Communal Security Research Articles

Predictive Influence of Proposed Rural Grazing Area (RUGA) on Communal Security in Ogun West Senatorial District, Nigeria

This study examines the predictive influence of the Nigerian government's Rural Grazing Area (RUGA) policy on communal security in the Ogun West senatorial district. Despite RUGA's aim to mitigate herder-farmer conflicts by establishing designated grazing areas, the policy faces significant opposition due to ethnic tensions, land use conflicts, and concerns about Fulani herder dominance. Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected from 500 respondents across five local government districts in Ogun West. Quantitative analysis using regression models revealed that RUGA significantly impacts communal security (R = 0.728, R² = 0.530, p < 0.001), social harmony (B = 0.874, t = 25.537, p < 0.001), community engagement (B = 0.862, t = 29.741, p < 0.001), and ethnocentric, religious, and socioeconomic issues (B = 0.869, t = 29.278, p < 0.001). However, the policy does not significantly predict the readiness of nomads to settle (B = 0.032, p = 0.586) or the preparedness of local people to accept the scheme (B = 0.051, p = 0.366). These findings indicate that while RUGA has the potential to enhance social and community engagement outcomes, its success is hindered by the lack of readiness and acceptance among key stakeholders. The study recommends increased engagement and sensitization efforts to enhance nomads' readiness and local acceptance, ensuring the policy's successful implementation and contribution to inclusive economic development.

Justice Without Retribution? The Case of the System of Communal Security, Justice and Reeducation of Montaña and Costa Chica in Guerrero, Mexico

Justice Without Retribution? The Case of the System of Communal Security, Justice and Reeducation of Montaña and Costa Chica in Guerrero, Mexico

Consultations on the System of Indigenous and Afromexican Communal Security and the Right to be Consulted in Mexico

Abstract The right to be consulted is a legal institution that originated in 1989 in the United Nations Convention 169, requiring states to conduct a consultation process of Indigenous peoples and communities on issues potentially impacting them. The Mexican state has subsequently implemented the right to be consulted in its legal system. The consultation processes were often riddled with inconsistencies and the violation of the rights of Indigenous communities and peoples. In this paper I analysed the case study of the consultation process in Guerrero, by researching press articles, engaging in participant observation and conducting interviews. I looked for similarities between the Guerrero consultations and past consultations in Juchitán, Sonora, and Campeche. I identified several violations and manipulations consistent with the history of the right to be consulted. In the last part of the article, I compared the proposed acts and established their potential impact on security in Guerrero.

Injustice, deindustrialisation and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in Scotland

ABSTRACT The transition out of coal production in Scotland was managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s, prioritising workforce voice and communal security. Under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments in the 1980s, the position changed abruptly. Colliery closures and redundancies accelerated; miners and coal communities were subject to political attack. The criminalisation and victimisation of union officials and activists during the 1984–1985 strike against pit closures was disproportionately greater in Scotland than in England and Wales. The oral history testimony of strike veterans provides a powerful narrative of historical unfairness, imposed by a hostile anti-union government, National Coal Board officials, police officers and sheriffs. Their stories of injustice on picket lines and in communities nevertheless qualify a tendency in oral histories of deindustrialisation to pessimism and loss. Strike veterans spoke positively about the strike and its political meaning. Their memories constitute a usable past, present in subsequent campaigning. The Miners’ Strike (Pardons) Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2022, was an important outcome, making provision for the collective and posthumous pardon of people with strike-related convictions from 1984–1985.

Maintaining the Common Peace: Security and the Religious Peace of 1578 during the Dutch Revolt

Abstract This article analyses the failed Dutch Religious Peace of 1578 through the lens of security. As Wayne te Brake recently argued in Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe, creating security for all parties is key for an effective religious peace. In the sixteenth century, communal security was deemed a collective responsibility. In practice this meant that religious peace – suppressing and preventing violence and threats between Protestants and Catholics – was framed as a matter of preserving the common peace. Theological questions were dissimulated or kept out of peace settlements. In 1578, the religious peace proposed that Catholics and Calvinists were to live in the Netherlands side by side, each allowed to worship publicly. Some 27 Dutch towns introduced this religious peace. Yet the municipal magistrates mostly did so reluctantly and generally declined to share political power, thus contributing to its failure. Moreover, there were different, conflicting conceptions at work concerning the common peace, as well as regarding how to keep it.

Assembling a Force to Defeat Boko Haram: How Nigeria Integrated the Market into its Counterinsurgency Strategy

ABSTRACT In the context of an increased use of commercial soldiers in high-end conflict, this article investigates how the Nigerian government's reliance on the global market for force has helped its efforts to counter Boko Haram. The article shows, through a case study of Nigeria's counterinsurgency campaign against jihadist insurgents, that states in the developing world can augment their ability to provide effective public security by creating security assemblages. Moving beyond the normative debate about Private Military Companies (PMCs), this article highlights that public-private security arrangements can support the state in the developing world to live up to its role as a communal security provider. Nigeria's employment of the South African PMC Special Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection Ltd. (STTEP), helped it build an effective public-commercial partnership, thus providing the Nigerian Armed Forces (NAF) with capacity, capability and norms that were essential in their counterinsurgency struggle.

