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The purpose of my article is to analyse the language utilized by the media as a representation of the evolution of the rapports existing between social and linguistic changes. Starting from two articles from 1978 and 1996 I would like to reveal the linguistic characteristics of each period. The linguistic material described has hybrid features being situated between institutional political discourse and ordinary discourse practices. Thus, the printed media are the privileged place used to identify lexical habits concerning politics. The main conclusions of this analysis are connected to the dynamics of linguistic modifications. During the 1970's, one could notice the correspondence between political stability and linguistic stagnation while during the 1990's, language (mainly political vocabulary) proved to be unstable and innovative. In this way, these lexical changes are the logical product of a restructuring phase of the partisan offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to explore Affect as a potential source of both personal and political subjectivity, with special reference to Bangladeshi author Hasan Azizul Haque's historical novel Agun Pakhi (The Bird of Fire). Published in 2008, The Bird of Fire chronicles a highly eventful time in the history of the Indian subcontinent. The novel begins around twenty years before the partition of Bengal and goes on to document a number of socio-political upheavals of the time, including, for example, the Second World War, the Bengal famine of 1943, the partition of Bengal, and the ensuing unrest between the Hindus and Muslims. In The Bird of Fire, however, these events are documented not as external, 'outside' activities, and are instead mediated by and presented through the everyday domestic experiences of the novel's unnamed female protagonist. As a consequence, the 'mundane' in Haque's novel acquires political salience. In Haque's novel, qualities like tenderness and affection, which are usually taken to be signs of 'passive' femininity, come to play a crucial role in the protagonist's attempts to subjectivize her. This 'feminine' expression, in turn, is largely driven by Affective dimensions. By the virtue of her emotional response-ability, the protagonist succeeds in forging a new mode of resistance that challenges both political violence and patriarchy. By studying the form and content of Haque's novel, this paper explores how the notion of resistance in The Bird of Fire recalibrates itself in terms of the 'ordinariness' of the protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on campaigns against the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention). These campaigns not only obstructed ratification processes in a number of countries, but also that the openly hostile and highly gendered attacks had a direct impact on women's rights activists and their work, seriously hindering their work, but also affecting their well-being and safety. In this paper we explore the violent implications of the campaigns against the Istanbul Convention which are part of wider anti-gender campaigns. We argue that the violence of the campaigns and the violent implications should be considered gendered political violence, which effectively marginalizes women and other targeted groups and obstructs their participation in society and politics and as such is central to current autocratization tendencies and undermining of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This article presents a model of political competition in which political parties, through clientelism strategies, vie for control of legislative seats. Parties exercise political violence to prevent potential rivals from gaining power and threatening their position within the hybrid political regime. The theory suggests that the degree of political violence exerted by parties in hybrid regimes will increase (decrease) as they concentrate more (less) power in the legislature. Methods: Using the methodology of analytical narratives, we examine the narrative on political violence in the Colombian political regime to identify key actors, strategies, information sets, and institutional changes. From these identified elements, we construct a theoretical model of political competition within the mathematical theory of games to explain the institutional changes highlighted in the narrative. Finally, we develop an econometric model to find statistical evidence supporting the predictions of the theoretical model derived from the narrative. Results: The narrative and the analytical narrative indicate that, in a hybrid regime, a higher degree of political power concentration causes a higher rate of political violence. The estimation of the Vector Auto-regression model allows us to analyze the response of the violence rate to a shock in the concentration index. Following an unexpected increase in the concentration of political power, the violence rate shows an initial increase of approximately 0.3 percentage points above its initial value. Subsequently, the effect attenuates slightly and stabilizes at around 0.2 percentage points above the baseline, maintaining this level throughout the period. Discussion/Conclusion: The theoretical model proposed in this paper suggests an explanation of political violence that diverges from the explanations offered by traditional theories. We suggest that the theoretical model proposed here captures the historical logic of the relationship between violence, political clientelism, and exclusion in Colombia, a country with a relatively long tradition as a formal democracy (since 1958), leading us to interesting conclusions that have not been proposed so far in the literature on violence in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, I interrogate the dominant representation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in humanitarian discourse as helpless victims in need of rescue. Based on the stories of IDP women and gender diverse individuals in the Philippines affected by the Zamboanga City siege in 2013, I illustrate how they exercised agency to shape their trajectories of displacement. The capacity of Filipino IDPs to contend with their displacement is shaped by their power as bakwit (evacuees), and by their class and ethnoreligious identities. While Christian Filipino IDPs had access to material, financial, and social resources, allowing them to engage in temporary migration after displacement, Muslim Filipino IDPs with limited access to these same resources found themselves in unwanted mobility and prolonged situations of displacement. Yet, Muslim Filipino IDPs do not lack agency, as they continue to actively and consciously forge new strategies to regain a sense of home in extended exile. Ultimately, while identifying bakwit power as a useful conceptual tool to make legible how IDPs exercised control at different stages of their displacement, embracing such a framework should not negate the long history of political violence in the region that continues to keep some people on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tecnología y Ciencias del Agua is