Christian-Muslim Relations in the Shadow of Conflict

Author(s):  
Alexandra Scacco ◽  
Shana S. Warren

In February 2000, large-scale Christian-Muslim riots shook the Nigerian city of Kaduna, killing thousands of people and displacing tens of thousands more. Drawing on original survey data from a random sample of three hundred young men living in particularly conflict-prone neighborhoods in Kaduna, the chapter analyzes patterns of Christian-Muslim relations fifteen years after the February 2000 crisis. The author argues that local exposure to deadly intergroup violence continues to have profoundly negative effects on intergroup relations nearly two decades later. Kaduna residents on either side of the religious divide continue to exhibit high levels of mistrust and prejudice against members of the religious out-group, and demonstrate substantial out-group discrimination in behavioral games with real material stakes. The chapter highlights three interrelated consequences of exposure to large-scale episodes of intercommunal violence, each of which complicates post-conflict reconciliation: (1) the erosion of intergroup trust, (2) the tendency that the violence increases local residential segregation along communal lines, and (3) lasting psychological effects. The chapter offers micro-level evidence on each of these consequences from the Nigerian context, and cautions against expectations that post-conflict communities should quickly bounce back from large-scale interreligious violence.

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Bardhyl Dobra ◽  
Michiel S de Vries

AbstractRegarding the effectiveness of privatization, two schools of thought are distinguished: a school in favor of privatization in general and a school that judges the success of privatization to be dependent on the institutional context. This article discusses the arguments of both schools and presents a case study on the privatization processes that did take place in Kosovo. The Kosovo case is a critical case as Kosovo was a post-conflict country with a deplorable institutional setting at the time it initiated the privatization processes. If privatization was successful anyway, this would make for a strong argument in favor of privatization in general.The outcomes of the case study show, however, many unintended and negative effects of privatization in the Kosovo context. The conclusion, therefore, disputes the claim that privatization is beneficial in general, irrespective of the institutional setting. Instead, the article makes a plea for creating a favorable institutional setting before starting far-reaching transformations through large-scale privatization.The issues arising from this article are important for policy-makers and international missions considering implementing similar programs to other post-conflict countries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Amjad Mohamed-Saleem

With nearly three million Sri Lankans living overseas, across the world, there is a significant role that can be played by this constituency in post-conflict reconciliation.  This paper will highlight the lessons learnt from a process facilitated by International Alert (IA) and led by the author, working to engage proactively with the diaspora on post-conflict reconciliation in Sri Lanka.  The paper shows that for any sustainable impact, it is also critical that opportunities are provided to diaspora members representing the different communities of the country to interact and develop horizontal relations, whilst also ensuring positive vertical relations with the state. The foundation of such effective engagement strategies is trust-building. Instilling trust and gaining confidence involves the integration of the diaspora into the national framework for development and reconciliation. This will allow them to share their human, social and cultural capital, as well as to foster economic growth by bridging their countries of residence and origin.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
L. V. Tomin

The article is devoted to the analysis of the structure, the peculiarities of functioning and the socio-economic and political effects of the «platform capitalism». The basis of this model is the network effects produced by the integrated information and communication infrastructure, which contribute to the monopolization and the constant expansion of platform companies into new areas. The principle of functioning of this infrastructure is the continuous collection and further monetization of data extracted from the interactions of individuals among themselves or with one of the elements of a digitalized economy or government structures. Such an infrastructure — forms a potential threat of strengthening state and corporate control over citizens. In addition, the activities of platform companies produce negative effects on the labor market, reinforcing the process of precarization of employment. The integrated information and communication infrastructure of platform companies form a system of a kind of «digital Taylorism», which deprives the employee of autonomy and privacy in the workplace. The influence of digitalization, subjected to the technocratic logic of the neoliberal model of governance in democratic countries, strengthens the de-politicization of relations between the citizen and the state and further changes the balance of power between labor and capital in favor of the latter. Large-scale protests of the last years against the companies of “capitalism of platforms” demonstrated the structural contradictions of this model and formed new forms of organization and actions of grassroots workers of the “digital economy”.


1987 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Henk L. F. Saeijs

The Delta Project is in its final stage. In 1974 it was subjected to political reconsideration, but it is scheduled now for completion in 1987. The final touches are being put to the storm-surge barrier and two compartment dams that divide the Oosterschelde into three areas: one tidal, one with reduced tide, and one a freshwater lake. Compartmentalization will result in 13% of channels, 45% of intertidal flats and 59% of salt marshes being lost. There is a net gain of 7% of shallow-water areas. Human interventions with large scale impacts are not new in the Oosterschelde but the large scale and short time in which these interventions are taking place are, as is the creation of a controlled tidal system. This article focusses on the area with reduced tide and compares resent day and expected characteristics. In this reduced tidal part salt marshes will extend by 30–70%; intertidal flats will erode to a lower level and at their edges, and the area of shallow water will increase by 47%. Biomass production on the intertidal flats will decrease, with consequences for crustaceans, fishes and birds. The maximum number of waders counted on one day and the number of ‘bird-days' will decrease drastically, with negative effects for the wader populations of western Europe. The net area with a hard substratum in the reduced tidal part has more than doubled. Channels will become shallower. Detritus import will not change significantly. Stratification and oxygen depletion will be rare and local. The operation of the storm-surge barrier and the closure strategy chosen are very important for the ecosystem. Two optional closure strategies can be followed without any additional environmental consequences. It was essential to determine a clearly defined plan of action for the whole area, and to make land-use choices from the outset. How this was done is briefly described.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oskar Englund ◽  
Pål Börjesson ◽  
Blas Mola-Yudego ◽  
Göran Berndes ◽  
Ioannis Dimitriou ◽  
...  

