“Don’t Frack with Our Karoo”: Water,Landscape, and Congregational Song in Kroonvale,South Africa

There is a new environmental threat to the South African Karoo region in the form of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) for natural gas reserves buried deep underground. In this article, I use the issue of fracking in the Karoo to investigate the power of this landscape over its people and focus particularly on the question of how the cultural traditions of the Karoo would be affected. In contrast, W.J.T. Mitchell argues that landscape exerts a relatively weak power over its residents. My work serves as a critique of theories that see landscape as exerting only marginal influence over people. I argue that not only does landscape exert a palpable power over its inhabitants, but also that landscape affects the musical traditions of these residents and, ultimately, the configuration of the Karoo soundscape. To investigate this, I draw on my research of music in three churches with coloured people’s membership in the town of Graaff-Reinet and examine this tradition in the context of its surrounding landscape.     

This violence good,that violence bad: normative and state-centric discourses in British school textbooks

ABSTRACT

Under the statutory obligations of the Prevent strategy, British schools have greater responsibility to counter terrorism and extremism than ever before. However, research has yet to fully explore how schools tackle such a complex issue in the classroom. This research critically examines the discourses of terrorism and extremism found within British secondary school textbooks to deepen understanding of how terrorism and extremism are taught in schools. This article deploys a mode of critical discourse analysis to assess and critique the ways in which the political realms of terrorism and extremism are constructed. I argue that these discourses construct an ethical proximity between the text, the reader and the state, while rendering voiceless both the “terrorist” and the civilian living in states prioritised by British foreign policy. As such, this article argues that British school textbooks construct a normative perspective through which the violence of states is sanitised and normalised. It raises concern regarding the role of contemporary schooling in perpetuating a global politics of violent foreign policy.     

Non-normative political extremism: Reclaiming a concept’s analytical utility

ABSTRACT

Political extremism suffers from a definitional deficiency. This article proposes an analytical definition of the term, which avoids using extremism in a pejorative way. This definition also avoids exclusive focus on violence. This definition encourages the analyst to explicitly make the case for defining an action or an actor as extremist by comparing the action or actor to its political context. The article then explores several dimensions of an extremist political identity that can help observers understand extremist behavior and goals. It uses this conceptual framework to consider three examples of political extremism. Finally, the article concludes with some limitations and strengths of this definition of political extremism.     

Interpreting “Cumulative Extremism”: Six Proposals for Enhancing Conceptual Clarity

The concept of “cumulative extremism”—described in 2006 by Roger Eatwell as “the way in which one form of extremism can feed off and magnify other forms [of extremism],” has recently gained considerable traction in academic, policy, and practitioner discourses about extremism. Yet in spite of the growing usage of the term, particularly in analyses of the dynamic between extreme Islamist and extreme Right-Wing or anti-Muslim protest groups, there has to date been scant interrogation of the concept itself or of its application. In this article, we make a series of six proposals as to how we might enhance the conceptual clarity of these conversations about “cumulative extremism.” Our aim in doing so is to increase the likelihood that the concept might become a useful addition to the debates on extremism rather than becoming, to borrow a term from John Horgan—something of an “explanatory fiction”—an idea that appears to enable us to explain a great deal, but whose explanatory value is largely lost because there is insufficient scrutiny of the claims that it is used to make and whose liberal application becomes increasingly conducive to poor science.     

Resurgent religious terrorism: A study of some of the Lebanese Shi'a contemporary terrorism

Abstract

This study introduces the concept of geocultural immobility. A minority's geocultural immobility is identified as an imposed low geographic mobility within a nation with low cultural pluralism. It establishes the Lebanese Shi'a geocultural immobility, to which it attributes their religious resurgence. This Lebanese Shi'a religious resurgence is proven in this research to produce the zealots needed by religious terrorist organizations. This study also introduces and defines religious terrorism as violent acts performed by elements of religious organizations or sects, growing out of a commitment to communicate a divine message. It makes distinctions among religious terrorism, secular terrorism, and fighters for religious freedom, which are based on the actors' motives, affinities, and consciousness of the maliciousness of their acts. The primary and secondary data and the quasiexperiment in this research support its special hypotheses. They indicate a statistical correlation between eight Lebanese Shi ‘a cultural and religious attributes.     

