Intra-community Conflicts Research Articles

Oil Compensation and Intra-Communal Conflict in the Niger Delta

Conflict is a recurrent phenomenon in the Niger Delta area. Many of the conflicts are due to poverty, unemployment, chieftaincy tussle and mistrust of the traditional institution. The aftermath of many of these conflicts are always immeasurable in financial terms, but usually include loss of lives and properties. The current crisis in Ogoni particularly in Kpor and Bomu communities of Gokana is one of such conflicts, arising from dispute over sharing of oil compensation money. This study, however, was conducted in Kpor community relied on key informant interview of community leaders and focus group discussion, and found that the crisis in Kpor was as a result of distrust of community leaders, especially the chiefs over oil compensation money supposedly paid through the chiefs. We, therefore, recommended the provision of employment for youths and channeling of oil compensation money towards community development projects rather than sharing among community members.

Critical analysis of the contemporary role of traditional institutions on intra-communal conflict resolution in Southwest Nigeria

ABSTRACT Studies have examined the shortfalls and complexities of modern mechanisms on conflict resolution. However, this study attempts to answer question as to whether the role of traditional institutions could still be found as efficient and complementary to cover up the shortfalls and complexities of modern state structure on conflict resolution. It adopts an in-depth qualitative research method. This study was conducted in Southwest Nigeria. It utilises purposive sampling technique to select formal and modern groups for the evaluation purposes. It provides an independent critique of the role of traditional institutions on intra-communal conflict resolution in modern times by drawing perspectives and inferences from formal and civil society groups. Interviews and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were used to generate qualitative data. Content analysis and ZY index were used for analytical purpose. It reveals that there is still a symbiotic relationship between the traditional institutions and formal/state institutions on intra-conflict resolution matters. Thus, the former has the capacity to close the shortfalls and complexities of the latter on intra-communal conflict resolution. This study concludes that the roles of traditional institutions are still found to be complementary of modern governance structure, with appreciable level of efficacy especially on intra-communal matters.

Oil Compensation and Intra-Communal Conflict in the Niger Delta

Oil Compensation and Intra-Communal Conflict in the Niger Delta

Cyprus: Korea by Transposition?

ABSTRACT Cyprus’ recent past is composed of elements that make it a lethal cocktail: colonialism, the struggle for independence, geography, ethnic composition, political and ideological differences among the indigenous population, inter and intra-communal conflict, all gravely affected by regional and international politics. Its immediate geographic area, i.e., the Middle East, along with Asia, acquired another dimension within the new climate of a global confrontation of the two superpowers since 1945 with many unforeseen and devastating consequences. Turkey’s invasion in July 1974 and the forcible partition that resulted have created a deadlock on the ground that still persists. The inability to come up with a just and viable solution, due to the unwillingness of the occupying power to yield, have led many voices advocating a clean solution instead, the euphemism for the creation of two independent states in the island. Employing history as guidance for similar circumstances, mutatis mutandis, the article seeks to demonstrate how such talk is not only dangerous, but pernicious as well, grossly unjust to the Cypriot people. The not-too distant past and its offspring, i.e., partition, which was implemented in the Middle East and Asia, still haunt memory and serve as warning against adopting similar practices in Cyprus.

Fathers, Mothers, Saints, Martyrs: Religion as a Lineage of Belief

AbstractCritiquing the literary-critical habit of approaching religion primarily in terms of individual belief, this essay proposes that the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s definition of religion as a “lineage of belief” can reorient literary scholars to religion’s investment in its own survival and reproduction. Hervieu-Léger’s model emphasizes that religious institutions ensure their continuity by negotiating intracommunity conflict and intergenerational transformations. Building on this model, the essay argues that literary texts participate in religion’s collective memory and self-definition, then illustrates this point by demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks (1869) creates a bildungsroman-like narrative to shape the story of Protestantism’s Anglican-Puritan branch from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Although this representation is political in that it reinforces Protestantism as integral to American identity, Oldtown Folks prioritizes the vibrancy and longevity of Anglo-American Puritanism and Episcopalianism as relatively autonomous, family- and community-based institutions that maintain complex relationships to state violence and imperialism. For instance, while Oldtown Folks endorses Protestantism’s collaboration with North American settler colonialism, it also challenges the efficacy and desirability of the Congregational Church’s South Seas missionary work.

