scholarly journals WHEN LARGE CONFLICTS SUBSIDE: THE EBBS AND FLOWS OF VIOLENCE IN POST-SUHARTO INDONESIA

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Barron ◽  
Sana Jaffrey ◽  
Ashutosh Varshney

AbstractThe last decade has witnessed an extraordinary spate of scholarship on the ethno-communal violence that swept through Indonesia following the collapse of the Suharto regime. Yet we know very little about how these large-scale violent conflicts subsided and the patterns of post-conflict violence that have emerged since. We introduce evidence from an original dataset to show that the high violence period lasted till 2003, after which violence declined in intensity and scale. Despite this aggregate decline, we find that old conflict sites still exhibit relatively high levels of small-scale violence. We conclude that Indonesia has moved to a new, post-conflict phase where large-scale violence is infrequent, yet small-scale violence remains unabated, often taking on new forms. Finally, we propose that effective internal security interventions by the state are a key reason, although not the only reason, why large-scale violence has not emerged again despite the continued prevalence of low-level violence.

Author(s):  
Alice Heeren

Rubem Valentim was born in 1922 in Salvador in the state of Bahia. A self-taught artist, Valentim starts his career in the 1940s acting alongside artists like Mario Cravo Júnior and others in effervescent new artistic milieu of the state of Brahia. As art historian Roberto Conduru has noted, Valentim, similarly to other artists working in the 1940s and 1950s in Latin America, responded to Joaquín Torres-García’s Universalimso Constructivo. Nevertheless, Valentim also learned from artists such as Alfredo Volpi and Milton Dacosta carrying their geometric stylistic principles into his own symbolic world heavily influenced by Afro-Brazilian religions. From the 1960s onwards, besides small-scale objects and paintings, Valentim also began working in large-scale murals, installations, and public art pieces, the most famous being his marble mural for the NOVACAP building in Brasília. Valentim found a common thread between the modernist rationality of Constructivism and the geometric lines of Afro-Brazilian visual culture. His work manifested local values and themes, while acting in the process of building a Brazilian national identity, and also figuring into the universal debates central to modernism. Paulo Herkenhoff points to how the double axe of Xangô, a recurrent theme in Valentim’s work with its double edge blade acts as a metaphor for the artist’s endeavor, working between Constructivism and Afro-Brazilian mythology. Valentim has become an exponent of Brazilian art and is especially praised for shedding light into the visual world of Afro-Brazilian religions. He showed at the now iconic 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal and at the 16ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo and in 1977. In 1998, the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAM-BA) inaugurated a special room in his sculpture garden in the artist’s name.


2008 ◽  
Vol 136 (10) ◽  
pp. 3781-3795 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward I. Tollerud ◽  
Fernando Caracena ◽  
Steven E. Koch ◽  
Brian D. Jamison ◽  
R. Michael Hardesty ◽  
...  

Previous studies of the low-level jet (LLJ) over the central Great Plains of the United States have been unable to determine the role that mesoscale and smaller circulations play in the transport of moisture. To address this issue, two aircraft missions during the International H2O Project (IHOP_2002) were designed to observe closely a well-developed LLJ over the Great Plains (primarily Oklahoma and Kansas) with multiple observation platforms. In addition to standard operational platforms (most important, radiosondes and profilers) to provide the large-scale setting, dropsondes released from the aircraft at 55-km intervals and a pair of onboard lidar instruments—High Resolution Doppler Lidar (HRDL) for wind and differential absorption lidar (DIAL) for moisture—observed the moisture transport in the LLJ at greater resolution. Using these observations, the authors describe the multiscalar structure of the LLJ and then focus attention on the bulk properties and effects of scales of motion by computing moisture fluxes through cross sections that bracket the LLJ. From these computations, the Reynolds averages within the cross sections can be computed. This allow an estimate to be made of the bulk effect of integrated estimates of the contribution of small-scale (mesoscale to convective scale) circulations to the overall transport. The performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model in forecasting the intensity and evolution of the LLJ for this case is briefly examined.


Author(s):  
Selin Çağatay ◽  
Mia Liinason ◽  
Olga Sasunkevich

AbstractThis chapter lays out the theoretical foundation of the book. It conceptualizes resistance as a space in-between small-scale mundane practices with a low level of collective organizing and large-scale protest activities which often exemplify resistance in social movement studies. In line with feminist and queer conceptualization of resistance, the authors suggest to examine multi-scalarity of resistant practices. The chapter attends to three scales of feminist and LGBTI+  activism in Russia, Turkey, and Scandinavia. The first scale analyzes activism in relation to the civil society-state-market triad. The second scale problematizes the notion of solidarity in relations between feminist and LGBTI+  activists from different geopolitical regions and countries as well as between small- and large-scale activist organizations and groups. Finally, the third scale focuses on individual resistant practices and the role of individual bodies in emergence of collective political struggles.


