – the Italian PD and the Turkish CHP – and analyses the causes of discontent within the party and the choice of activists to voice this discontent rather than exit the party. It is argued that, beyond country specificities, shared factors include the perceived betrayal of social-democratic values, a lack of internal democracy, and electoral defeats. In both cases, activists’ choice to refer to Occupy in their opposition inside the party can be explained by the normative resonance of anti-austerity protest claims and forms within the party, as well as the instrumental exploitation of mass media attention to Occupy as a logo.     

影响我国全面建设小康社会的五大人口问题

人口问题是影响我国全面建设小康社会的一个具有全局性的重大问题。经济增长对其核心要素资本、劳动力、技术、人力资本、自然资源和产业结构变迁的需求 ,都受着人口问题的制约和影响。人口增长、老龄化、剩余劳动力、体能素质和人力资本等方面的问题是影响经济增长的五大人口问题。因此 ,必须致力于稳定低生育水平 ,提高出生人口素质 ,而最根本的则在于解放生产力 ,依靠经济的发展。     

城市化与农村流动人口犯罪问题原因分析

城市化战略对我国经济社会的发展具有重大作用。但是,在我国城市化加速发展的进程中,犯罪也随之而出现。目前我国犯罪的城市化趋势和农村流动人口的犯罪问题均与城市化进程中滞后或虚无的社会防卫机制和农村流动人口特有的文化心理有着重大关系。     

全面实现山西人口现代化的对策

人口现代化是社会主义现代化的前提和保证。全面实现山西人口现代化,必须搞好计划生育,稳定低生育水平,建立和完善利益导向机制,控制出生人口性别比;降低新生儿缺陷率,发展教育事业,提高人口素质;科学合理地加快城镇化建设;对贫困地区进行重点扶持。     

工人运动视野下邓中夏“纸老虎”观点探析

邓中夏的"纸老虎"观点,源于其认为资本家是"老虎"、工贼背叛革命是为虎作伥。在领导工人运动的实践中,他逐渐认识到资本家、军阀和帝国主义的本质,认为这些也是"纸老虎"。在省港大罢工中,邓中夏的"纸老虎"观点包含着认清英帝国主义的真面目、英帝国主义危机论和中华民族反英斗争的实践总结等丰富的内涵。其"纸老虎"观点随着中国工人运动而不断发展,反映了他寻求中国革命之路的理论和实践的发展历程。     

The transformation of Turkey’s Islamic media and its marriage with neo-liberalism

ABSTRACT

The Islamic press in Turkey started at the beginning of the 20^th century as a reaction to the secularist Young Turks’ revolution of 1908. In the Republican period, Sufi orders and other religious communities maintained internal communication via periodicals despite being interrupted by the 1960, 1971 and 1980 coup d’etats. In the 1990s, the first private Islamic TV channels were opened and soon were targeted by the Turkish Armed Forces through mainstream media in the run-up to the 1997 military memorandum. Only after Erdo?an came to power did the Islamic media find favourable conditions to flourish, lining up with Erdo?an’s AKP. However, there are still small dissident groups who struggle for an independent identity.     

A provocative event,media, and religious choice in post-Soviet Russia

This paper uses the famous events related to Pussy Riot as a natural experiment to examine the effect of alternative media on church membership. A difference-in-differences strategy is used to explore the effect in question. The hypothesis is that, given a lack of religious background in the majority of the population and strong temporary interest in religious issues promoted by a particular provocative event, mass media substantially affect religious choice. To check if this is the case, I compare the dynamics of religious choice of those exposed to alternative media reports on church topics and the rest of the population. As a proxy of familiarity with an alternative view, I use a dummy variable for using the Internet to obtain news. The main finding is that, during the experiment run over the year 2012, the growth of self-reported Orthodox believers was significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group. Exposure to alternative media coverage turned out to heavily affect religious choice.     

Radicalization of Russians in Ukraine: from ‘accidental’ diaspora to rebel movement

Abstract

The article examines different types of macropolitical identities in Ukraine and their interaction in establishing political order in the country. The authors argue that political institutional design was unfavourable to the Russian diaspora in eastern and southern regions. It hindered stable development of post-Soviet identity between Russians in the country. But during the Euromaidan protests, the Russians reacted to unpleasant political situation by exploring who they were and what social and political goals they had. Having been incipient for decades, the identity of the diaspora evolved in a soaring way within three or four months. The violent actions of the newly established government in Kiev radicalized the Russian diaspora. Diasporants started establishing alternative authorities in regions where government had no monopoly on the use of force. The involvement of Russia and international volunteers complexifies the situation in Donbass and the identity formation process in unrecognized republics also known as DNR and LNR.     

Answering the “International Call”: Contextualising Sydney Anti-Nuclear and Anti-War Activism in the 1960s

Although recent work on protest in the 1960s has placed organised opposition to the war in Vietnam in a transnational context, there is as yet no history of the Australian anti-nuclear campaigns of the early years of the decade. By examining anti-nuclear activism in 1961 and 1962 in relation to anti-war protest in 1965 and 1966, this paper argues that Sydney activists understood themselves as part of a transnational protest movement well before they began to agitate against military involvement in Vietnam. Lessons learnt while mounting solidarity protests with the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament informed the repertoire of practice that Australian anti-war activists used to mount their protests against the conflict in Indochina.