Kind Of Insecurity Research Articles

Del no saber al saber (y viceversa): inseguridad e intimidad en El Salvador de la posguerra

Shortly after the end of El Salvador’s civil war (1980- 1992), Salvadorans began to experience a new kind of insecurity—an affective state of not knowing when to feel anxiety. Their war-era survival repertoire could not account for the new postwar context. Slowly, and then suddenly, gangs converted into the new principal danger in the Central American country. Today they have become figures of intimacy in El Salvador’s political and community life. As the thirtieth anniversary of the Peace Accords nears, in this article, based on a combined 30 years of ethnographic fieldwork, we consider transformations in senses of insecurity, from not knowing to knowing and back again, as well as continuing forms of unknowing, that perpetuate unequal distributions of power in urban San Salvador.

Competition, Patronage and Fragmentation: The Limits of Bottom-Up Approaches to Security Governance in Ituri

People are affected by different kinds of insecurity in the Ituri Province in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This article investigates donor-driven attempts to improve security governance there. More specifically, it investigates bottom-up approaches to security governance in Ituri’s capital of Bunia and in Irumu territory. Whereas in Bunia people are faced with high levels of violent crime, Irumu is the site of a violent conflict between the Ituri Patriotic Resistance Force (FRPI), an armed group connected to the Ngiti community, and the Congolese army. Involving local non-state security actors in security governance is perceived by international and national actors as a pragmatic way to improve security conditions. However, we show that these bottom-up security governance initiatives have not succeeded in resolving the issues that generate insecurity. We argue that this is because the drivers of insecurity in northeastern Congo are translocal and too complex for localised bottom-up approaches to significantly change the status quo.

Peculiar Weather Variability and Terrorism in Nigeria

Terrorism is now a global phenomenon which is threatening the peace and security of the world. Nigeria is not left out as it is experiencing the kind of insecurity never witnessed since the end of civil war in the 1970s. The Boko Haram terrorist group has wrecked tremendous havoc in the North-eastern region of the country and beyond. There is a possible indication that weather variability may be the side effect or root cause of terrorism in Nigeria. This is because climate change is seen as a threat multiplier due to its deleterious impacts on the environment and livelihood. This paper seeks to identify the relationship between climate variability and terrorism. Data on temperature and precipitation will be collected from Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET). Also published and unpublished scholarly articles of various literature , investigations and electronically stored information on implications of climate change was reviewed to determine whether changes in weather system are catalysts to the insecurity being witnessed recently in Nigeria. Content analysis technique was applied for data analysis and findings reveal that changes in the climate system escalate the existing tension in natural resources depletion. The paper recommends possible mitigation and adaptation measures that will address the security impact of these changes in Nigeria.

Promoting Attachment-Related Mindfulness and Compassion: a Wait-List-Controlled Study of Women Who Were Mistreated During Childhood

Numerous studies have shown that mindfulness-based interventions contribute to a variety of positive outcomes in physical, cognitive, and affective domains. Less is known about how mindfulness influences variables associated with close interpersonal relationships. The present study evaluated a novel mindfulness-based intervention for promoting cognitive-emotional processes that are underdeveloped in people who have experienced unhealthy attachment relationships. In a sample of women who were mistreated in childhood, baseline measures confirmed that attachment anxiety was related to rumination and negative emotion; attachment avoidance was related to emotion suppression and lack of emotional clarity; and both kinds of insecurity were related to emotion dysregulation and lower levels of mindfulness. Across three measurement periods, a treatment group (N = 17), relative to a wait-list control group (N = 22), evinced significant improvements in the domains of rumination, emotion suppression, clarity of emotions, emotion regulation, and mindfulness. A multiple mediation analysis showed that, of these variables, improvements in rumination and emotional clarity mediated the gains in mindfulness for the treatment group. Also, participants in the treatment group showed significant changes in their use of mindfulness-based language when writing about stressful or traumatic childhood attachment experiences. Taken together, the results suggest that the intervention led to increases in mindfulness, primarily due to decreased rumination and increased emotional clarity, and these treatment-related changes were specifically related to participants’ thoughts and emotions regarding attachment.

