Social representations of risk in Cameroon: Influence of sociopolitical and cultural context

The threat of sociopolitical instability is a perennial subject of political debate in Cameroon, even though the country’s stability has never really been challenged since independence. Given this omnipresent discussion on the need to preserve social cohesion, the aim of the present study was to analyze social representations of risk. Two studies were carried out among two samples (N1 = 31 and N2 = 156) of Cameroonians with higher education diplomas. Data collected by means of free association and characterization questionnaires were subjected to hierarchical, similarity and Q-sort analyses. These revealed that governance failures are regarded as factors that might undermine social cohesion. Comparative analysis of the risk representations of the country’s different ethnic groups revealed several differences. Previous research had emphasized the importance of proximity to the object in the construction of a social representation, and this was also evident in the present study, as social representations of risk for both the whole sample and the different ethnic groups were structured around specific threats or ills that undermine Cameroonian society.

Groundwater Resources Assessment for Sustainable Development in South Sudan

The economic activities of South Sudan (East-Central Africa) are predominantly agricultural. However, food insecurity due to low agricultural production, connected with weather conditions and lack of water infrastructure and knowledge, is a huge problem. This study reports the results of a qualitative and quantitative investigation of underground and surface water in the area of Gumbo (east of Juba town) that aims to assure sustainable water management, reducing diseases and mortality and guaranteeing access to irrigation and drinking water. The results of the study demonstrate the peculiarity of surface and groundwater and the critical aspects to take into account for the water use, particularly due to the exceeding of limits suggested by the WHO and national regulation. The outcomes provide a contribution to the scientific overview on lithostratigraphic, hydrochemical and hydrogeological setting of a less-studied area, characterized by sociopolitical instability and water scarcity. This represents a first step for the improvement of water knowledge and management, for sustainable economic development and for social progress in this African region.

Identification of Measurement Variables for Understanding Vulnerability to Education Inequality in Developing Countries: A Conceptual Article

The article reviews the concept of vulnerability and develops a framework for vulnerability to education inequality (VEI). It further reviews the concept of education inequality and develops a framework for the cumulative measuring instruments of inequality of education. The schooling vulnerability processes are developed to understand the migration of susceptible children in susceptible compartment to tragedy compartment and later migrate to resilience compartment. For statistical testing, the article develops tangible hypotheses arising from the VEI framework. These theoretical hypotheses could serve as valuable guidelines for predicting the degree of susceptibility that triggers the prevalence of inequality of education among the school-age children. The findings show that the VEI framework contains various stimuli, arranged in cubicles, attributable to within-education (WE), socioeconomic status (SES), and school physical environmental (SPE) stimulus. Consequently, a VEI structural model (VEISM) is proposed, representing a structural equation framework that captures the latent and manifest indicators of the VEI cubicles. Because intervention was built into the VEI framework, the mediation and moderation effects are captured in the VEISM for examination. Nevertheless, further research should be concentrated on macroeconomic indicators, for example, sociopolitical instability, war and economic upturn risks that could trigger a school-age child been vulnerable to education inequality. Finally, susceptibility → tragedy → resilience discovered in the article, with epidemiological properties, requiring a further mathematical and epidemiological modeling.

Revisiting China’s Social Volcano: Attitudes toward Inequality and Political Trust in China

Existing literature suggests that despite rising inequality in China, Chinese people tend to tolerate inequality, so it would be unlikely that rising inequality would cause sociopolitical instability. Few studies, however, have systematically explained Chinese people’s attitudes toward inequality, analyzed attitudinal changes over time, or examined the relationship between such attitudes and political trust. The author’s analysis of national surveys in 2004, 2009, and 2014 yields three findings. First, critical attitudes toward inequality consistently correlate with a structural understanding of inequality and skepticism of procedural or institutional justice. Second, Chinese people’s attitudes toward inequality changed little between 2004 and 2009, but between 2009 and 2014, there was increasing criticality of both inequality and its seeming disjuncture with China’s socialist principles. Third, people who are discontent with income inequality in China are more likely than others to distrust the local government, and those who draw on socialism to critique inequality are also more likely to distrust the central and local governments. Together, these findings suggest rising inequality could have political ramifications.