Author(s):  
Finn Stepputat

The article explores the phenomenon of mob violence in predominatly Mayan towns in rural Guatemala. Since 1996, more than 100 people have been killed by crowds in rural towns. The victims have usually been young men accused of often minor criminal acts, or representatives of the state trying to protect the victims. The occurrence of mob violence coincides roughly with the area where the army organized civil self-defence patrols during the civil war from 1981-96 as part of the national security counterinsurgency program. The post-conflict transition has paradoxically brought security back to the top of the political agenda as political violence has been substituted and overshadowed by violence related to drug trafficking and other forms of criminality. The article shows how mob violence has been interpreted in the context of postconflict transformations where the elimination of violence and violent conflicts has been addressed as an object of development, and suggests that we, in addition to common sociological interpretations, may understand lynchings as an exclusive practice of communal sovereignty within a transnational political field of politics of in/security.  


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
Logan Cochrane ◽  
John-Michael Davis

The literature on international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) has focused primarily on large INGOs, which capture the majority of total INGO spending but represent a small number of total INGOs. Over the past two decades, the number of INGOs has more than tripled throughout the global North, which has ushered in a decentralization of the sector as an emerging class of small- and medium-sized INGOs increasingly share the same space once occupied solely by large INGOs. This study focuses on these INGOs in transition to explore how they differ from large INGOs that receive significant government funding and their pathways to scale. Using an original dataset of 1371 Canadian INGOs, we explored comparative differences related to funding sources, overhead, organizational age, country coverage, staff, and religion between the transitioning and small-scale INGOs. Our results identified several general insights for how INGOs transition: (1) Large INGOs are less likely to articulate a religious motivation, which may impede government funding; (2) INGOs are more likely to be headquartered in Ontario, which is closer to federal government offices; (3) low overhead expenditures inhibit small-scale INGOs from transitioning to medium- and large-scale INGOs; (4) organizational age plays a critical factor to scale-up as INGOs increase their experience and expertise; (5) generous compensation to attract talented staff offers an under-valued pathway to scale. Finally, our results demonstrate the diversity among INGOs in Canada and problematizes singular scale-up pathways, while underscoring the necessity of future research to explore scaling strategies through individual case studies.


Author(s):  
Beatriz Reboredo ◽  
Gilles Bellon

Abstract We investigate the steady dynamical response of the atmosphere on the equatorial β-plane to a steady, localized, mid-tropospheric heating source at the equator. Expanding Gill (1980)’s seminal work, we vary the latitudinal and longitudinal scales of the diabatic heating pattern while keeping its total amount fixed. We focus on characteristics of the response which would be particularly important if the circulation interacted with the hydrologic and energy cycles: the overturning circulation and the low-level wind. In the limit of very small scale in either the longitudinal or latitudinal direction, the vertical energy transport balances the diabatic heating and this sets the intensity of the overturning circulation. In this limit, a fast low-level westerly jet is located around the center of diabatic heating. With increasing longitudinal or latitudinal scale of the diabatic heating, the intensity of the overturning circulation decreases and the low-level westerly jet decreases in maximum velocity and spatial extent relative to the spatial extent of this heating. The associated low-level eastward mass transport decreases only with increasing longitudinal scale. These results suggest that moisture-convergence feedbacks will favor small-scale equatorial convective disturbances while surface-heat-flux feedbacks would favor small-scale disturbances in mean westerlies and large-scale disturbances in mean easterlies. Part II investigates the case of off-equatorial heating.


2010 ◽  
Vol 138 (12) ◽  
pp. 4285-4304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hironori Fudeyasu ◽  
Yuqing Wang ◽  
Masaki Satoh ◽  
Tomoe Nasuno ◽  
Hiroaki Miura ◽  
...  