Heeft coping een invloed op (de relatie tussen) baanonzekerheid, welzijn en arbeidstevredenheid?

Does coping affect (the relationship between) job insecurity, well-being and job satisfaction? Does coping affect (the relationship between) job insecurity, well-being and job satisfaction? Katrien Bohets & Hans De Witte, Gedrag & Organisatie, Volume 19, Juni 2006, nr. 2, pp. 113. The consequences of both quantitative and qualitative job insecurity on well-being and job satisfaction are analysed. Quantitative job insecurity refers to the continuity of the actual job, whereas qualitative job insecurity refers to the continuity of valued job characteristics. The association of both kinds of insecurity with emotion-focused coping (avoidance) is studied, as well as the moderating role of problem-focused coping in the relation between job insecurity, satisfaction and well-being. Data of 568 employees from 23 companies are used to test the hypotheses. The results show that both forms of job insecurity are associated with a decrease in well-being and job satisfaction, as expected. Job insecurity is also associated with an increase in avoidance behaviours (emotion-focused coping) and with a decrease in problem-focused coping behaviours. Problem-focused coping (and avoidance) do not moderate the relationship between job insecurity, satisfaction and well-being.

Conceptualizing economic security and governance: China confronts globalization

With the expansion and deepening of globalization, as well as China's entry into the World Trade Organization, the nexus between economic growth and national security has gained prominence in China since the mid-1990s. How to ensure socio-economic security while maintaining its robust economic growth is now the most serious concern of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government. This paper addresses three questions: first, it explores why and how the transformation of economic growth and national security as two separate logics to a single domain evolved conceptually over the past two decades in China; second, what kinds of insecurities are generated by China's robust economic growth coupled with the expansion and deepening of globalization, and in which way and to what extent do they challenge China's government; third, what kinds of mechanisms or policy instruments have been adopted by China's government to address emerging economic insecurities while maintaining robust economic growth. The paper concludes that in the case of China, globalization has posed new challenges to economic security, but given that economic insecurity has its particular salience in individual countries, national institutional adjustment or adaptation becomes increasingly important for each country to govern in the interests of economic security while maintaining economic growth.

Resistances of Gender

Resistances of Gender

The U.S. Response as Armed Struggle

The U.S. Response as Armed Struggle Neal Milner (bio), Sankaran Krishna (bio), and Kathy E. Ferguson (bio) The Honolulu Advertiser’s September 16 headline read: “Prayers and War Plans”, while two other front-page stories announced “Conspirators in Attack Kept Low Profile” and “Fight Against Terror Won’t Be Easy”. Alongside these stories was a mug shot of Osama bin Laden with a caption “World’s Most Wanted.” These visions of conventional war, new war, and crime are mixed visions, mixed metaphors for viewing the September 11 attack and its aftermath. Months later, these visions continue to coexist. Sometimes they compete, other times they reinforce one another. No single metaphor dominates entirely, as even the most hawkish cabinet members realize the risks of comparing this to conventional warfare. Yet newspapers have utilized familiar war graphics to represent the Afghan war, using maps, charts and arrows to portray front lines, troop movements, and territorial gains and losses; such visual props evoke the known quantity of a conventional war, even while President Bush insists that the nation has embarked on a different kind of fight. When CNN and the Honolulu Advertiser proclaim that this is “America’s new war,” some equivocation remains as to whether “new” means “our most recent war” or “war of an hitherto unknown kind.” A different strategy for describing, understanding and perhaps unraveling the violence is one portraying the U.S. response as “armed struggle.” Like revolutionary groups’ armed struggle strategies, the early U.S. response emphasizes the need to be in it for the long haul. But this is not the long haul of conventional warfare so much as it is the uncertain, peaks-and-valleys time frame of a guerilla movement. Like armed struggle, the emerging articulation of the U.S. response emphasizes sudden, quick battles rather than drawn-out conventional fighting. These are wars without borders. Those involved are never secure. They can never be certain that they are sufficiently hidden, or that “their” territory is really their territory. The enemy is all over the place. It can appear any time anywhere, just as the guerillas can. For a society committed to armed struggle, there is little distinction between military and civilian life. “The cause” becomes everything, justifying extraordinary measures, demanding larger-than-life sacrifices. Ordinary life is recruited into the ruthless binary that frames the struggle: comrades who fall are heroes; those who hesitate are traitors. There is no room for a loyal opposition; to question is to betray. That kind of insecurity and surveillance is very much a part of the U.S. response, as U.S. struggles to act with the same protective vigilance as guerilla movements do. The attackers were, in the words of the Washington Post, a “soft, subtle presence in this country for many months.” It’s not hard to picture leaders of a national liberation movement saying to their supporters just what U.S. leaders are saying: our enemy is not safe anywhere, and neither are we. Armed struggle merges violent with charitable responses. The carrot and stick work hand in hand as the advocates of armed struggle attempt to gain new supporters. If, as President Bush declared, “Those who are not with us are against us,” then supporters become comrades, eligible to have other sins forgiven so long as they are “with us,” while opponents become enemies, no matter what their other virtues, if they are “against us.” Of course many elements within U.S. politics and society pull against the mobilization of tropes of armed struggle. For example, the Pearl Harbor analogies that were so popular after the initial September 11 attack pull our mental maps toward the reassuring promise of a clear enemy, a workable military solution, and, best of all, a total victory. The Bush administration’s unwillingness to negotiate, to accept anything less than total victory, suggests that the World War II model of universal triumph vs. complete surrender still operates in U.S. policy. Yet events may propel policy makers away from the relatively well-defined arena of “war” and into the murky and boundary-less arena of armed struggle. Thinking about the national response in these terms helps to highlight...

