Deprivation, Violence, and Conflict: An Analysis of “Naxalite” Activity in the Districts of India

This paper asks: is it a fact that there is more violence in districts affected by Naxalite (Maoist) activity compared to those which are free of Naxalite activity? And can the existence of Naxalite activity in some districts of India, but not in others, be explained by differences in economic and social conditions? This study identifies districts in India in which there was significant Naxalite activity and correlating the findings with district-level economic, social, and crime indicators. The econometric results show that, after controlling for other variables, Naxalite activity in a district had, if anything, a dampening effect on its level of violent crime and crimes against women. Furthermore, even after controlling for other variables, the probability of a district being Naxalite-affected rose with an increase in its poverty rate and fell with a rise in its literacy rate. So, one prong in an anti-Naxalite strategy would be to address the twin issues of poverty and illiteracy in India.

Changing Europe and The Relevance of Care and The Caring Professions

The aim of the paper is to introduce the challenges of the international care debate of the last ten years in order to grasp basic social needs, to analyse their treatment in the public and private sphere and to look at the orientation of professional answers by the care-professions. The concept of care enhances the societal dealing with - or ignoring of - different forms of dependency on informal and formal personal and social services throughout the life-cycle (child-care, nursing sick or handicapped persons, supporting the elderly) and in special life situations (from help to lone mothers and their children, via help to drug-addicts to help for homeless people). All societies have different approaches to deal with these life-situations, they do so by employ-ing various mixtures of: familial support, mostly provided by women, social politics, organized by the state, public and/or private social services. This welfare-mix shows different combinations of private and public obligations, paid and und unpaid work, professional and laymen's tasks based on a specific understanding of mo-rality and justice embedded in the gender structure and intergenerational relationships. The importance of social work as a profession in this context differs according to the historical developments and cultural traditions. Characteristic for the profile of social work is the rele-vance of a care ethics and the existence of social rights, the tension of mothering and profes-sional methods, the relationship between help, denial and punishment and the ways of institu-tionalisation. The actuality of this debate is closely intertwined with the restructuring of societal bonds in the face of globalisation, the political reorganisation of states, the changes in the living to-gether of different generations and both sexes and the consequences for the organisation and contents of welfare. Looking at Germany and Eastern Europe two new phenomena of social relevance for the dis-cussion of care work and care needs can be taken as an example: the extent of cheap illegal women laborers travelling between east and west, especially Polish women working intermit-tendly in private care for old people and the highly organized traffiking of women from Russia to Germany to work in the sex business. The care debate entails a reframing of welfare issues in the light of social justice between classes, ethnicities and gender groups.

Access for All? The promise and problems of universalism.

In what follows, I explore why the question of ‘access for all’ is both important and difficult. Beginning by treating it as a contested claim, I will consider some of its political, institutional and professional implications. What do I mean by saying that access for all is a contested claim? First of all, it is a claim – a demand that access for all needs to be created. It is a claim about change. To demand ‘access for all’ is to speak about, and speak against, social conditions that are unjust, unequal or excluding. At its simplest, then, to claim ‘access for all’ is to address social arrangements in which all people do not have access. Secondly, it is a claim made by – or on behalf of – specific social groups against their experience of exclusion, marginalization or subordination. I have added these other terms because I think that ‘exclusion’ is too simple, and too problematic, a term to capture all the aspects of unjust social arrangements that produce claims for ‘access’.1 Access is a demand to be treated equitably in relation to a range of valued social resources, conditions and relationships. It is a claim to be a member: of the society, the polity or the nation. It is a claim to be a citizen: to possess rights and the capacity to make legitimate demands on the state. It is a claim on the apparatuses and agencies that sustain social citizenship: citizenship brings with it access to benefits, services and rights of ‘fair dealing’ or ‘fair treatment’. As this last point suggests, it is a claim about equality: the expectation that all citizens will be dealt with by public agencies in ways that are not discriminatory or oppressive.