AbstractWithin the scope of the new Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, in coherence with other EU policies, new incentives are developed for farmers to deploy practices that are beneficial for climate, water, soil, air, and biodiversity. Such practices include establishment of multifunctional biomass production systems, designed to reduce environmental impacts while providing biomass for food, feed, bioenergy, and other biobased products. Here, we model three scenarios of large-scale deployment for two such systems, riparian buffers and windbreaks, across over 81,000 landscapes in Europe, and quantify the corresponding areas, biomass output, and environmental benefits. The results show that these systems can effectively reduce nitrogen emissions to water and soil loss by wind erosion, while simultaneously providing substantial environmental co-benefits, having limited negative effects on current agricultural production. This kind of beneficial land-use change using strategic perennialization is important for meeting environmental objectives while advancing towards a sustainable bioeconomy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-237
Author(s):  
Priya Lall ◽  
Rumana Saifi ◽  
Diva Baggio ◽  
Samantha Fitzsimmons Schoenberger ◽  
Martin Choo ◽  
...  

Malaysia currently has an estimated hepatitis C virus (HCV) prevalence of 1.3% with an infected population of 384,000. Fishermen in Malaysia are at risk of HCV infection due to injection drug use and disproportionately high rates of incarceration. This study used quantitative data from Project WAVES, a large-scale mixed methods project charting environmental drivers of risk-taking behaviors among a respondent-driven sample of 406 fishermen in Malaysia. Over a quarter of participants (27.9%) reported injecting drugs in the past month; 49.8% of the sample tested positive for HCV. Respondents who had previously been arrested displayed increased odds of being HCV-positive (adjusted odds ratio = 4.79, confidence Interval = 2.46-9.35). Participants who reported being in lock-up displayed close to 6-fold odds of being HCV-infected (adjusted odds ratio = 5.49, confidence interval = 2.77-10.90, P < .001). These findings underscore the need for policies and structural interventions targeting the negative effects of aggressive incarceration contributing to the burden of HCV among high-risk communities.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine Natalya Clark

AbstractMuch of the literature on transitional justice suffers from a critical impact gap, which scholars are only now beginning to address. One particular manifestation of this aforementioned gap, and one which forms the particular focus of this article, is the frequently-cited yet empirically under-researched claim that "truth" fosters post-conflict reconciliation. Theoretically and empirically critiquing this argument, this article both questions the comprehensiveness of truth established through criminal trials and truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) and underscores the often overlooked problem of denial, thus raising fundamental questions about the reputed healing properties of truth in such contexts. Advocating the case for evidence-based transitional justice, it reflects upon empirical research on South Africa's TRC and the author's own work on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Kandel

ABSTRACTRising competition and conflict over land in rural sub-Saharan Africa continues to attract the attention of researchers. Recent work has especially focused on land governance, post-conflict restructuring of tenure relations, and large-scale land acquisitions. A less researched topic as of late, though one deserving of greater consideration, pertains to how social differentiation on the local-level shapes relations to land, and how these processes are rooted in specific historical developments. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Teso sub-region of eastern Uganda, this paper analyses three specific land conflicts and situates them within a broad historical trajectory. I show how each dispute illuminates changes in class relations in Teso since the early 1990s. I argue that this current period of socioeconomic transformation, which includes the formation of a more clearly defined sub-regional middle class and elite, constitutes the most prominent period of social differentiation in Teso since the early 20th century.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Alonso Arechar ◽  
David Gertler Rand

We investigate whether experience playing the Dictator Game (DG) affects prosociality by aggregating data from 37 experiments run on Amazon Mechanical Turk over a six-year period. While prior evidence has shown a correlation between experience on Amazon Mechanical Turk and selfishness, it is unclear to what extent this is the result of selection versus learning. Examining a total of 27,266 decisions made by 17,791 unique individuals, our data shows evidence of significant negative effects of both selection and learning. First, people who participated in a greater total number of our experiments were more selfish, even in their first game – indicating that people who are more likely to select into our experiments are more selfish. Second, a given individual tends to transfer less money over successive experiments – indicating that experience with the DG leads to greater selfishness. These results provide clear evidence of learning even in this non-strategic social setting.


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