Perceptions of Racism and Depressive Symptoms in African American Adolescents: The Role of Perceived Academic and Social Control

Experiences with racism are a common occurrence for African American youth and may result in negative self perceptions relevant for the experience of depressive symptoms. This study examined the longitudinal association between perceptions of racism and depressive symptoms, and whether perceived academic or social control mediated this association, in a community epidemiologically-defined sample of urban African American adolescents (N = 500; 46.4% female). Structural equation modeling revealed that experiences with racism were associated with low perceived academic control, which in turn was associated with increased depressive symptoms. Findings suggest that experiences with racism can have long lasting effects for African American youth’s depressive symptoms, and highlight the detrimental effects of experiences with racism for perceptions of control in the academic domain. Implications for intervention are discussed.

Explaining variation and change in supervisory confidentiality in the European Union

Abstract

Some European Union member states’ financial regulators choose to make some of the data they routinely collect on individual banks publicly available. Others treat this data as confidential. What explains this difference? This paper considers the possible effects of crises, path-dependent legal institutions, and the design of deposit insurance schemes. At the national level, the paper focuses on contrasting German and Dutch cases. After the recent economic crisis, the Dutch released more data while the German authorities maintained strict confidentiality rules. The design of deposit insurance schemes provides a key reason why the level of secrecy varies, with the Dutch move from an ex post to an ex ante scheme where the government served as the ultimate backstop leading to questions about the accounts of individual banks while the German system favoured continued secrecy. The paper also describes the level of transparency at the EU level. Multilevel legal restrictions and bureaucratic capacity tilt EU banking union practices towards member states that treat financial supervisory data as confidential.     

Autocratic legitimation in Iran: Ali Khamenei’s discourse on regime “insiders” and “outsiders”

The article analyses Ali Khamenei’s discourse on insiders and outsiders in the Islamic Republic of Iran, arguing that it shows the leader of an electoral revolutionary regime striving to counter elite fragmentation and growing democratic demands. It studies identity demarcation as a tool of autocratic legitimation. In a political system where the possibility to access political positions depends on supporting a belief-system, all cadres share a basic identity, which rulers can exploit to draw boundaries between “us” and “them”. The analysis reveals how Iran’s leader capitalizes on the existence of an insider-outsider divide to promote ideas about an imagined “we” of the regime. The “we” is portrayed as an Islamic we, fully committed to his rule. The article maintains that Khamenei developed this discourse in response to the challenge of the Iranian reform movement. It analyses, first, the context in which the discourse emerged and, second, the discursive strategy itself, to substantiate the claim. It concludes that the discourse had two essential aims in the containment (1997–2003) and crushing (2009–2010) of the pro-democracy reformist and Green movements: to de-legitimate Khamenei’s opponents through othering and to legitimate the counter-mobilization of repressive agents.     

The Czech Islamophobic movement: beyond ‘populism’?

ABSTRACT

Sla?álek and Svobodová’s paper focuses on the ideology of the Czech Islamophobic movement as seen during the 2015–16 migration crisis. In their analysis of interviews with demonstrators and speeches by leaders of the movement, they discuss first how the movement imagined its enemies, and then describe its vision of positive core values. They conclude that the movement’s key ideological features are: an emphasis on social and civilizational decline (declinism); a return to an assumed naturalness in economic and gender relationships (naturalization); and the open evocation of violence and severity (brutalization). In terms of Rogers Brubacker’s distinction between xenophobic ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe, and the xenophobic defence of liberal values in the West, Sla?álek and Svobodová find that the Czech case fits the allegedly western pattern better than the eastern one, which may cast doubt on the whole essentialization of distinctions between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ populisms.     

