属灵的冲突来自属物的冲突--东南亚宗教冲突初探

宗教问题和民族问题将是21世纪困扰人类社会最复杂的问题,东南亚是一个多宗教的地区,婆罗门教、佛教、伊斯兰教、天主教都曾经在东南亚盛行一时,东南亚国家在独立以后,一些国家内部的宗教冲突一直连续不断,特别是20世纪60、70年代泰国南部地区穆斯林和佛教徒之间的冲突;70、80年代菲律宾南部的穆斯林和天主教徒之间的冲突和90年代末印度尼西亚马鲁古群岛穆斯林和基督教徒之间的冲突,导致社会的激烈动荡,带来了经济、文化等方面的重大损失.本文通过分析60年代到90年代在东南亚地区发生的不同宗教教徒之间的冲突,阐释产生冲突的历史渊源,并从制度的角度观察精神世界的冲突.笔者认为属于精神层面的宗教冲突在很大程度上来自一些制度层面的失误.因此,解决宗教冲突的关键并不是单纯地针对精神层面的因素,解决宗教冲突的外部原因比解决宗教的内部原因更为重要.     

A Divided Family: Race,the Commonwealth and Brexit

Abstract

The Commonwealth has long been conceptualised as ‘a family of nations’ in a reflection of the size, diversity and shared values of the organisation. As the discussion in post-Brexit Britain engages with questions of race and immigration, it is important to consider the role the Commonwealth played in the referendum campaigns. The combination of the Leave campaign’s promises to reinforce ties with ‘kith and kin’ in Commonwealth countries with the xenophobia that defined the campaign prompts the question what exactly does the Commonwealth mean in modern Britain? The EU referendum revealed two Commonwealths—one reflecting the backgrounds of Britain’s ethnic minorities, and one centred on the three majority white nations of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. This article will offer an investigation of these conflicting visions of the Commonwealth in the referendum, as well as the voting motivations of Commonwealth nationals and British citizens of Commonwealth descent.     

State Livelihood Planning and Legibility in Vietnam’s Northern Borderlands: The “Rightful Criticisms” of Local Officials

Macro-level policies frequently transform and reconfigure local livelihood options. While there is a small but growing body of ethnographic work regarding ethnic minority livelihoods in Vietnam’s mountainous borderlands, there is far less research examining the state decrees and policies implemented there and the opinions of state workers who have to apply them. This article starts to address this gap. First, we examine contemporary Vietnamese state legislation regarding upland livelihoods. We focus on the directions found in 82 livelihood-related state decrees, examining their scope and edicts while critiquing what they overlook regarding upland livelihood needs and approaches. Then, from in-depth interviews with state officials in Hà Giang Province, a mountainous upland region with a proportionately large ethnic minority population, we explore the opinions of those charged with the implementation of these decrees. Building on O’Brien’s earlier work on rightful resistance in China, we suggest that a form of “rightful criticism” has emerged among upland state officials, allowing us to reveal the contours of political power in Vietnam’s borderlands. Moreover, we draw attention to the lack of acknowledgement of ethnic diversity in these uplands within policy and official practice.     

Does religion count for religious parliamentary representation? Evidence from Early Day Motions

The article addresses one facet of the representation puzzle, namely substantive minority representation in the UK House of Commons. It examines whether a religious Jewish and Muslim minority background stimulates politicians from these backgrounds to address issues of concern for Jewish and Muslim minority groups in Early Day Motions (EDMs), and compares the effects from identity-based and institutional predictors. The study draws upon previous studies that used low-cost parliamentary activities to assess the impact of gender and ethnic minority identities on the representation of women and ethnic minorities, employing quantitative content analysis and time-series cross-sectional data analysis to examine the content of EDMs sponsored by members of parliament from Jewish and Muslim background (plus a control group) between 1997 and 2012. The analyses test for the effects of religious background and institutional predictors on the likelihood of referring to minority issues. They show that identity-based predictors such as a religious background are vastly inferior to institutional factors, including a legislative role, representing a constituency with a significant proportion of minority population, and the length of parliamentary service, in determining such references.     