A Community Divided: The Ho Lawsuit and Chinese San Franciscans’ Search for Education Equality and Racial Inclusion

Abstract The Brian Ho lawsuit in the 1990s, brought about by several school children of Chinese descent in the San Francisco United School District against the school district, state defendants, and the San Francisco NAACP, signified a shift in the understanding of education equality that spotlighted divergent views, motivations, and actions concerning race-conscious education policies among Chinese San Franciscans. This article examines the intra-community dynamics and conflicts in Chinese San Franciscans’ pursuit of education rights and racial equality in the 1980s and 1990s by reconstructing their various claims to education equality. These divergent yet analogous struggles for equal educational opportunities reflected varied racial attitudes and conceptions of Chinese American racial identity. What these disparate racial perceptions and identity conceptions embodied fundamentally was a range of arguments for racial inclusion and equality. The contrast and contradictions between these distinct views persisted, reemerging in Chinese Americans’ continued apprehension of their racial identity in the wake of the renewed debate about race-based education policies that was juxtaposed with the rising racial hatred toward Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Land speculation by villagers: Territorialities of accumulation and exclusion in peri-urban China

Speculation in land and real estate has become a chief means of revenue generation in cities across the world. The literature on speculative urbanism has discussed how the advent of land markets transformed government strategies and created new partnerships between state and capital for rent extraction. Far less attention, however, has been paid to grassroots practices of speculation among residents of peri-urban and rural areas, whose neighbourhoods are often dramatically transformed by the rapid appreciation in land prices brought about by urbanization. Based on fieldwork in a Chinese urban village, this paper demonstrates how land commodification gave rise to competitive territorialization and forms of "intimate exclusion" within the community. The boom in property prices amplified inequalities between villagers, as those with greater access to capital, authority and social networks were better positioned to reap gains from the market while those without land rights were excluded. The desire to capitalize on market gains furthermore sharpened intra-community conflicts, creating tensions between neighbours and family members over issues of ownership and distribution. By focusing on everyday practices of territorialization at the neighbourhood level, this paper sheds light on how land speculation and rentiership could contribute to deepened differentiation at the urban frontier.

Toward QTPOC Community: A Theory in the Flesh, an Open Letter, a Closing Wound

Building on work by Ono, Calafell, and Simmons et al., who use the letter as autobiographical performance, this essay/letter explores trans and queer of color (QTPOC) community-building as rhetorically significant and ongoing labor. Using Moraga’s theory in the flesh, I draw from my own experience as a student of Third World feminisms and as a trans nonbinary queer Taiwanese American to query how QTPOC can address intracommunal conflict and harm. This application of intimate, interpersonal address also challenges the field(s) of rhetoric to reconsider the forms of writing given prominence as “rigorous” work as well as the implied audiences of those texts. What and how might we write if we prioritize the people we wish to call into community and the relationships we most value? How do we approach and evaluate work that centers one another’s survival? Although the open letter has become increasingly popular as a means of calling out, this essay spotlights the openness of this form, inviting responses that might facilitate community accountability and healing. Finally, this essay is a tribute to the QTPOC mentors and kin who have made my life possible, as well as to my QTPOC students, who give me courage to fight for worlds where we can all thrive.

Hierarchy and the Provision of Order in International Politics

The anarchic international system is actually heavily structured: communities of states join together for common benefit; strong states form hierarchical relationships with weak states to enforce order and achieve preferred outcomes. Breaking from prior research, we conceptualize structures such as community and hierarchy as properties of networks of states’ interactions that can capture unobserved constraints in state behavior, constraints that may reduce conflict. We offer two claims. One, common membership in trade communities pacifies to the extent that breaking trade ties would entail high switching costs: thus, we expect heavy arms trade, more than most types of commercial trade, to reduce intracommunity conflict. Two, this is driven by hierarchical communities in which strong states can use high switching costs as leverage to constrain conflict between weaker states in the community. We find empirical support for these claims using a time-dependent multilayer network model and a new measure of hierarchy based on network centrality.