Post-Soviet Reindeer Herders: Between Family and Collective Herding

Reindeer herding constitutes the basis of the traditional economy and culture of many indigenous peoples of Eurasia. This paper discusses the diverse trajectories reindeer herding in Russia has taken in different areas of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is shown that three regional trajectories of reindeer-herding development can be distinguished: (1) the northeastern/taiga trajectory, characterized by a collapse of Soviet-era state farms (sovkhozes) and a dramatic decrease of reindeer herding; (2) the west Siberian trajectory, characterized by a collapse of sovkhozes and a boom in private reindeer herding; (3) the European (Barents Region) trajectory, characterized by a relative stability in the number of farms, reindeer, and reindeer herders. This diversity can be explained by three factors: the degree to which local reindeer herding has been "modernized" in the Soviet era, the legal status of the herders, and, most importantly, the worldview of "sovkhoism" as a complex of informal practices that manipulate collective property for personal advantage and communal security.

Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist by Barbara L. Bellows

Reviewed by: Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist by Barbara L. Bellows Edwin C. Breeden Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist. By Barbara L. Bellows. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 330. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6909-4.) Barbara L. Bellows's biography of two nineteenth-century Charlestonians stems from a single conversation her subjects shared in circumstances rich with historical irony: a free man of color, born in Charleston, South Carolina, and [End Page 458] now a Union soldier, guarding a member of one of the Lowcountry's leading white families, now a Confederate prisoner of war on Morris Island. Using that chance encounter as a starting point, Bellows crafts a personalized story of how two natives of the cradle of secession navigated different yet intersecting paths through disunion, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Born a free person of color in 1823, Joseph Barquet worked as a mason in Charleston until the late 1840s, when he left for New York after serving in South Carolina's Palmetto Regiment during the U.S.-Mexican War. Barquet eventually settled in Illinois and became an outspoken advocate for abolition and equality for all black Americans. When the United States government allowed African Americans to volunteer for military service in 1863, Barquet joined the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, returning to fight in his native Charleston, including in the famed 1863 assault on Morris Island's Battery Wagner. After the war, Barquet was active in Illinois Republican politics but became frustrated and disillusioned as the party increasingly embraced the politics of white supremacy. Barquet had returned to Morris Island to serve as prison guard in 1864, when he encountered Bellows's second subject, Thomas Pinckney. Born into one of South Carolina's most influential Revolutionary-era families in 1828, Pinckney studied as a physician but was more eager to manage the family's plantations along the Santee River than to pursue medicine. When war came, Pinckney, a skeptic of secession, captained an independent home guard unit that was later consolidated into the Fourth South Carolina Cavalry. After participating in the failed Confederate challenge to the Combahee River raid, Pinckney's regiment was ordered to Virginia, where he was taken prisoner and eventually transferred to the Union prison on Morris Island. Unlike Barquet, Pinckney remained generally aloof from Reconstruction politics and instead focused on establishing a new work order for the family's Santee plantations, bargaining with freedpeople and working with other planters to ensure continued white control of the post-emancipation world. By her own admission, Bellows uses "old-fashioned storytelling" that prioritizes narrative over systematic analysis (p. 9). Frequently, she humanizes her subjects by ascribing thoughts or emotions that, however plausible, also go beyond the documentary record. Most such instances are well crafted and reasonable, while others test readers' patience, such as an unsourced description of Barquet being "mesmerized" (p. 31). Perhaps most frustrating is that only Pinckney's account of the two men's Morris Island encounter remains, a limitation that Bellows acknowledges. No single thesis fuels the book, though Bellows does argue that her subjects' lives illustrate the inherent contingency of history, as well as the more specific complexities of Civil War history. However true, more incisive insights probably would have resulted from an analytical approach that maximized the comparative potential of the book's dual biography format. Regardless, that is not the book Bellows aimed to write, and what she has written is a fine example of southern biography that deftly weaves together military, social, and political history. Barquet's struggle for personal and communal security—before and after the war, and in and out of the South—provides a deeply personal glimpse of white supremacy's lasting and sprawling impact, the poignancy of which is amplified by Barquet's service in [End Page 459] perhaps the most famed African American military unit. Pinckney was committed to preserving that racist order, yet his story still possesses its own sympathetic threads. One of the book's most engaging themes is Pinckney's recurring failure to live...

Surrogate warfare: the art of war in the 21st century?

