City visioning and the turn to community:The case of Derry/Londonderry

In the 1980s, urban re-imaging and place marketing were vital elements in the strategies of post-industrial cities aiming to redefine their role, make themselves more competitive and attract global investment and tourists. By the early 1990s, the questionable effects of trickle-down economics on deprived housing estates and the rediscovery of the 'community' as a social partner shifted both the substance and process of vision exercises. This paper examines the experience of building an input into a city vision that aimed to address social and ethno-religious segregation in Derry/Londonderry. Designing a consensus statement for a city that cannot agree its name, was wrecked by bloody violence and has its hinterland fractured by a contested international border, is a difficult and delicate process. The city had a population of 105 800 people in 1998, but is divided by the river Foyle between the mainly Catholic Cityside (to the north and west) and the mainly Protestant Waterside (to the south and east). The analysis connects with the literature on urban policy that emphasises the importance of argumentation and democratic debate in strategic planning and local regeneration (Forester, 1989; Healey, 1996). The paper concludes by arguing that strategies for 'listening' would help to shape a vision that could mobilise community interests around some common urban regional issues and help to promote social and ethno-religious polarisation as mainstream policy concerns.

Right-Wing Violence in Germany: Assessing the Objectives, Personalities and Terror Trail of the National Socialist Underground and the State's Response to It

In the last five years the forces of organised right-wing extremism have made electoral advances across many states in contemporary Europe. Germany has not been immune and the extreme right party, the National Democratic Party of Germany won its first seat in the European Parliament since 1989. The recent successes of the extreme right pose issues for European society about tolerance and immigration policy, but this scene has also been associated with an upsurge in racially motivated political violence and acts of right-wing terrorism. Much of this violence is perpetrated by small neo-Nazi styled groups. This paper looks at the most notorious and recent of such groups to emerge in Germany, the National Socialist Underground. The paper explores the origins and personalities behind this terror cell, provides derails of its criminal activities and murder spree, and questions why it took so long for the authorities to identify the NSU.

Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Late Nineteenth Century Ireland

"Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland" provides an original and insightful study of the highly formative Land War and Home Rule from a local and regional perspective. Lucey examines the emergence and development of the largest mass political mobilisation brought about in nineteenth-century Ireland in the form of the Land League, and subsequently the National League, in the south-western county of Kerry. Such an unprecedented level of local political activity was matched by an upsurge in agrarian violence and the outbreak of serious outrage, which was largely orchestrated by secret societies known as Moonlighters. In turn, this book provides an important exploration of the dynamics behind the mass political mobilisation and agrarian violence that dominated Kerry society during the 1880s. The role of Fenians, radical agrarian agitators and moderate constitutional nationalists are all examined within the county.This study has importance beyond the local and provides a range of insights into motivations behind political action and violence at an everyday level during one of the most seminal and transformative eras in the development of modern Irish history. This title is suitable for students and academics of nineteenth-century Irish history and general readers.

Impact of political violence, social trust, and depression on civic participation in Colombia

Civic participation is important for peacebuilding and democratic development; however, the role of mental health has been largely overlooked by policymakers aiming to stimulate engagement in civil society. This study investigated antecedents of civic participation in Colombia, a setting of protracted political conflict, using bootstrapped mediation in path analysis. Past exposure to violence, experience with community antisocial behavior, and perceived social trust were all significantly related to civic participation. In addition, depression mediated the impact of past exposure to political violence and perceived social trust, but not community antisocial behavior, on civic participation. In this context, findings challenged depictions of helpless victims and instead suggested that when facing greater risk (past violence exposure and community antisocial behavior), individuals responded in constructive ways, taking on agency in their communities. Social trust in one’s neighbors and community also facilitated deeper engagement in civic life. Relevant to the mediation test, interventions aiming to increase civic participation should take mental health into account. Limitations and possible future research are discussed.

Can Consent Training End Sexual Violence On Campus?: Students, Consent and Sexual Ethics

The ongoing, potentially worsening problem of sexual violence and harassment on university campuses has emerged in the last few years as an area of concern. Female students have been identified as one of the most likely groups to experience sexual violence and this violence is exacerbated by contemporary student cultures around alcohol consumption and gendered and sexual norms. University campuses have also become central to prevention efforts in many countries due to their relatively accessible populations and an ability to implement social policies at an institutional level.
Many of these measures are based around promoting or educating students about sexual consent, and particularly notions of affirmative consent, expressed as ‘Yes means Yes’. However, there exists little research around sexual ethics with students exploring whether consent is in fact the best way to tackle cultural problems of sexual violence on campus. This paper makes use of existing literature on sexual ethics and focus group research undertaken with Australian university students to argue for an approach to the problem of sexual ethics on campus that is broader than simply focusing on training programs in sexual consent. It identifies a number of limitations to the consent framework and argues that prevention efforts need to more seriously engage with broader cultural norms around heterosexuality and gendered relationships.

The Tragedy of Darfur and the Limits of the Responsibility to Protect

The view that states which claim sovereign status must comply with the responsibility to protect their own citizens is gaining ground in international politics. When a state is unable or unwilling to meet this responsibility, the international community is justified in intervening militarily to end widespread human rights violations. This article argues that a diffuse responsibility to protect, as currently conceived, may have important negative consequences. By using the ongoing tragedy of Darfur as an example, the article argues that the responsibility to protect is reactive and focused on the short term, contributes to the outbreak of violence and perversely provides repressed groups with a further incentive to continue their armed struggle after war breaks out. The tragedy of Darfur shows that effective protection requires case-specific policies aimed at prevention, democratization and economic and political development.