the property of Instituto Mexicano de Tecnologia del Agua (IMTA) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Under what conditions do incumbents support, tolerate, or try to rein in armed groups within their borders? The paper argues that incumbents strategize toward armed groups in ways that help them manage the ruling coalition and remain in power. I find that incumbents support armed groups in provinces where provincial politicians have defected from the ruling coalition to opposition parties, recruiting armed groups to deliver the province in national elections with fraud and violence and punish elite defectors. Where incumbents are not fighting to keep provinces in the ruling coalition, I show that they tolerate non-dissident groups that enjoy social contracts with local communities, and try to contain their dissident counterparts. Incumbents are likely to repress predatory armed groups, dissident and non-dissident alike. Doing so helps boost elite and mass support for incumbents and project central government power into the province. The argument was inductively built with comparative case studies from Nigeria and then evaluated in Kenya. The findings contribute to an important research agenda on government-armed group relationships and carry implications for security sector aid and reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre- and post-independence Zimbabwe has been marred by extreme political violence and gross human rights violations. This ranges from Chimoio and Nyadzonya massacres in the 1970s, the Gukurahundi massacres of the early 1980s and since 2000, unprecedented political violence that characterised elections in the country. Resultantly, Zimbabwe has witnessed peace-building processes and frameworks aimed at ending episodes of politically motivated violence. This paper analyses how peace-building frameworks can ensure lasting peace in Zimbabwe. It draws experience from previous peace processes in Zimbabwe. Data was gathered through interviews and desktop research. Purposive and snowball sampling were utilised for selection of 10 key informants and 50 victims of political violence from six provinces in Zimbabwe. The paper casts doubts on existing peace and reconciliation approaches that aim at achieving a 'peaceful society" in a community where perpetrators remain faceless. Instead, the paper discusses an open peace-building process based on unmasking of perpetrators in an open dialogue platforms of victims and perpetrators, reparations and compensation and depoliticizing peace processes. It argues that although there are peace-building frameworks in the country, experiences from Zimbabwe points to opposite results. Calls by civil society, community and scholars to resolve underlying conflicts and achieve peace and justice have not translated into sustainable peace. This paper concludes that without an open peace-building process, there would be a danger of false peace and reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the case studies of Hungary and Israel, this article proposes an expansion of the term 'political violence' to encompass the phenomenon of using harsh language followed by punitive measures, which are not necessarily physical. It aims to gain additional power, intimidate opponents, and narrow the public and political abilities of social and political forces with a different ideology. One major consequence is a transition from a democratic regime to a non-democratic one. The paper concludes that political violence is currently mainly verbal in Israel, but in Hungary, it also has the practical dimension of hurting the government's political opponents. This policy has a direct implication on the state national identity, which is in both cases a more national-religious one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay documents my three-decade-long journey of connections and resultant transformations between scholarly knowledge and artistic production in my work. In reinvestigating my history with stage and visual arts, I trace the relationship between traditionally 'alien' practices and academic understandings of societal and political mass violence and invite the reader to reconsider what academia stands for in order to engage with borderless histories of conflict, violence, and displacement. This essay dwells on how artistic engagement is both a personal and a profoundly political process through which the experience of violence is communicated through thoughts, emotions, hopes, and expressions of trauma. There are also significant ethical concerns present concerning the portrayal of violence, death, and suffering, which the paper discusses under the aegis of ethics of witnessing as responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the article by Gayatri Singh, Trina Vithayathil and Kanhu Charan Pradhan on residential segregation by caste in urban India, in this issue of Environment and Urbanization. It compares caste-based residential segregation in India and Pakistan, focusing on Mithi and Karachi in Pakistan. The paper discusses how political change, migration, violence, and religious and ethnic identity in Karachi have shaped preferences on where different castes and religious minorities wish to reside. Meanwhile, in Mithi, where capitalism is not fully developed, caste continues to determine where one can live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conceptualizes dwelling as an analytical lens to study the effects of combined human-made and environmental threats on the governing of peripheral urbanization. I call this grounded and phenomenological-analytical approach to dwelling dwelling in limbo to highlight the improvised and always uncertain nature of low-income populations' forms of residence. As such, dwelling will be explored as a temporal, political, and more-than-human process: as residents' exposure to, endurance while, and ways of navigating towards urbanization. Combining three data sources - semi-structured interviews with residents, politicians, state attorneys; own observations/ fieldwork notes, and local media reports - the paper situates this approach in the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro. I present cases of once promised, yet suspended resettlement and highlight the role of organized criminal actors in the partial implementation of the Project Iguaçu - a disaster prevention program financed by Brazil's Federal Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). The paper identifies such dwelling in limbo, that is, residents' exposure to criminal actors' dominion, enduring (non)resettlement, and navigating amidst uncertainty, to illustrate the effects of standby urbanization. Standby urbanization, I argue, is characterized by an active passivity of marginalized residents: To secure future dwelling, low-income populations are forced into supporting structures that perpetuate their marginality. In other words, dwelling in limbo is not an accidental side-effect of urbanization, but a form of political violence inherent to the governing of urban peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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