NGO networks in Central Asia and global civil society: potentials and limitations

Based on research carried out by INTRAC (International NGO Training & Research Centre) in 2006–2007 in four countries of Central Asia for Oxfam–Novib, the article investigates NGO networks and their international links in the context of current theory on civil society and global civil society. Three case studies of NGOs working in service delivery, community development and free media are examined to show the diversity of aims and the potential and challenges of networking in the region. Civil society advocacy at national and international levels is analysed with a fourth case study on the campaign conducted in Kyrgyzstan against joining the World Bank's Highly Indebted Poor Countries programme. This example shows a more radical, alternative mode of civil society activism. The article emphasizes the importance of national- and regional-level networking and poses the question of whether NGOs in Central Asia can shift from their current positions on the periphery of global movements and debates.     

多重三边关系影响下的中亚地区

作者通过总结和分析中亚的态势,提出在中亚存在的多重三边关系.首先,作为中亚区域的核心三角关系:例如在上海合作组织框架下的中亚国家、俄罗斯、中国三边关系; 其次,跨欧亚区域的三边关系,包括俄罗斯、欧洲、中亚国家,其中包含俄罗斯、中国、印度等国家; 第三,全球层面的三边关系,例如:俄罗斯、美国、中国的关系,俄罗斯、欧洲、美国的关系.从长远来看,中亚地区内部的多元化以及外部的多样化共同深刻地影响这个区域的发展.作为中亚外部环境的基本形式,三边关系应以尊重国家基本安全利益为目标,并考虑在不可避免的合作与竞争的外部行为过程中采用共同的价值标准.     

俄罗斯、中国及中亚的权力制衡:融合还是竞争?

近年来,中亚地缘政治结构出现重大变化,传统地缘关系被打破,新的地缘政治格局尚未完全形成.中国、俄罗斯由于自身实力的变化,以及各自在中亚目标存在异同,双方在中亚形成既融合又竞争的态势,而作为中俄在中亚共同的平台――上海合作组织,同样也面临着复杂的发展前景.随着时间的推移,不可确定因素的增加,中亚可能成为更复杂的"舞台".     

中亚地区的俄中关系:合作还是竞争?

由于各种原因,中俄对中亚的政策有很大的不同,但双方应考虑到彼此动机的差异.鉴于这两个大国都有志于中亚的稳定,而中亚的稳定又有赖于双方旨在刺激中亚经济发展和消除中亚贫困的共同努力,因此中俄有可能、也有必要协调双方在中亚的利益.上海合作组织也能在一定程度上作为协调中俄之间、以及中俄与中亚各国间利益关系的体制框架.     

‘I Want to Wear It’: Fashioning Black Feminism in Mahogany (1975)

ABSTRACT

In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiority. I want to show how Mahogany’s representation of fashion undermines the historically entrenched bias against colourful, highly adorned clothing while also revealing how this bias has played a subtle but significant role in the racism and sexism black women have encountered, further (but not finally) impeding them from the forms of recognition the category of femininity offers. Mahogany represents those impediments and repeats the sexual and racial commodification underlying them, but also resists them (albeit quite subtly) through the film’s loving display of fashion and its attention to the work of designing and making clothes. Mahogany tells a story of bright sartorial resistance that can be understood as an articulation of black feminist desires for women of colour to be able to compose the images through which their bodies are perceived.     

Racial animosity and political party partisanship in South Africa: the case of the African National Congress and the Black African majority

As it is in many countries, racial rhetoric is a feature of South African national government elections. The use of such rhetoric provokes the question, how much is political party support in the country driven by interracial animosities? Using the nationally representative public opinion dataset, the South African Social Attitudes Survey, this article looks at party closeness to the African National Congress (ANC) amongst the black African population. The ANC is one of the oldest and most powerful political parties on the African continent and currently dominates South Africa’s parliamentary government. Constructing four indexes of racial attitudes and behaviours, the article investigates whether partisanship with the ruling party can be predicted by racial animosity. The period under investigation is 2010–2014. Bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques are employed to test the relationship between ANC partisanship and racial animosity. The results of this investigation show that racial enmity in the country is troublingly widespread. Public opinion analysis, however, found no correlation between racial acrimony and ANC partisanship. Other factors are driving black African identification with the country’s ruling party. The implications of these results for the study for political party support in South Africa are discussed and future avenues of research presented.