Neighborhood Opportunity and Location Affordability for Low-Income Renter Families

Abstract

We use the Location Affordability Index (LAI) and the newly developed Child Opportunity Index (COI) to assess, for the first time, the tradeoff between neighborhood opportunity and housing/transportation affordability facing low-income renter families in the 100 largest metropolitan areas. In addition to describing the opportunity/affordability relationship, we explore the level of balance between neighborhoods’ relative cost burden and their corresponding opportunity levels to determine whether children of different racial/ethnic groups are more (or less) likely to experience cost-opportunity imbalance. Our multilevel analyses show that housing affordability is largely accounted for by the neighborhood opportunity structure within each metropolitan area. The metropolitan characteristics examined account for only a small proportion of the between-metro variance in the opportunity/affordability gradient for housing, presumably because the neighborhood opportunity structure already reflects metro area factors such as fragmentation and segregation. On the other hand, transportation affordability shows a weaker association with neighborhood opportunity. The COI/LAI association is much weaker for transportation than for housing, and a large part of the variation in the transportation gradient occurs at the metropolitan area level, not the neighborhood level. Sprawl is particularly associated with transportation affordability, with lower sprawl areas having lower transportation-cost burden. We discuss the implications of the empirical findings for defining affordability in housing assistance programs. We recommend that housing policy for low-income renter families adopt an expanded notion of affordability (housing, transportation, and opportunity) and explicitly consider equity (e.g. cost-opportunity imbalance) in the implementation of this expanded affordability definition.     

Family Shelter Entry and Re-entry During the Recession in Hennepin County: The Role of Race,Residential Location,and Family Earnings

This article examines the extent to which shelter entry and re-entry increased during the Great Recession (December 2007–December 2009) in Hennepin County, Minnesota. Among successive cohorts of families entering the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Black families were 23% more likely to enter shelter if they were in the 2008–2009 cohort and 28% more likely to enter shelter if they were in the 2010 cohort than if they entered SNAP in 2004–2005. In addition, families who left shelter in 2009 were 39% more likely and families leaving shelter in 2010 were 63% more likely to re-enter shelter than those leaving shelter in 2004–2006. Only a small part of the increases in shelter entry and shelter re-entry was explained by reductions in family earnings. This suggests that the increases in shelter entry and re-entry may have been caused by other factors, such as the decline in the availability of affordable housing.     

元以来历朝对藏传佛教宗教事务的法律调整及其历史启示——藏传佛教宗教事务的法律化研究之一

西藏自元朝正式纳入统一国家版图,至此,全国藏区成为统一国家的一部分。藏传佛教到元朝时已发展成为藏区的主流宗教信仰,并且影响着藏区各方面的事务。因此,对藏传佛教宗教事务的不断规制和调整就成为元以来历朝对藏政治策略的首要任务。鉴于这种重要性,元以来历朝中央政权对藏传佛教宗教事务进行了一系列的政策实施和立法调整,主要包括册封宗教首领、礼遇喇嘛,设置中央和地方专门管理机构,扶持建立地方政教合一政权,规范限定宗教首领世俗权力、规制大活佛转世的立法等方面。这些政策法规的实施不断强化了统一国家主权、保持了藏区社会稳定、促进了藏区经济相对发展。在当今复杂的国内外形势下,这些政策法规对国家如何管理藏传佛教宗教事务和藏传佛教如何谋求自身发展有着重要借鉴意义。     

Ethnicity as political cleavage: the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania

This article examines the role of ethnicity in the formation of political cleavage and is based on the analysis of the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania after the re-establishment of the independent state in 1990. It analyzes the political performance of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (EAPL), an ethnic-based “niche” political party that tends to keep a monopoly over the representation of interests of the Polish minority in Lithuania and collects a vast majority of the votes of citizens of Polish origin. The article considers how specific in comparison to the titular nation the interests of the Polish national minority are, and how different in comparison to the political agendas of other political parties the political agenda of the EAPL is.     

The U.S. Coptic Diaspora and the Limit of Polarization

ABSTRACT

After briefly presenting the main characteristics of the Coptic diaspora in the United States and of its attempts at gaining political clout since the 1990s, the article examines the impact of the election of President Obama and of the 2011 Egyptian revolution on the rhetoric and strategy of the main Coptic organizations in the United States. I also examine the changing relation between Copts in Egypt and Copts in the United States.     

Minimal democratic audit of Islamic and other identitarian regimes

Empirical evidence overwhelmingly shows that democracy in Muslim societies is poorly institutionalized. Many scholars of democratization studies critique that the methodology of Western institutions that audit democracy and freedoms worldwide employs normative metrics which are insensitive to cultural particularisms and thus biased. This paper presents a minimal framework for democratic audit of electoral Islamic regimes that while being normative, answers to this criticism. It is also shown to be in the self-interest of modernizing elites in such regimes. This framework is premised on the transference of the burden of legitimacy from ‘majority consent’ to ‘minority concern’ by basing itself on the substantive ‘political equality’ proviso of Dahl. This is achieved without constraining the democratic capacity of the majority. Structured as a guarantee of rights and two guarantees of justice in a system of fairness, the framework can be used for democratic audit of a much larger set of electoral regimes.