Introduction

Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors that shape people’s ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties. Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcraft, scapegoating, and inter- and intra-communal conflict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded understanding of both ethics and emotions.

Linking Water Scarcity to Mental Health: Hydro–Social Interruptions in the Lake Urmia Basin, Iran

Alterations of water flows resulting from the manifestation of powerful hydro–social imaginaries often produce an uneven distribution of burdens and benefits for different social groups or regions, reflecting their social and political power. Marginalized regions can suffer manufactured territorialized water scarcity, which disturbs the natural, economic and socio-political order of water users, and as this article shows, inevitably affects their psychological wellbeing. Set in the context of the surroundings of Lake Urmia in Iran, once one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world and now a severely degraded ecosystem mainly as a result of water overuse in its watershed, this article explores how and through which pathways this manufactured water scarcity impacted the mental health of the water users in the region. The research findings reveal that alterations in this local hydro–social territory and the resulting biophysical, financial and social changes, as well as impacts on physical health of water users, relate to chronic psychological stress, social isolation, intra-community conflicts, despair, hopelessness, depression and anxiety.

Intracommunity Conflict among New Citizens: Ottoman Immigrants in Late nineteenth century Brazil

This article looks at intracommunal conflict among Ottoman immigrants in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the end of the 1800s. It examines how community members sought the intervention of the positivist state as an additional strategy to resolve conflicts. It illustrates the ways notions of White Brazilian citizenship shaped intracommunal conflicts, specifically in the realm of business transactions and job opportunities. In the absence of traditional labor relations among Ottoman peddlers and or elite Ottoman businessmen, the latter surfaced as agents of community discipline to promote good work ethics and citizenship. Finally, it provides a glimpse into the reformed positivist police’s inquisitorial logic of the and how it supported the racialization of commercial crimes.

The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict

The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict Anh Ngô This case study illustrates the complex consequences of the pressure for political representation within a diasporic community. In 2015, an internal conflict disrupted a local Vietnamese women’s agency in Toronto, Canada, over the issue of political representation. This case study describes a conflict between the senior members of this agency and their 1.5 generation counterparts who made up the agency’s board of directors. The conflict arose as a consequence of the latter’s failure to display the flag of the Republic of Viet Nam (rvn) at its events and office. The rvn flag, visualized as three red stripes on a yellow background, represents the lost nation of South Vietnam following the civil war, which became part of the larger Cold War, lasting nineteen years and resulting in massive civilian losses (Lau 153). While to non-Vietnamese persons, the display of the flag may seem trivial, it is the chief political issue in the diaspora because the flag is charged with a complex history, memory, and transnational politics. The conflict that arose in response to an agency’s decision not to fly the rvn flag shows how Vietnamese refugees negotiate their sense of identity and community in a multicultural nation-state like Canada and how larger political forces such as the Cold War legacy and Canadian nation-building exert pressure on understandings of who and what is a refugee. I [End Page 73] argue that the multiple issues presented by the key players in this conflict became elided as the diaspora became hyper-focused on the single sole issue of political representation and overlooked other significant concerns. This case is important for it demonstrates how the often-inevitable act of community-making in an official multicultural society results in a flattening of the multiplicities and complexities of intra-group refugee relations. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of intra-community conflicts to signal the need for the literature to resist the flattening of identities. Recently, Yan, Wong, and Lai interviewed thirty-nine self-identified Chinese persons in Vancouver and noted that for their participants, who differed in place of origin and time period of migration resulting in distinct social, political, and economic systems, “transnational political tensions among the different places of origin are a factor that further divides them, representing an obstacle to generating mutual trust” (456). Contributing to the call for an awareness of multiplicity of communities’ identities, this article traces the events of a specific conflict among the Vietnamese in Toronto. I argue that this conflict, which originally emerged out of some significant complaints by the seniors, which point to deep material and structural challenges Vietnamese seniors face in Canada, became shaped and overshadowed by the larger political context so that the only issue to be addressed was that of political representation. This political context is shaped, on the one hand, by anti-communism, whose persistence attests to the lingering aftermath of the Cold War in shaping diasporic identities and, on the other hand, by the pressures of a Canadian multiculturalism which forces diverse groups of people related by ethnicity to present themselves within a boundary of static culture (Dang, Le, Nguyen). In particular for the Vietnamese community, this static representation is entangled with the events of the war in Vietnam. To some in the Vietnamese community the rvn flag is the symbol of their political purpose and identity. Particularly for those involved in formal Vietnamese associations, most identify as South Vietnamese refugees and as political exiles, having left Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975, in political protest and fear of political persecution. However, in 2015, the younger staff and board of directors of the agency contended that the display of the rvn flag is divisive, as it has come to only represent the loss of the civil war for the South Vietnamese and not the full range of subject and political positions in the diaspora. The diaspora, now over forty years post the war in Vietnam, contains a multitude of identities and sociopolitical affiliations, yet this group continues to present as one community under one flag. After...

