“Prison Is for Young People!” Youth, Violence, and the State in Praia and Mindelo, Cape Verde

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Anton Zoettl

Abstract:In the past decade Cape Verde has seen an unexpected outburst of gang-related urban violence. The state has reacted mainly by means of a repressive securitization policy, which has not been able to offer more than temporary solutions. In public discourses, “broken” families, youth drug consumption, and a supposed lack of education and sufficiently severe punishment are often referred to as the main causes for the rise in crime. The article discusses such discourses, contrasting them with the experiences and narratives of inmates from the country’s two central prisons. It suggests that extrajudicial punishment of suspects and offenders by police officers, as reported by many juvenile convicts, is part of the dynamics of violence manifest in different spheres of Cape Verdean society and may be a possible factor influencing the decision of young citizens to “opt” for, or stick to, careers of marginality and delinquency.

Author(s):  
Xiaoyuan Shang ◽  
Karen Fisher

For children who grow up being cared for by the state, rather than their families, in China, the past twenty years has seen a shift: China has gone away from keeping those children in institutions and moved towards alternative approaches that attempt to honor children's rights to an inclusive childhood and adulthood. This book reviews the changes in policy and practice that underlie this shift, and, through interviews with young people involved with state care in the period, presents a clear view of how the change in approach has affected individual lives. As this is an issue that all countries struggle with, the lessons on offer here will be of value not just to those working in and studying China but to a broader range of practitioners in child welfare and development.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 285-295
Author(s):  
Marcin Owczarek ◽  
Grainne McAnee ◽  
Donal McAteer ◽  
Mark Shevlin

AbstractExcessive worry can negatively influence one’s developmental trajectories. In the past 70 years, there have been studies aimed towards documenting and analysing concerns or ‘worries’ of teen and preteen individuals. There have been many quantitative and qualitative approaches established, suggesting different themes of contextual adolescent worry. With the hopes of future clinical utility, it is important to parse through these studies and gather what is currently known about what teens and preteens worry about and what is the state of methods used to gather that knowledge. Studies were searched for using Web of Science, PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus and ScienceDirect databases and selected on systematic criteria. Data regarding the country in which the study took place, participants, methods of collection, worry themes and conclusions and limitations were extracted. Data were synthesised in a narrative fashion. It was concluded that currently available methods of measuring themes of adolescent worry face certain problems. Themes of worry differ substantially between the studies, with the exception of school performance seeing stable high endorsement across cultures and ages. Issues with ordering worry themes and implications for future understanding of adolescent and preadolescent worry are discussed.


Author(s):  
Derek Pardue

Musicians rapping in Kriolu—a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde—have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the Kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, this book introduces Lisbon's Kriolu rap scene and the role of rap music in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. It demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As the book argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.


2021 ◽  
pp. 184-209
Author(s):  
Ana Aliverti

This final chapter explores the relationship between place, belonging, and order in migration policing. It foregrounds the question of ‘place’ as a category of analysis to understand how immigration and police officers relate to and make sense of their quotidian work and the different publics they interact with. Foregrounding space in policing sheds light on its importance for visualizing, sensing, and constructing order. This spatial and atmospheric dimension of policing forms part of officers’ cognitive maps through which they attach meaning to and make sense of their patches, and the world beyond them. As these officers deal on an everyday basis with people hailing from far away, what are their perceptions of the world outside their patches and how do these ideas and experiences impact on their work? Directing our attention to the geographies of migration policing, its spatial dimensions illuminate how officers apprehend and construct ‘the here and now’ of the local and vernacular in relation to the ‘outside’ and the past. While the intensification of global movements and interconnections—and the attendant economic, social, and political transformations it entailed–has been said to de-border the state and erode a sense of place, their testimonies point to a recasting of it (of the immediate communities and the nation) in a globalizing context. In such context, these sensibilities which articulate experiences of change have become more acute as these officers convey their sense that the world has been turned upside down.


Author(s):  
Javier Auyero ◽  
Katherine Sobering

Over the past few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have shifted from analyzing the state’s neglect and abandonment to documenting its harsh interventions and punishing presence. Most of this research has focused on the overt actions and inactions of the state. Yet we know very little about the covert world of state action that is hidden from public view. The Ambivalent State offers an unprecedented look into the clandestine relationships between police officers and drug dealers in Argentina. Drawing on a unique combination of ethnographic research and documentary evidence, including hundreds of pages of wiretapped phone conversations, sociologists Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering analyze the inner workings of “police-criminal collusion” and its connections to drug markets and the depacification of daily life. Through rich descriptions of the actual clandestine interactions between drug dealers and police, they argue that an up-close examination of covert state action exposes the workings of an “ambivalent state”: one that enforces the rule of law while at the same time and in the same place functions as a partner to what it defines as criminal behavior. The Ambivalent State develops a political sociology of violence that focuses on not only what takes place in police stations, criminal courts, and poor neighborhoods, but also the clandestine actions and interactions of police agents, judges, and politicians that structure daily life at the urban margins. By way of empirical demonstration, the book makes an urgent call for scholars to incorporate clandestine action into understandings of the state.


1970 ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Ikran Eum

In Egypt, the term ‘urfi2 in relation to marriage means literally “customary” marriage, something that has always existed in Egypt but nowadays tends mostly to be secretly practiced among young people. Traditionally, according to Abaza,3 ‘urfi marriage took place not only for practical purposes (such as enabling widows to remarry while keeping the state pension of their deceased husbands), but also as a way of matchmaking across classes (since men from the upper classes use ‘urfi marriage as a way of marrying a second wife from a lower social class). In this way a man could satisfy his sexual desires while retaining his honor by preserving his marriage to the first wife and his position in the community to which he belonged, and keeping his second marriage secret.


2019 ◽  
pp. 3121-334
Author(s):  
Carmen Palumbo ◽  
Antinea Ambretti ◽  
Giovanna Ferraioli

Over the past few decades, the adoption of an inclusive approach to education has stimulated a reflection on the educational value of body and movement within teaching-learning process in order to break down all barriers to learning and promote the full participation of young people to school activities. Indeed,body and movement represent an important didactic "medium" for developing individualized and personalized learning paths that take into account the specific needs and characteristics of students thus contributing to their global and harmonious development.


Author(s):  
Jeff Chang ◽  
Daniel Martinez HoSang ◽  
Soya Jung ◽  
Chandan Reddy ◽  
Alex Tom

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.


Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.


Author(s):  
Walter Lowrie ◽  
Alastair Hannay

A small, insignificant-looking intellectual with absurdly long legs, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a veritable Hans Christian Andersen caricature of a man. A strange combination of witty cosmopolite and melancholy introvert, he spent years writing under a series of fantastical pseudonyms, lavishing all the splendor of his mind on a seldom-appreciative world. He had a tragic love affair with a young girl, was dominated by an unforgettable Old Testament father, fought a sensational literary duel with a popular satiric magazine, and died in the midst of a violent quarrel with the state church for which he had once studied theology. Yet this iconoclast produced a number of brilliant books that have profoundly influenced modern thought. This classic biography presents a charming and warmly appreciative introduction to the life and work of the great Danish writer. It tells the story of Kierkegaard's emotionally turbulent life with a keen sense of drama and an acute understanding of how his life shaped his thought. The result is a wonderfully informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the past two centuries.


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