Abstract The Nonhydrostatic Icosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM), a global cloud-system-resolving model, successfully simulated the life cycle of Tropical Storm Isobel that formed over the Timor Sea in the austral summer of 2006. The multiscale interactions in the life cycle of the simulated storm were analyzed in this study. The large-scale aspects that affected Isobel’s life cycle are documented in this paper and the corresponding mesoscale processes are documented in a companion paper. The life cycle of Isobel was largely controlled by a Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) event and the associated westerly wind burst (WWB). The MJO was found to have both positive and negative effects on the tropical cyclone intensity depending on the location of the storm relative to the WWB center associated with the MJO. The large-scale low-level convergence and high convective available potential energy (CAPE) downwind of the WWB center provided a favorable region to the cyclogenesis and intensification, whereas the strong large-scale stretching deformation field upwind of the WWB center may weaken the storm by exciting wavenumber-2 asymmetries in the eyewall and leading to the eyewall breakdown. Five stages are identified for the life cycle of the simulated Isobel: the initial eddy, intensifying, temporary weakening, reintensifying, and decaying stages. The initial eddy stage was featured by small-scale/mesoscale convective cyclonic vortices developed in the zonally elongated rainband organized in the preconditioned environment characterized by the WWB over the Java Sea associated with the onset of an MJO event over the East Indian Ocean. As the MJO propagated eastward and the cyclonic eddies moved southward into an environment with weak vertical shear and strong low-level cyclonic vorticity, a typical tropical cyclone structure developed over the Java Sea, namely the genesis of Isobel. Isobel experienced an eyewall breakdown and a temporary weakening when it was located upwind of the WWB center as the MJO propagated southeastward and reintensified as its eyewall reformed as a result of the axisymmetrization of an inward spiraling outer rainband that originally formed downwind of the WWB center. Finally Isobel decayed as it approached the northwest coast of Australia.


2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver P. Richmond

IR’s dominant theoretical and methodological approaches are, to varying degrees, compliance oriented. IR needs a theory of resistance if it is to survive its current methodological and ethical crisis. Resistance, read from a broadly Foucaultian perspective, is a process in which hidden, small-scale and marginal agencies have an impact on power, on norms, civil society, the state and the ‘international’. This may be in the form of individual or grass-roots critical agency not coordinated or mobilized on a large scale but still globally connected. Such agency is often discursive and aimed at peaceful change and transformation. Through such critical agency a post-colonial civil society has emerged, which is transversal, transnational, fragmented, but may be constitutive of new, hybrid and post-liberal forms of peace.


2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (8) ◽  
pp. 2847-2863 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pornampai Narenpitak ◽  
Christopher S. Bretherton ◽  
Marat F. Khairoutdinov

Abstract Tropical cyclogenesis (TCG) is a multiscale process that involves interactions between large-scale circulation and small-scale convection. A near-global aquaplanet cloud-resolving model (NGAqua) with 4-km horizontal grid spacing that produces tropical cyclones (TCs) is used to investigate TCG and its predictability. This study analyzes an ensemble of three 20-day NGAqua simulations, with initial white-noise perturbations of low-level humidity. TCs develop spontaneously from the northern edge of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), where large-scale flows and tropical convection provide necessary conditions for barotropic instability. Zonal bands of positive low-level absolute vorticity organize into cyclonic vortices, some of which develop into TCs. A new algorithm is developed to track the cyclonic vortices. A vortex-following framework analysis of the low-level vorticity budget shows that vertical stretching of absolute vorticity due to convective heating contributes positively to the vorticity spinup of the TCs. A case study and composite analyses suggest that sufficient humidity is key for convective development. TCG in these three NGAqua simulations undergoes the same series of interactions. The locations of cyclonic vortices are broadly predetermined by planetary-scale circulation and humidity patterns associated with ITCZ breakdown, which are predictable up to 10 days. Whether and when the cyclonic vortices become TCs depend on the somewhat more random feedback between convection and vorticity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 243
Author(s):  
Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno ◽  
Lord Mawuko-Yevugah

<p>The article draws on the insights of political ecology to illuminate the politics shaping the enforcement of environmental regulation in the mining sector of Ghana. We argue that the Ghanaian state uses strong-arm measures against artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) operators, particularly, the subaltern classes engaged in the industry for survival. Periodically, the state deploys the military and the police to clamp down on ASM for destroying the environment, but treats with kid gloves foreign companies engaged in large-scale mining (LSM), wreaking similar disastrous ecological effects on mining communities. The state believes that LSM by foreign companies is a source of foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign mining companies should be incentivized to come and stay in the country. Presented in broad-brush strokes as illegal (<em>galamsey</em>), the Ghanaian state sees ASM as an environmental menace to be fought with all the coercive apparatuses that it can command. Disputing this claim, the article argues that mining-FDI is essentially ecological imperialism, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem of mining communities whose livelihood strategies are in conflict with the accumulation and political interests of foreign mining companies and the Ghanaian political class respectively. The article demonstrates that concerns over the harmful impacts of mining on the ecology of Ghana are neither class-neutral nor free of politics. They are rather highly imbricated in power structures and relations, in which the interest of the ruling class is supreme in the enforcement of environmental regulations in Ghana. The paradox of the biases of the Ghanaian state against ASM, particularly ASM operated by its own citizens for survival, and in favor of foreign mining companies engaged in LSM for profits, is explained with the insights of ecological imperialism.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Large-scale mining, artisanal and small-scale mining, Operation Vanguard, Ghanaian state biases, ecological imperialism</p>


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