Education systems, examination and failure: a case study of Kenyan teenagers in four schools

ABSTRACT This article reports on a small case study of the impact of instructional materials on students, and the impact of high-stakes testing in Kenya on those who fail; who, because there is very limited employment, are potentially open to radicalisation. The setting is secondary schools in Kenya which, after the 1998 attacks by al-Quaeda and later inter- and intra-community conflicts during the 2008 election, has seen a resurgence in externally sponsored terrorism, this time from Al-Shabaab, with reports that Kenya youth were involved. The case study involved examinations of texts on government, history, politics and religion; interviews with directors, teachers and students at four secondary schools, based partly on scripts extracted from those texts. On the advice of the teachers, we included discussion of the literature the students were exposed to which addressed more directly issues of corruption, democracy, etc. We also had discussions with the Kenyan Institute for Curriculum Development. All groups of interviewees were concerned with growing radicalisation, and saw the examination system, which encouraged rote teaching and learning as against critical thinking and led to large numbers of failed students without any job skills in a precarious employment market, prone to inducements from Al-Shabaab.

Lasting impacts and perceived inequities: community reappraisal of the siting of a regional biosolids processing facility in rural Ontario

This paper presents a comparative study of the shift in community perceptions pre- and post-siting of a biosolids processing facility – the Organic Material Recovery Centre – in the rural Township of Southgate, Ontario. The study responds to the need for comparative studies examining residents’ perceptions of contested noxious facilities during acrimonious siting processes and later during facility operations. Interviews were conducted before and after the techno-industrial facility was sited to compare community perceptions of the proposed and operational facility, and further examine residents’ experiences with residual impacts and reflections on the siting process. Results reveal that once the facility began operations and residents had the opportunity to understand its operational mandate and directions, many residents seem to accept the facility as less threatening to well-being, quality of life and core values. Nonetheless, sustained community concerns shifted to invisible impacts and long-term uncertainty. Findings highlight lingering intra-community conflict between those supporting and those who remained concerned about negative impacts. As a result of the hostile community conflict, the local politics seems to have morphed into a ‘one-issue’ political scene, whereby all issues are divided along the lines of municipal councillors opinions of the facility These findings make methodological contributions with pre- and post-siting comparative qualitative research and contribute theoretically to our understanding of residents’ reappraisal of contested noxious techno-industrial facilities, show sustained divisive social impacts within the community, and call for meaningful consultation and increased participatory siting processes that accounts for the diversity of values and expectations during facility siting.