Airpower, drones and cyber-weapons are employed by states in conjunction with local armed non-state actors in an effort to coercively intervene in the crises of the twenty-first century. While the externalization of the burden of warfare is a return to pre-modern war, it is the change in the underlying socio-political relations between the state and its military agent that is a novel phenomenon in surrogate warfare. This article demonstrates that in a post-Westphalian era characterized by non-state violence, globalized conflicts, a prioritization of risk management in a mediatized environment, the state has to explore new ways to remain relevant as the primary communal security provider. Thereby, the organization of violence has departed from the employment of the state’s soldier as the primary bearer of the burden of warfare to a mode of war where technological and human surrogates enable the state to manage the risks of post-modern conflict remotely. In this article, we conceptually explore surrogate warfare as a socio-political phenomenon within the context of globalized, privatized, securitized and mediatized war.

Contractualism and the Death Penalty

It is a truism that there are erroneous convictions in criminal trials. Recent legal findings show that 3.3% to 5% of all convictions in capital rape-murder cases in the U.S. in the 1980s were erroneous convictions. Given this fact, what normative conclusions can be drawn? First, the article argues that a moderately revised version of Scanlon’s contractualism offers an attractive moral vision that is different from utilitarianism or other consequentialist theories, or from purely deontological theories. It then brings this version of Scanlonian contractualism to bear on the question of whether the death penalty, life imprisonment, long sentences, or shorter sentences can be justified, given that there is a non-negligible rate of erroneous conviction. Contractualism holds that a permissible act must be justifiable to everyone affected by it. Yet, given the non-negligible rate of erroneous conviction, it is unjustifiable to mete out the death penalty, because such a punishment is not justifiable to innocent murder convicts. It is further argued that life imprisonment will probably not be justified (unless lowering the sentence to a long sentence will drastically increase the murder rate). However, whether this line of argument could be further extended would depend on the impact of lowering sentences on communal security.

Affirming the importance of justice as a basic human need.

It is a truism that justice is pre-eminently a matter of significance for everyone, no matter their current stage in the life-cycle, social circumstances or nationality. It assures personal and communal security, and is manifest in the way countries deals with crime, civil conflict and social strife within their borders or by agreement beyond. Yet the topic is much neglected by academic and experimental psychologists, except when their professional and ethical obligations in teaching and research come into question. While the same might not be true for practising child, clinical, forensic, industrial, political and social psychologists, rarely do they address justice formally in either their practice or interprofessional discourse and the topic has yet to appear in formal course-work for their successors. The aim of the present paper is to remedy the situation and give justice the prominence it deserves in psychological theory and practice.

AIDS, ORPHANS AND CRIME: Exploring the linkages

In the hardest hit regions of the world, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is increasing poverty and inequality and reversing decades of improvements in health, education, and life-expectancy. It is also leaving millions of children orphaned and living in situations of acute vulnerability. Yet, even as the international community mobilises in support of these young people, some researchers and practitioners are linking orphaning and crime, suggesting that growing numbers of impoverished orphans may pose a threat to individual and communal security in some countries. This connection is generally presented as a neat, linear relationship. But is this the case?

United They Fall: Why the International Community Should Not Promote Military Integration after Civil War

Preventing the recurrence of civil war has become a critical problem for both scholarship and policy. Conventional wisdom urges the creation of capable, legitimate, and inclusive postwar states to reduce the risk of relapse into civil war, and international peacebuilders have often encouraged the formation of a new national army that would include members of the war's opposing sides. However, both the theoretical logics and the empirical record identifying military integration as a significant contributor to durable post–civil war peace are weak. An analysis of eleven cases finds little evidence that military integration played a substantial causal role in preventing the return to civil war. Military integration does not usually send a costly signal of the parties’ commitment to peace, provide communal security, employ many possible spoilers, or act as a powerful symbol of a unified nation. It is therefore both unwise and unethical for the international community to press military integration on reluctant local forces.

Precarious work: Economic, sociological and political perspectives

This article brings together labour relations, sociological and political perspectives on precarious employment in Australia, identifying local contexts of insecurity and setting them within the economics of regional supply chains involving the use of migrant labour. In developing the concept of precarious work-societies, it argues that precarity is a source of individual and social vulnerability and distress, affecting family, housing and communal security. The concept of depoliticisation is used to describe the processes of displacement, whereby the social consequences of precarious work come to be seen as beyond the reach of agency. Using evidence from social attitudes surveys, we explore links between the resulting sense of political marginalisation and hostility to immigrants. Re-politicisation strategies will need to lay bare the common basis of shared experiences of insecurity and explore ways of integrating precarious workers into new community and global alliances.

