Jats,Khaps and Riots: Communal Politics and the Bharatiya Kisan Union in Northern India

Contrary to the general view that communal riots in India are urban‐centred, the rural areas of Muzaffarnagar in the state of Uttar Pradesh were the site of a major communal riot in September 2013. The majority of victims in the riot were Muslim labourers from the lower‐caste groups, and the alleged perpetrators were members of the relatively prosperous Hindu Jat households. This paper deals with how the leadership and membership of a ‘new farmers’ movement’ – the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) – actively internalized, and helped entrench, a communal discourse that preceded the riots. It argues that the reasons for why the identity of a ‘Hindu’ prevailed over the class‐neutral identity of a ‘farmer’ during the riots can be traced to the ways in which the BKU has historically sought to culturally construct the identity of a ‘farmer’. The political intermediation of the traditional institution of khaps is highlighted as central to this process. Khaps played a major role in spreading and sustaining a communal discourse and preparing the ground for the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013.     

关于政治体制改革的几点思考

当前我国社会进入各类矛盾多发期,其中尤以劳资矛盾、官民矛盾最为突出,加快推进政治体制改革迫在眉睫。政治体制改革的主要目标是实行民主政治。加快推进政治体制改革,应主要从以下几方面着手：一是进一步落实、完善选举制度,真正实现权为民所授,首先在县乡两级推行直接选举,并逐步扩大直选范围。二是进一步落实和完善人民代表大会制度,减少代表人数,延长会期,优化代表结构,实行代表职业化,并落实人大的财政预算权,实现人大对政府的有力制约监督。三是深化司法体制改革,真正实现司法独立。     

A wait‐and‐see approach to investments: Do elections play a role?

Unlike previous studies on electoral investment cycle—the tendency for firms to reduce investment expenditure during an election year relative to nonelection years—that have primarily focused on developed countries, this study documents cycles in private investments in relation to the timing of national elections across a broader set of African countries. The estimation results indicate that during election years, private investment decreases by an average of 16% relative to nonelection years. The results also reveal that private investment falls in the year leading up to an election and increases in the immediate year after an election, consistent with the view that electoral uncertainty deters investments. These findings suggest that electoral investment cycles apply strongly to African countries.     

Encountering Everyday Racist Practices: Sociospatial Negotiations of Immigrant Settlement in Athens,Greece

This article delineates the ways in which the context of institutional and non‐institutional racist practices, legitimated by the rise of extreme right‐wing populism and racism, affects immigrants’ everyday lives in Athens, Greece. In this research, I explored the transformations of immigrants’ settlement trajectories, coping strategies and tactics, and their bodily interactions when encountering racist violence at the local level, through extensive fieldwork in two case study areas in metropolitan Athens—Omonia and Nikaia. The article is based on previous work on encounters with difference and everyday racism, with the aim of contributing to existing scholarship by examining urban encounters with manifestations of racism in the form of violent practices, which are on a rise not only as exceptional but also as everyday lived events. I demonstrate how immigrants’ encounters with police raids and patrols, and with racist violence perpetrated by neo‐Nazi militias, transform immigrants’ daily lives in the city at the micro‐scale. These encounters have an impact not only on immigrants’ social relationships, strategies and tactics of settlement, but also on the reconstruction of urban space. My argument is that urban encounter remains an open and dynamic field for negotiation of interethnic cohabitation, as it produces both violent confrontations and sociospatial embodied opportunities for coexistence.     

Curbing domestic violence: instantiating C–K theory with formal concept analysis and emergent self-organizing maps

We propose a human-centred process for knowledge discovery from unstructured text that makes use of formal concept analysis and emergent self-organizing maps. The knowledge discovery process is conceptualized and interpreted as successive iterations through the concept–knowledge (C–K) theory design square. To illustrate its effectiveness, we report on a real-life case study of using the process at the Amsterdam–Amstelland police in the Netherlands aimed at distilling concepts to identify domestic violence from the unstructured text in actual police reports. The case study allows us to show how the process was not only able to uncover the nature of a phenomenon such as domestic violence, but also enabled analysts to identify many types of anomaly in the practice of policing. We will illustrate how the insights obtained from this exercise resulted in major improvements in the management of domestic violence cases. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

论集体暴力——基于三个案例的深度分析

当前社会转型过程中发生的群体性事件,都表现出比较明显的集体暴力倾向。对典型案例的分析表明,集体暴力具有社会抗争性质,集体暴力的蔓延既有可能影响公共政策,也有可能导致治理危机,因此需要通过法治和民主来化解。化解的关键在于促进民主转型、维护社会正义和法律尊严,同时要对权力进行有效制约。     

Electoral Participation and Non-Voter Segmentation

SUMMARY

This article examines some of the issues and debates surrounding electoral participation in the UK from a political marketing perspective. In particular, this article reviews the current literature and details some of the output of primary research into non-voter behaviour and investigates the opinions and motivations of the electorate. The role of the Electoral Commission and the effects of all-postal voting are analysed. This article both challenges and supports previously presented arguments regarding political issues and voting. In addition, electoral turnout and voter participation is reviewed and the consequences for democracy discussed.