Ancestral and instrumental in the politics of ethnic and religious conflict

ABSTRACTEthnicity, like race, religion, and nationality, is a feature of group identity that is contested. There are literatures devoted to each, and in each there are those who see the origins of identity and affiliation in ancestry and deeply rooted affect and those who see these as socially constructed and instrumentally used by elites. Yet all recognize that the ancestral is socially constructed and that social constructions make use of existing cultural features, and that the vertical cleavages of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality dominate the horizontal ones of class. This generates implications for institutional changes, for the pursuit of extraterritorial interests, for the selection of explanatory narratives for conflict when multiple attributions are possible, for intra-communal conflict, and for policies for ethnic conflict regulation.

After Woolwich: Analyzing Open Source Communications to Understand the Interactive and Multi-polar Dynamics of the Arc of Conflict

This article is based upon a case study of the 2013 murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London. It shows how analysis of open source communications data collected via social media platforms can illuminate the inter- and intra-community conflict dynamics arising in the aftermath of such events. Framed by Collins’ recent theoretical work on the escalatory and de-escalatory forces in conflict situations, the empirical analysis brings to the fore some new insights about the ‘arc of conflict’. These frame a conceptual accent upon the interactive sequences of mobilization and counter-mobilization occurring in the moves towards group-based conflicts, and the importance of understanding the multi-polar nature of these involvements.

Gendering ethnic conflicts: minority women in divided societies – the case of Muslim women in India

ABSTRACTThis article explores the practical and theoretical significance and long-term consequences of the failure to incorporate women’s interests in post-conflict negotiations by examining the case of Muslim women in India. Analyses of deeply divided societies must recognize that political competition and political violence do not affect all citizens equally. Also, the “larger picture” depicted by inter-community conflicts should not overshadow the effects of intra-community conflicts, which are no less important. Evident within each community conflict are the winners and the losers of the political accommodation process, in which the marginalized and weaker sections of each “side” of the conflict may be the real “losers”. Gendered analysis of ethnic conflicts and ethnic conflict resolution demands a reorientation of the concepts of conflict and security – Whose conflict is being solved and who is being secured?

Bio-cultural anchorage of the prickly pear cactus in Tlalnepantla (Morelos), Mexico

The prickly pear cactus is a source of food with strong bio-cultural anchorage in Mexico. This is due to at least three factors: 1) the nature and heritage of cacti; 2) cultural heritage; and 3) the socio-cultural relationships with historical and symbolic roots that have facilitated knowledge of how to cultivate it and how to use it. The aim of this article is to put factors of territorial anchorage and its historical transformation in context by examining the case of the municipality of Tlalnepantla in the state of Morelos, Mexico. This community has experienced accelerated change due to the exchange of traditional crops for the prickly pear cactus and the integration of farming, commercialization and agro-transformation. Our hypothesis is that the market, internal conflicts and a lack of socio-institutional coordination have put social organization into crisis, favoring the territorial spread of the prickly pear cactus and making the Local Agro-Food Systems (LAFS) of Tlalnepantla less competitive. The conclusions highlight important economic and social advances whose roots lie in the strengthening and anchorage of the territory-product. However, circumstances both internal and external to the community persist, such as intra-community conflicts, the international market and cultural paradigm shifts that affect the producers and put consolidation of the LAFS at risk.

Food or flowers? Contested transformations of community food security and water use priorities under new legal and market regimes in Ecuador's highlands

During the past three decades, the Pisque watershed in Ecuador's Northern Andes has become the country's principal export-roses producing area. Recently, a new boom of local smallholders have established small rose greenhouses and joined the flower-export business. This has intensified water scarcity and material/discursive conflicts over water use priorities: water to defend local-national food sovereignty or production for export. This paper examines how including peasant flower farms in the capitalist dream – driven by a ‘mimetic desire’ and copying large-scale capitalist flower-farm practices and technologies – generates new intra-community conflicts over collective water rights, extending traditional class-based water conflicts. New allocation principles in Ecuador's progressive 2008 Constitution and 2014 Water Law prioritising food production over flowers' industrial water use are unlikely to benefit smallholder communities. Instead, decision-making power for peasant communities and their water users' associations on water use priority would enable water user prioritization according to smallholders' own preferences.