Journal für Konflikt- und Gewaltforschung (JKG)

Culture or Conflict? Escalation toward Terrorism

Roland Eckert — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Conflicts arise and, no matter what they are about, turn violent if there are no institutions within which they can be carried out by other means. Such unregulated conflicts intensify the process of establishing unambiguous identities, which appear to safeguard personal integrity and dignity. Therefore, terrorism is not the expression of a specific culture (be it Basque, Irish, Tamil, Chechen, Hutu, or Saudi), it is primarily a means of extreme political struggle, following the construction of dichotomies like friend and foe, good and evil.

Acculturation, and Delinquency among Adolescent Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israel

Gideon Fishman, Gustavo Mesch — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This study is part of a larger project which follows the acculturation of youth from the Former Soviet Union in Israel over a period of three years. It reports the first wave of data collection that established a base line for a longitudinal comparison later on. This paper examines the relations between adolescent immigrants’ acculturation and involvement in delinquency.
Acculturation is conceptualized as the outcome of interactions and encounters between the adolescent and the host society, i. e., the school, the peers and the bureaucracy. Like in many other studies, we used some proxies for acculturation such as length of residence, family economic conditions, and use of language, however, we also included direct measures of the adolescent’s perceptions and experiences of daily interactions with people and institutions in the host society.
The current study is based on a face-to-face national survey conducted on a sample of 1,421 adolescents (ages 12-18) who have immigrated from the FSU to Israel during the preceding 6 years. Participants were interviewed face to face by Russian-speaking interviewers without the presence of parents.
The analysis uses logistic regression and calculates predicted probabilities to be involved in delinquency for various profiles of immigrant adolescents. Accordingly, the highest probability to be involved in delinquency is attributed to an adolescent who lives in a poorly functioning family, has a high score of perceived discrimination and has been in the new country for a relatively long period. The lowest probability to become a delinquent is assigned to an adolescent who lives in a highly functioning family, has low perception of discrimination, and is relatively short time in the country. These results underline the importance of the family as a control agent and as a buffer against delinquency.

Exklusion als Macht. Zu den Bedingungen der Konfliktträchtigkeit sozialer Ausgrenzung

Thorsten Bonacker — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This article describes the conditions under which social exclusion leads to conflict. Following Max Weber's concept of social organization, exclusion is defined as a person's lack of opportunity to participate in vital social systems of society. The article also links action theory and structural theory approaches. It systemizes the conditions for exclusion-based conflict identified by empirical research and theoretical discussion in a model of conflict formation.
The central assumption is that exclusion leads to conflict when groups perceive it as a collective sanction and thus as an expression of power. Conflicts that are based on such a perception tend to be conducted as power conflicts.

Jugendliche und die narrative Konstruktion ihrer (Ohn)Macht

Ulrike Pörnbacher — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This paper contains the results of research conducted within the framework of a project about youth institutions, sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation. The case study is based on an analysis of interviews with adolescents and local representatives and on the analysis of local observations. The main subject is marginalized adolescents’ gossip about an outgroup, regarded as a form of separation. The analysis focuses on the categories used by the adolescent outsiders. Finally the interrelationship between the categories used by the adolescents and their everyday lives is demonstrated.

Transformations in French anti-Semitism

Nonna Mayer — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The increase in the number of anti-Semitic acts since the start of the Second Intifada has sparked off a broad debate on the return of anti-Semitism in France. This article focuses on the question whether this anti-Semitism is still based on the alleged superiority of the Aryan race as in the time of Nazism, or if it does represent the birth of a „new Judeophobia“ that is more based on anti-Zionism and the polemical mixing of „Jews“, „Israelis“, and „Zionists“. One supposed effect of this transformation is that anti-Semitism is in the process of changing camps and migrating from the extreme right to the extreme left of the political arena, to the „alter“-globalizers, the communists, and the „neo-Trotskyists“.
Questions that will be answered in this article are: Are anti-Jewish views on the increase in France today? Do these opinions correlate or not with negative opinions of other minorities, notably Maghrebians and Muslims? Do they tend to develop among voters and sympathizers with the extreme right or on the extreme left of the political spectrum? And how are they related to opinions concerning Zionism and the Israelo-Palestinian conflict?
The evaluation of the transformations in French anti-Semitism will rely on two types of data. The first is police and gendarmerie statistics published by the National Consultative Committee on Human Rights (CNCDH), which is charged with presenting the prime minister with an annual report on the struggle against racism and xenophobia in France. The other is data from surveys, notably surveys commissioned by CNCDH for its annual report and surveys conducted at the Center for Political Research (CEVIPOF) at Sciences Po (Paris Institute for Political Research). They show that anti-Semitic opinions follow a different logic from acts, that the social, cultural and political profile of anti-Semites remains very close to that of other types of racists, and that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism do not overlap exactly.

Sozialer Protest zwischen Deprivation und Populismus. Eine Untersuchung zu den Hartz IV-Demonstrationen

Beate Küpper, Andreas Zick, Alexandra Kühn — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

In autumn 2004 massive protests against reforms of the unemployment benefit — known as the „Hartz IV reform“ — rose overall in Germany. Shortly afterwards, right-wing-extremist parties were substantially successful in the following federal elections. Not only politicians, but also theories of deprivation and disintegration indicate a causal relationship in presuming that unemployment leads to an affinity with right-wing political parties. We analyzed the relation of unemployment and political affinity (political orientation, negative evaluation of the established parties and voting intention) with respect to right-wing and left-wing populism. 1150 individuals, participating in demonstrations in East- and West-Germany, were interviewed with standardized questionnaires. As hypothesized, unemployment influenced political affinity.

However, it turned out that the actual state of occupation hardly had an effect. More in detail, subjective fears of unemployment by those, who are in work, and subjective fears to be directly or indirectly concerned by Hartz IV by those, who are not employed, count for political affinity with specific patterns for East and West Germans. While only some of the differences between East- and West-German participants can be explained by differences in objective and subjective deprivation, the effect of deprivation is mainly explained by the agreement with right- and especially left-wing populism. On the whole, only a small proportion of variance of political affinity can be explained by East-West origin, state of occupation and populism.