Social identification and prevalence of PTSD in Northern Ireland

Background Understanding of the psychological impact of politically motivated violence is poor. Aims To examine the prevalence of post-traumatic symptoms subsequentto the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Method A telephone survey of 3000 adults, representative of the population in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Irish Republic, examined exposure to political violence, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and national identity. Results Ten per cent of respondents had symptoms suggestive of clinical PTSD. These people were most likely to come from low-income groups, rate national identity as relatively unimportant and have higher overall experience of the ‘troubles’than other respondents. Conclusions Direct experience of violence and poverty increase the risk of PTSD, whereas strong national identification appears to reduce this risk.

No Easy Way Through: Black Workers and Race Leadership at the Nadir

It is difficult, even excruciating, to imagine the staggering descent from high optimism to despondency experienced by many African Americans who lived between emancipation and the dawn of the twentieth century. For historians living in the post–civil rights era, recapturing the scale, velocity, and brutality of that dramatic fall has been hampered by two conceptual problems. The first of these, undergirded by prominent trends in the formerly “new” social history, is a widely shared enthusiasm for illuminating those hidden corners of daily life where men and women on the receiving end of Jim Crow continued to wield a degree of control. “Agency” has been the buzzword for a generation of scholarship that emphasizes the staying power and persistence of black Southerners in the face of relentless assaults on their social and economic status, their civil rights, and even, at times, their collective existence. This is, in many ways, an understandable reaction to an earlier consensus that relegated black historical initiative to the margins of a national fable cleansed of unseemly violence and sharp social conflict, but it can also be problematic.

The Impact of Disrespect on Prisoners’ Aggression: Outcomes of Experimentally Inducing Violence Supportive Cognitions

Self-report research suggests that much violence is triggered by perceived insults and disrespect. This may be particularly true in the context of a prison or another environment of acute deprivation, whereby individuals have little other recourse to means of reputation enhancement. This paper presents the findings of two studies conducted with prisoner volunteers inside a Category C (minimum security) prison in England. In the first study, the authors randomly assigned a sample of 89 prisoners to one of two conditions: the experimental group were asked to discuss times they have been disrespected by authority figures inside and outside the prison; the control group were asked more neutral questions. Both groups then completed several measures of cognitive beliefs, distortions, and hostile attribution biases. None of the measures differed across the two groups except the measure of excuse and justification acceptance. Controlling for other factors, the experimental group endorsed these rationalisations at a significantly higher rate than the control group. This finding suggests that raising the salience of disrespect - reminding prisoners of times they have been made to feel unworthy of consideration - may raise the risk that prisoners will engage in violence by providing prisoners with justifications or excuses for actions they might not otherwise endorse. These findings received some additional validation in the second study, a qualitative analysis of offender accounts of violence and aggression within the prison. Implications for reducing violence within prisons are discussed.

Social psychology and peace: An introductory overview

This paper begins by giving an overview of why and in which ways social psychological research can be relevant to peace. Galtung's (1969) distinction between negative peace (the absence of direct violence) and positive peace (the absence of structural violence, or the presence of social justice) is crossed with a focus on factors that are detrimental (obstacles) to peace versus factors that are conducive to peace (catalysts), yielding a two-by-two classification of social psychological contributions to peace, Research falling into these four classes is cited in brief, with a particular focus on four exemplary topics: support for military interventions as an obstacle to negative peace; antiwar activism as a catalyst of negative peace; ideologies legitimizing social inequality as an obstacle to positive peace; and commitment to human rights as a catalyst of positive peace. Based on this conceptual framework, the remaining six articles of the special issue

Cinema Lucida: Johan van der Keuken and the Meaning of Loss

Ever sceptical about the positivistic claims of ethnographic and so-called realist documentary, Johan van der Keuken’s film-making is the work of a curious, spontaneous and disorientated observer of the essential strangeness of both the foreign and the familiar, new landscapes and cities, experiences, and people. While there are various explicitly political and socially orientated films and themes across his work, it is those films and moments when what is being conveyed is a sense of him being somewhere liminal, being ‘in-between’ situations, cultures, styles and interpretations, reticent, uncertain but incorrigibly curious that constitute his most valuable contribution to documentary film aesthetics. Not surprisingly, such characteristics often come to the fore in those films where he tries to make sense of loss, the passing of lives and the legacies left behind. This article discusses questions of history and personal loss in a number of his films.

What Did the Lawyers Do During the 'War' ? Neutrality, Conflcit and the Culture of Quietism

Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this paper explores how lawyers responded to the challenges of entrenched discrimination, sustained political violence and an emerging peace process. Drawing upon the literature of the sociology of lawyering, it examines whether lawyers can or should be more than ‘paid technicians’ in such circumstances. It focuses in particular upon a number of ‘critical junctures’ in the legal history of the jurisdiction and uncouples key elements of the local legal culture which contributed to an ethos of quietism. The paper argues that the version of legal professionalism that emerged in Northern Ireland was contingent and socially constructed and, with notable exceptions, obfuscated a collective failure of moral courage. It concludes that facing the truth concerning past silence is fundamental to a properly embedded rule of law and a more grounded notion of what it means to be a lawyer in a conflict.