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Although much has been written on the Sri Lankan state's civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), less has been said about how the conflict's dynamics evolved. How did the parties come to utilize the methods they did? Why did the war become so brutal, characterized by a predisposition toward extreme violence on both sides? Using the typology of “dirty war,” this investigation seeks to address such questions, demonstrating how the strategic choices of the main belligerents shaped the conflict. The analysis shows that while the conflict emerged out of deep-rooted social and ethnic divisions, these factors do not account for how the war came to be defined so comprehensively by the methods of dirty war. It finds that dirty war developed from a sporadic tactic to advance political goals to dominant military practice by a reciprocal process of escalation that eventually internalized dirty war as the accepted mode of strategic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the historical roots and cultural characteristics of the Chechens and Albanians, and how they relate, in their recurrent conflicts with the Russians and Serbs, to long-term grievances, the second variable of my Brutalisation theory. In this article I also explain why the theory departs from the grievance rather than greed premise. Indeed, most of the Chechen and Albanian grievances appear to be based on real and correctly perceived, i.e. absolute deprivations. More fundamentally, given my post -constructivist proposition on the "acting-out" of norms, values and beliefs irrespective of factual or invented origins, I seek to show that martialism, (Sufiinspired) resistance, and (male) egalitarianism have helped to shape and sustain historic grievances, Islamisation (particularly among Chechens), nationalist aspirations and traditional violence-values in Chechen and Albanian societies. Finally, I describe how pre-1979 trauma's and devastations destroyed most records, buildings and symbols of their cultures and histories, as a cautionary note to my efforts to trace both the factual and mythologised foundations of their identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used data from the 1990 General Social Survey to investigate the extent to which anti-Semitism had syndromic relationships with other authoritarianism-related attitudes among American White non-Jews. The correlational and factor analytic connections between four measures of anti-Semitism and the other attitudes were generally weak. There were no clear-cut differences between respondents high and low in education in the strength of these connections. Moreover, when the scores of respondents favorable and unfavorable to Jews were compared on a number of authoritarianism-related scales, the differences were usually small. The results suggest a diminished role for anti-Semitism in authoritarian attitude syndromes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine the validity of inferences drawn from readiness tests when placing children in the regular or a 2-year kindergarten program. Using data from nine Virginia school districts, we studied the technical characteristics of four commonly employed readiness tests. Boys, minorities, children of low socioeconomic status, and young children scored consistently lower on all four tests. Three of the four tests were fairly reliable, but the fourth was highly inconsistent for minorities and those younger than 5 years. None of the four tests were impressive predictors of future test performance. The results are interpreted within specific selection and placement policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]