A Study on Quality of Life in Mathare, Nairobi, Kenya

Sub-Saharan Africa hosts the highest number of urban slum households in the world with an estimated 60 to 70% of urban residents living in slums. Kenya belongs to this region and has large informal settlements with dire socio-economic conditions. This study on the quality of life, in a typical East African slum, is based on fieldwork carried out in Mathare, Nairobi. The research revealed that Mathare residents prioritise sanitation, waste management and access to water, electricity, education and healthcare as the most essential services for adding quality to their lives. However, one of the main conclusions of this research is that although improved service delivery is necessary, it may not be sufficient in satisfying the quality of life requirements of Mathare residents. Other aspects of economics, such as regular employment as well as socio-cultural issues, like freedom from fear and access to communal security, are equally important and policy objectives should pay holistic attention to both the objective living conditions and the subjective life satisfaction indicators of slum dwellers.

Elderly destitution in Ile‐Ife community of Osun State, Nigeria

Many studies have been conducted on the elderly, but none has ever paid particular attention to the increasing rate of destitution in the rural communities, where the elderly serve as agents for sustenance and transmission of culture. This study is descriptive in nature and has adopted qualitative perspective in order to identify and examine the factors that have contributed to the state of elderly in destitution in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. It has also examined the feelings and reactions of the subjects of the study and has documented how their lifestyles affect their health status. Sixteen elderly people in destitution were traced and interviewed in Ile-Ife community. At each location, where an elderly in destitution was located, at least an elderly chief and a resident were located for interview. Data collected were analysed using Textbase Beta package for qualitative analysis. The study found that communal feud, violence and conflicts were factors that created unhappiness for the elderly, and the lack of adequate support from the immediate households consequently led to their homelessness. The study documented that the elderly in destitution lack good hygiene and nutrition, and equally suffer self-neglect and mental confusion. The study concludes that peaceful coexistence, communal security, and familial care and support are important factors that promote happiness and successful ageing. It also maintains that focused health education is highly essential for the households and caregivers of the elderly in rural community.

Examining Power-sharing in Persistent Conflicts: De Facto Pseudo-statehood versus de JureQuasi-federalism

The reasons that explain the failures in power-sharing lie in the notions of sovereignty and territoriality and their applications in the (post-)modern world. While territory is largely perceived as indivisible, sovereignty is seen as something that could be shared. Power-sharing schemes tend to fail because of the incompatibility of these two principles. Although enduring compromises between facts and norms may allow talks about diffused power and fuzzy identities and are therefore an asset, they do not offer a recipe of how to end zero-sum games and provide communal security. The aim of this paper is to examine comparatively recent attempts to resolve persistent conflicts through power-sharing in Cyprus, Moldova and Bosnia & Herzegovina. It concludes that although power-sharing is compatible with the normative categories stipulated in international law, solving modern conflicts necessitates a rethinking of the concepts over which these conflicts are taking place.

The panoptic state: Privacy, surveillance and the balance of risk

Advances in technology and changes in the way that we communicate and store information have steadily increased the vulnerability of informational privacy. This vulnerability is compounded by a combination of increased concerns about citizen security and developments in e-government designed to improve state services and reform the public sector. Starting from a statement of principle of the right to informational privacy, recent technological developments are surveyed, the dangers they pose to privacy and existing protections are discussed. The question of risk in this context is then explored and, resulting from this, a number of mechanisms for achieving a better balance between the right to individual privacy and the need for communal security in an information society are proposed.

Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11

America's “war on terror” and Al Qaeda's “jihad” reflect mirror strategies of imperial politics. Each camp transnationalizes violence and insecurity in the name of national or communal security. Neoliberal globalization underpins this militarization of daily life. Its desire industries motivate and legitimate elite arguments (whether from “infidels” or “terrorists”) that society must sacrifice for its hypermasculine leaders. Such violence and desire draw on colonial identities of Self vs. Other, patriotism vs. treason, hunter vs. prey, and masculinity vs. femininity that are played out on the bodies of ordinary men and women. We conclude with suggestions of a human security to displace the elite privilege that currently besets world politics.

The Affective Fallacy and the Student's Response to Poetry

Many of our current dilemmas are probably due to the increased permissiveness of a society which puts few demands (mental or physical) on its children, a society in which the term discipline can only be used by faculty members susurrating timidly behind closed doors. It is also due to the contemporary phenomenon of popularism in the arts: where the teenager is begged to indulge his emotions in the atavistic rhythms of acid rock; or sip leisurely at the predigested and commercially packaged songpoems of Rod McKuen; or, if he musters courage enough to confront poetry at all, to take it in diluted doses-in the communal security of a coffeehouse or the private safety of a marijuana-dream. This is not to deny the valid claims that can be made for genuine folk-art, rock music, etc., but I have seen no evidence in working with present-day students that they are able to discriminate any better among these forms than they are in the heady world of high-literature. We would be foolish and not-a-little reckless to believe that the current in-