Islamic reformation discourses: popular sovereignty and religious secularisation in Iran

Disputes over the outcome of the June 2009 presidential election in Iran rapidly developed into a contest about the legitimacy of the Islamic state. Far from being a dispute between religious and non-religious forces, the main protagonists in the conflict represented divergent articulations of state–religion relations within an Islamic context. In contrast to the authoritarian legitimisation of an Islamic state, the Islamic reformation discourse is based on secular-democratic articulations of state–religion relations. This article focuses on the ideas of four leading Iranian religious scholars who advocate a secular-democratic conceptualisation of state authority. Disputing the religious validity of divine sovereignty, they promote the principle of popular sovereignty based on Islamic sources and methods. This reformist conceptualisation is rooted in the notion that Islam and the secular-democratic state are complementary.     

Does faith limit immorality? The politics of religion and corruption

Critically considering scholarship relating religiosity to ethical behaviour, we contend that religion is systematically related to levels of corruption, and that the nature of this relationship is contingent on the presence of democratic institutions. In democracies, where political institutions are designed to inhibit corrupt conduct, the morality provided by religion is related to attenuated corruption. Conversely, in systems lacking democratic institutions, moral behaviour is not tantamount to staying away from corrupt ways. Accordingly, in non-democratic contexts, religion would not be associated with decreased corruption. Time-series cross-sectional analyses of aggregate data for 129 countries for 12 years, as well as individual level analyses of data from the World Values Surveys, strongly corroborate the predictions of our theory. The correlation of religion with reduced corruption is conditional on the extent to which political institutions are democratic.     

Radical distinctions: a comparative study of two jihadist speeches

Work on contemporary instances of “violent extremist” texts tends to see these primarily as more or less instrumental extensions of political (or political-religious) movements. As a result, there are few studies that devote close attention to individual examples of the texts themselves. In this article, we offer a detailed analysis of two jihadist speeches by the prominent ideologues Adam Gadahn and the late Anwar al-Awlaki. We argue that Al-Awlaki’s work ultimately succeeds where Gadahn’s seemingly fails because it is underpinned by a form of fundamentalism which, paradoxically, is inherently premised on the survival of possibilities for dialogue and polyglossia.     

非法持有宣扬恐怖主义、极端主义物品罪的规范限缩

持有行为入罪的正当性原理是行为对法益的抽象性危险。《刑法修正案(九)》设立的"宣扬恐怖主义、极端主义物品罪"不满足持有型犯罪的基本特征:"持有行为与实害结果的密接性",存在对法益保护原则稀释。究其原因,在于宏大反恐背景下对于安全价值的过度倾斜。罪状中规范性构成要件要素含义不明确以及本罪的"恐怖主义活动"属性,导致了实然上规制范围的非理性扩张和制裁程度的加重。基于法教义学的叙事逻辑,在我国现实的刑事立法下,理应对本罪的处罚边界进行规范性限缩,具体路径包括:构成要件要素的规范解释、"正当目的"的出罪机制以及"最后适用性"的潜在限制。     

First Steps Towards Hearts and Minds? USAID's Countering Violent Extremism Policies in Africa

The United States government has adopted new approaches to counter violent extremist organizations around the world. “Soft security” and development programs include focused educational training for groups vulnerable to terrorist recruitment, norm messaging through local radio programming, and job creation in rural communities. This article evaluates the effectiveness of one set of these multi-vectored, community-level programs through data from 200 respondents in two similar, neighboring towns in northern Mali, Africa. The data show that residents in Timbuktu who were exposed to the programming for up to five years displayed measurably altered civic behavior and listening patterns in comparison with their counterparts in the control town of Diré, which had no programming (controlling for potential covariates including age, ethnicity, and political and socioeconomic conditions). However, there was little measurable difference between the groups in terms of their cultural identities and attitudes towards the West. While this study is unable to definitively prove a causal connection between programming and behavioral outcomes, it nonetheless strongly suggests that the process of “winning hearts and minds” can be effective at certain levels but may require extended time and dedicated resources to generate higher-level results.