The Effectiveness of Global Systems for Monitoring Sociopolitical Instability: A Systematic Analysis

The article provides a systematic review of the main, existing methodologies of the global monitoring and forecasting of socio-political destabilization. A systematic analysis of the correlation between the forecasts of destabilization generated by these systems and the actual levels of destabilization observed in the respective countries has been carried out. The analysis shows that the forecast, based on the assumption that the level of destabilization in each country in the following year will be proportional to the actual level of destabilization of the current year, turns out, in all cases, to be more predictive than the forecasts made on the basis of any of the considered indices of the risk of destabilization (at least for all cases when the relevant forecasts were published). At the same time, it is shown that, before the Arab Spring, the indices we considered still performed some useful function, allowing us to identify not so much countries with a high risk of destabilization as those countries with particularly low risks of this kind. However, in 2010–2011, all destabilization risk indices had a very serious failure. High index values not only turned out to be not-very-good predictors of a high degree of the actual destabilization in 2011, but also low index values turned out to be bad predictors of a low degree of actual destabilization. As a result, all destabilization risk indices in 2010/2011 showed extremely low statistically-insignificant correlations between the expected and observed levels of destabilization, which can be attributed to the anomalous wave of 2011 launched by the events of the Arab Spring. As we have shown in several ways, the predictive ability of indices had been restored to some extent, again becoming statistically significant after 2011, but it has not returned to the level observed before the Arab Spring. This confirms the conclusions of our previous work that the Arab Spring in 2011 acted as a trigger for the global phase transition, resulting in the World System changing into a qualitatively new state in which we observe some new patterns that were not taken into account by the systems developed before the Arab Spring. Thus, the existing systems of forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization have lost the last “competitive advantages” over the method of simple extrapolation. There are grounds to believe that the pandemic of the coronavirus infection COVID-19 may lead to an additional decrease in the prognostic ability of the indices we have examined. All this, of course, suggests the need to develop a new generation of systems for forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization.

Barcelona’s peer-to-peer tourist accommodation market in turbulent times

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of sociopolitical instability on the peer-to-peer market for tourist accommodation. Design/methodology/approach The author studies for the case of Barcelona the impacts of the events occurring in the past months of 2017, which consisted of a terrorist attack and the calling for a referendum on the independence of Catalonia, by fitting a fixed effects regression model to a data panel of Airbnb listings, using New York and Paris as a control group. Findings The results show that, after controlling for individual and time effects, listing reviews and revenues fall in the last quarter of 2017 and do not recover until the second quarter of the next year, in spite of a notable effort to decrease prices in the same period. They also indicate that peer-to-peer hosts react fast to demand shocks and as those from traditional markets. Originality/value This is the first study to evaluate the impact of terrorism or political uncertainty in the peer-to-peer market and the first to evaluate their combined effect in any market.

Relative Deprivation as a Factor of Sociopolitical Destabilization: Toward a Quantitative Comparative Analysis of the Arab Spring Events

The article analyzes relative deprivation as a possible factor of sociopolitical instability during the Arab Spring events using the methods of correlation and multiple regression analysis. In this case, relative deprivation is operationalized in two ways: (a) through the indicator of subjective feeling of happiness on the eve of the events of the Arab Spring, and (b) through the scale of decrease of the subjective feeling of happiness on the eve of the events of Arab Spring. It is shown that the change in the level of subjective feeling of happiness between 2009 and 2010 is a powerful, statistically significant predictor of the level of destabilization in Arab countries in 2011. The next most powerful predictor is the mean value of the subjective feeling of happiness in the corresponding country for 2010. At the same time, the fundamental economic indicators we tested, while controlling for them, have turned out to be extremely weak and at the same time statistically insignificant predictors of the level of sociopolitical instability in the Arab countries in 2011.

Emerging media, political protests, and government repression in autocracies and democracies from 1995 to 2012

This study empirically analyzed the relationships between emerging media as tools in fomenting anti-government protest as well as government repression of political opposition. Using a dataset of 162 democratic and autocratic countries over 18 years, potential differences between these phenomena were examined. The results of a series of analytic models suggest that higher levels of internet and mobile phones are positively associated with more instances of both political protests and political repression, which have increased dramatically in recent years. The differences between democratic and autocratic countries' emerging media and sociopolitical instability trends are explored and discussed.

Conclusion

This book has studied the relationship between sociopolitical instability and conviction by focusing on how secular and religious collective ideas fared in conditions of existential uncertainty in Kokjangak. It has also examined the precarious attempts of “secularists” to position themselves between fading Soviet atheism and assertions of new forms of religiosity and how spiritual practitioners who were sometimes labeled “shamans” operated in unpredictable spiritual fields. This conclusion considers the pulsation and dynamics of conviction and introduces a conceptual framework to show how collective ideas gain and lose force. The term “pulsation” emphasizes impermanence and fluctuation as key characteristics of ideational power. Three aspects of pulsation are discussed involving hope, tension, and effervescence: voicing, responding, and reverberating, respectively.