Religious discrimination and religious armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa: an obvious relationship?

ABSTRACT

Relative deprivation theory suggests that discrimination increases the risk of violence. While religious armed conflicts have been increasing in sub-Saharan Africa, effects of religious discrimination have rarely been investigated. Using the new Religion and State dataset and other sources, this contribution investigates this question in a two-level analysis. The analysis yields three main results. First, religious discrimination has been increasing over the last 15 years but in interregional comparison sub-Saharan Africa has a low level of discrimination. Second, at the cross-country level there is a significant correlation between religious discrimination and armed conflict over religious content. Third, looking closer at four pertinent country cases (the Comoros, the Gambia, Mali and Mauritania) reveals that discrimination is probably not a direct driver of religious conflicts. High levels of discrimination are embedded in problematic state-religion relations and existing cleavages become mobilised along religious lines through transnational influences and geography.     

Resilience in the Workplace: A Multilevel Review and Synthesis

In an increasingly dynamic business environment, the concept of resilience is fundamental to understanding how employees successfully handle adversity. Yet, the operationalisation of the concept, the factors which lead to its development, and how and why it influences outcomes of interest to organisations are issues still under debate in the literature. In this article, we address these debates by undertaking a critical review of research on resilience in the workplace at both the individual and team levels. We pinpoint different conceptualisations of resilience and highlight how resilience has been measured in extant quantitative work. Further, we provide a systematic literature review of empirical work on the antecedents and outcomes of resilience at the individual and team levels, as well as conduct a review of work that has introduced resilience as a moderator or mediator. In doing so, we highlight theoretical approaches that have been adopted to study resilience in the workplace. Based on our review of the extant empirical work on resilience, we develop a roadmap for future research. In particular, we pinpoint relevant theoretical approaches that help us understand the mechanisms underlying the development and outcomes of resilience and highlight opportunities for empirical advancement of the literature.     

These pretzels are going to make me thirsty tomorrow: Differential development of hot and cool episodic foresight in early childhood?

The current study examined 3‐ and 7‐year‐olds' performance on two types of episodic foresight tasks: A task that required ‘cool’ reasoning processes about the use of objects in future situations and a task that required ‘hot’ processes to inhibit a salient current physiological state in order to reason accurately about a future state. Results revealed that 7‐year‐olds outperformed 3‐year‐olds on the episodic foresight task that involved cool processes, but did not show age differences in performance on the task that involved hot processes. In fact, both 3‐ and 7‐year‐olds performed equally poorly on the task that required predicting a future physiological state that was in conflict with their current state. Further, performance on the two tasks was unrelated. We discuss the results in terms of differing developmental trajectories for episodic foresight tasks that differentially rely on hot and cool processes and the universal difficulties humans have with predicting later outcomes that conflict with current motivational states.