Slow violence in post-1984 Punjab: Remembering,forgetting and refusals

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine the afterlives of insurgent and counterinsurgent violence in Punjab and the US. We explore how the period of the 1980s and 1990s came to have effects that linger into the present, and how violence is remembered by ordinary people, especially non-elite women. We argue that memories unfold in relation to the slow and structural violence that has manifested through years of Punjabis living with the after-effects of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Our research on remembering and forgetting shows that the period of violence of the 1980s and 1990s remains alive and formative in contemporary forms of community, gender, and identity across Punjab and its diasporas.     

Entitlement and conscientiousness in the prediction of organizational deviance

Responding to Wu and LeBreton’s (2011) call for further study, this paper examines dispositional predictors of organizational deviance. In a sample of 428 participants, self-report data were collected anonymously. Using hierarchical regression, the dispositional variables of entitlement and conscientiousness were similarly strong and statistically significant predictors of organizational deviance. The total variance explained in deviance by these variables and some demographic variables was .31. Additionally, the specificity matching principle suggests that narrow band traits like entitlement are better at predicting narrowly measured behaviors like deviance than are broad band traits like conscientiousness. Using dominance analysis, entitlement was a stronger predictor of organizational deviance than is conscientiousness.     

Young people and life in the city. The lessons of political sociology and of the patterns of socialization of young people

Faced with a considerable lack of interest in politics among the young, in spite of their precocious maturity, we must come to terms with the failure of over‐institutionalized practices. The way of integrating the young into democratic life must go through a dynamic approach, favoring associative processes so as better to take account of the real needs and the experience of the young.     

Relational attachment and ethical workplace decisions: The mediating role of emotional burnout

Working is an inherently relational act that requires the management of relationships in many of the same ways as other domains in our lives. In two studies, the association between attachment orientation and unethical decisions in different workplace scenarios was examined. In both studies, attachment avoidance was associated with more unethical workplace decisions. In Study 2, emotional exhaustion mediated the association between avoidance and unethical decisions. Findings are discussed with respect to individual differences in ethical decision-making in organizations.     

Price-directive decision making in hierarchical systems with conflicting preferences

In this paper we consider a classical model of price-directive decision making in hierarchical organizations, namely Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition, well known from single-objective programming. Here, however, we allow for preference differences that are usually observed between a central unit and a subunit in an organizational structure. The procedure models, therefore, how decision making may evolve in a context with decentralized information as well as intra- and interpersonal conflicts. Several numerical experiments with the procedure have been performed. The results of those experiments demonstrate that the procedure in many instances converges towards an efficient solution, despite the differences in the criteria weights used in the master problem and the subproblem respectively. This suggests that some amount of goal discordance need not prohibit efficient decision making in a hierarchical organization.     

Law and Gospel,or the Law of the Gospel? Karl Barth’s Political Theology Compared with Luther and Calvin

This essay is an attempt to understand the significance of Barth's redefinition of the "law/gospel" rubric for political theology. Barth's thought is exposited at length, and illumined by comparison with Luther and Calvin. Luther emphasizes the distance between gospel and the law, distinguishing between serving God in the secular regiment, and serving Christ in the spiritual regiment. He thereby challenges the improper relation of state and church, but does so in a manner that can lead to a passive dualism. Calvin holds that preaching the law to the state includes preaching the gospel; thus, the church has a positive vision against which it can evaluate the state's service to God in Christ. This leads, however, to the danger of a 'clerical guardianship' of the state.
Barth finds a positive connection between the two governments in the fact that both communities are based in Christ, in whom the gospel is their law. This grounds his high view of the state as predecessor to the heavenly kingdom, as well as a prophetic mission of the church to the state. This does not lead to a new Christendom, however, first, because Barth hopes not for a kingdom wrought by human hands, but for the Theocracy of God, and second, because Barth sees the fallen reality of both church and state, the state pagan and violent, and the church a poor witness. In the end, though Barth makes a strong case for supporting theological critique of the state, while avoiding Constantinianism, he is unable to solve the problem of how to connect the gospel and the law in the civil community.     

Contemporary Art and Contemporary Sport in the Arabian Peninsula

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between the development of art and sport in the Arabian Peninsula. In particular, it will be argued that both sport and art can be understood in terms of a trajectory from the ‘modern’ to the ‘contemporary’. Modernity and modernism are introduced through an interpretation of Paul Delaunay’s series of paintings ‘The Cardiff Team’ (1912–22) which may be read as an expression of modernity. The content of the paintings documents core elements of European modernist culture, including technology and science, leisure, consumerism and advertising, and crucially (international) sport. Delaunay’s work provides a background from which to reflect upon the development of sport into something like its contemporary form, in early 20th Europe. By drawing on Terry Smith’s analysis of the difference between modern and contemporary art, and applying this to sport, in order to suggest that there is a distinctive contemporary form of sport, the core tensions within both artistic and sporting practices are argued to lie in the movement from a conception of sport as an expression of modernity, where this is conceived as a universal movement, exemplified by Western humanism, towards a conception of sport as something particularised, expressive of local cultures. The promotion of art institutions and sports events within the Arabian Peninsula highlights the resultant tensions between the neo-colonial influence of Western culture and the reinterpretation of that culture, locally, in order to reflect upon and articulate communal identity within the contexts of globalism and transnationalism.     

Secularism and securitisation: the imaginary threat of religious minorities in Canadian public spaces

ABSTRACT

From the assumed physical threat of a ceremonial Kirpan in an elementary school carried by a Sikh child, to the fictional possibility of rich, Arab, Muslim University students utilising their implicitly understood patriarchal power to subjugate all women from access to common swimming pools, Canada has become increasingly replete with examples of using religious minorities as a danger to secure public spaces for societies most privileged. Since 9/11, this has become a far too common public discourse on maintaining close surveillance, scrutiny and regulations for those religious and racialised Canadian minorities associated with the ‘war on terror’. Promoting public spaces, especially public-school spaces, as ‘secular’ has become the argument of supposed non-bias in ensuring safety and equality for the wider population, all the while leaving many of those used as an example of threat to wonder if the ultimate intent is to preserve white, Christian (and Christian cultural) privilege. This article proposes to examine cases since 9/11 that have problematised racialised groups associated with the terrorism in public schooling to the benefit of maintaining ‘Old Stock’ status quo.     

Sexuality,Capitalism, and Africa

ABSTRACT

This piece provides a general overview and analysis of the current imperative to decolonize in South Africa, linking the recent turn to identity politics with the transformation of the university in a neoliberal institution. Before introducing the several pieces that make up this special issue, the proposal is made that colonisation is perhaps best seen as a phenomenon that lies at the intersection of sexuality, capitalism and “Africa”, provided the latter is understood not necessarily or not only in a geographical sense as denoting a continent but, rater, as the devalued yet dangerous Other of the West.     

CHRISTIAN REALISM FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Christian realism has provided a theological understanding of politics that identifies the limits within which all political choices are made. Those limits are set by a theological understanding of judgment, which reserves the ultimate meaning of history to divine judgment, and by a theological understanding of responsibility, which gives proximate meaning to the choices between greater and lesser goods that are available to human politics. The assessments of global politics offered by Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists during the Second World War and the Cold War which followed owe their influence partly to an astute and historically informed reading of events, but primarily, their influence is due to this basic theological understanding of politics. While the world has changed in ways that clearly reveal limitations in the original formulations of Christian realism, the theological principles of judgment and responsibility continue to provide an understanding of global politics adequate to the new realities of the twenty-first century.