Edinburgh Festival 1993

with even a closely pruned version of a play that usually inspires despair and incomprehension among actors at the first read-through. But the assurance and skill of the staging consisted in bringing it closer to musical comedy than to Chekhov, and when it faltered, it was with the kind of insecurity that goes with the musical genre. This production had considerable wit and charm and lovely stage pictures but still wanted to show it could be taken seriously. But not too seriously: Judge told you about the Great War, then let you know that it didn't really matter that much.

Commercial Morality, the Merchant Character, and the History of the Voidable Preference

American bankruptcy law has never decided what to do about the crucial but elusive concept of the voidable preference. Defined in the most roughly general terms, a preference has a few basic elements: It is a transfer of money or of some interest in property by a debtor to a creditor to settle an antecedent debt; it occurs when the debtor faces imminent bankruptcy; and it benefits that creditor to the prejudice of other creditors by granting the favored creditor a greater share of the diminished assets of the debtor than that creditor would enjoy under the formal system of bankruptcy distribution.' Preference doctrine would seem to be a central part of bankruptcy law. If the general purpose of bankruptcy law is to ensure a ratable distribution of the debtor's assets among the creditors,2 preference law would seem, by definition, to be a primary instrument for achieving that goal. Indeed, the preference, unlike its somewhat mismatched partner, the fraudulent conveyance, is strictly a creature of bankruptcy law, rather than a part of nonbankruptcy commercial law that simply receives special enforcement in the bankruptcy process.3 Preference law, however, reflects a kind of insecurity about the formal process of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy law enforces its principle of ratable distribution at the technical point when the petition is filed. But preference law then sets a still earlier moment at which the debtor's estate faces a risk of dismemberment. At that earlier moment, preference law imposes a duty or sanction on the debtor or individual creditors to preserve the estate so that, when the petition is filed, the trustee

Migration and Life Satisfaction: Evidence From Latin America

Using data from the Gallup World Poll and Latinobarometro, we examinethe relationship between life satisfaction, vulnerabilities, and migration in LatinAmerica. We look at three kinds of insecurities: nutritional, personal, and job insecurity.We find that controlling for income, migration experience by a householdmember increases life satisfaction of the respondent. We also find, however, thatnutritional insecurities interact negatively with migration. In other words, hungerhas a devastating effect on happiness, especially in households where a member isabsent due to migration.