State Practices, National Identity and Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Political Science, Arizona State University

Research Grant, 1997

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This study critically examines the various practices of anti-immigrantism in three Western democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—within the context of globalization. The study draws upon the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who apply a psychodynamic conceptualization of capitalism, and by association, the Westphalian state, as a “desiring machine.” The concept of desire is used to examine the ways in which these three countries have responded to immigration from third-world countries. Desire can be seen to be working in the tensions between the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of modern statecraft; between the drive to control the populace from the center and the individualistic liberal ideals that underpin democratic theory and institution building in the West. The study demonstrates how these two tendencies are apparent in contemporary anti-immigrantism and the “new racism,” or “neoracism,” that underpins it. The study concludes that immigration is an exemplary site of the manifestation of the desire for order and security in a world where these things are perceived to be under threat. In doing so, it questions conventional conceptualizations of the state and offers a definition of the state as desire.

Desire can be seen to be working in the tensions between the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of modern statecraft; between the drive to control the populace from the center and the individualistic liberal ideals that underpin democratic theory and institution building in the West.

An Exploration of the Marked Decline of Women’s Involvement in Crime: 1700–1900

Malcolm M. Feeley, Law, University of California, Berkeley

Research Grant, 1998, 2000

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A number of years ago while working on another project, I discovered that in several locations in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Europe, women constituted 60 percent or more of those charged with serious crimes. These are figures several times higher than contemporary levels, and wholly at odds with conventional criminological understanding, which holds that serious criminal activity is overwhelmingly male behavior. Once I found that virtually no one had explored this phenomenon, I developed plans for a systematic study to see how widespread this pattern was, to see if it applied to violent as well as nonviolent (serious) crimes, and to explore its causes and consequences.

The proportions of men and women charged with crime, including serious crime, have varied widely across time and space.

With support from the foundation, I have been able to explore this issue systematically. I have gathered a vast body of data from records on charging, prosecution and sentencing, and drawn on a vast amount of secondary materials from archives and libraries in England, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere to explore shifts in criminal prosecutions of men and women from roughly 1650 to 1850. I continue to analyze these data, but am able to offer several tentative findings. The proportion of those charged with serious crimes who were women declined markedly in a great many locations in Northern Europe during this period. This pattern holds for both violent and nonviolent offenses, though is much stronger for nonviolent offenses (e.g., theft). However, this pattern also holds for petty nonviolent offenses. These patterns are strongest in a handful of commercial or international shipping centers that had expanded rapidly, and whose economies depended heavily on casual laborers, often young, single immigrants. It is not so pronounced in locations in more traditional societies.

Two general factors appear to account for the high levels of women caught up in the criminal process. First, as to more serious criminal offenses, these commercial and industrial centers attracted a disproportionate number of young single women, many of whom got into trouble with the law. As the cities adapted to the new conditions, this problem appears to have declined. Second, in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, a variety of less-serious public nuisance offenses, such as scolding, gossiping, slander, immodest dressing, and the like, came to be decriminalized. Women constituted the vast majority of such offenders, and so with decriminalization came a decline in the numbers of women offenders. Together these two factors, I believe, account for much of the dramatic decline in the proportion of women charged with crimes during this period. It may be that these changes are simply the consequence of general demographic and cultural shifts not directly related to issues of gender. However my research suggests that they are also due in some considerable part to a marked shift in the forms and methods of patriarchy at the outset of the industrial revolution, a shift that led to the decline of public controls of women and an expansion of a variety of informal, private controls. Whatever the case, this study challenges the conventional wisdom that crime, including violent crime, is and always and everywhere has been overwhelmingly male behavior. It reveals that the proportions of men and women charged with crime, including serious crime, have varied widely across time and space.

Remembering Violence and the Transvaluation of the Public Sphere

Allen Feldman, Anthropology, National Development and Research Institutes

Research Grant, 1997-2000

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My South African research brings the two poles of structural violence and transacted violence into greater proximity through the very tissue of historical memory. In the debates that have surrounded the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), there has been much comment about the Commission’s focus on “exceptional,” “extreme,” and “gross” acts of human rights violation to the extent that the inquiry risks normalizing and backgrounding the everyday structural violence of apartheid’s socioeconomic institutions in South Africa. From certain perspectives, the emphasis on “gross human rights violations” is seen as an artificial separation of the political dimensions of the apartheid regime from its economic character and everyday structural underpinnings. However, once analyzed from the perspective of both the commodification of the body and critical race theory, such acts come into focus as present-day expressions of a depth archeology. At different stages in the history of the colonial and postcolonial political economy, transacted violence and structural violence served as symbolic lubricant for each other. Egregious labor discipline as act, threat, and spectacle facilitated the ideological and structural reproduction of the colonial economy. Structural nostalgia for this class and racial hierarchy haunted the reenactments of repressive violence from 1964 to 1992 as a form of historical desire, magic, and fantasy that was materialized in disfigurement and pain and that rechanneled and consumed the recalcitrant Black body as a renewed productive fuel for state power.

In accessing alternative memory, I was compelled to inject the absent notion of racially fetishized violence into the deliberations of the TRC. For the concept of racialized violence I deploy contains embedded layers of historical and somatic meaning that were filtered out of the TRC’s engagement with state violence due to its juridical-positivist approach to history. In this context, I view racism not as a form of civil rights discrimination, nor as a psychological pathology, but rather as the fetishization of the body of color in the labor objectification/coercion of colonially subjugated populations. I argue that “European” regimes of labor discipline in colonial and postcolonial South Africa deployed the body of color both as an instrumental-economic and magical substance. I show that in South Africa, the performative signifiers of race- and class-based economic domination were eventually, in a time of postcolonial crisis, transposed into the sphere of state political ritual, thereby symbolically ordering counterinsurgency performance and consequently normalizing and legitimating what has been subsequently termed “gross” violations of human rights.

Hence, the cultural memory of “White” economic dominance was mobilized as self-conscious political agency that translated the residual economy of the colonial body into emerging economies of transacted postcolonial political violence. This dynamic of transposition by which the so-called “instrumental” practice of the political economy was refigured as the legitimating semiology of domination in recent state violence points to the magical invocation of the memory of economic domination in the performance culture of political repression.

Racialized and disproportionate violence became juridical blind-spots and historical recesses where alternative historical memories and political experiences could be accessed.

My research strategically deploys racialized somatic fetishism as an alternative analytic to the liberal-rationalist reductions of the TRC concerning politically motivated and thus indemnifiable human rights violations. Nor do I completely reject the norm of human rights promoted by the truth commission, rather I connect the suppressed discussion of racialized violence to the equally evaded human rights norm of “disproportionate violence” originally mandated yet conveniently forgotten by the TRC. The TRC could not reconcile politically rationalized violence with disproportionate excessive violence–its notion of political violence remained resolutely within an enlightenment framework. Amnesty applicants were thus indemnified for political justifications of human rights violations. Steve Biko’s assailants were not denied amnesty for their coercive interrogation methods but for their post-interrogation medical neglect of their prisoner; the latter could not be politically justified but torture could. Racialized violence and disproportionate violence are an excluded locus of a fundamental contradiction within the liberal-rationalist historiography of the TRC; thus the identification and condemnation of excessive violence was subject to structural forgetfulness by the human rights paradigm. Racialized and disproportionate violence became juridical blind-spots and historical recesses where alternative historical memories and political experiences could be accessed.

In part my goal in this project was to examine how the history of certain memory formations mediated the reproduction of certain types of excessive and racialized violence that were given short shrift by the TRC. By treating memory as a utilitarian and unproblematic transparency largely residing in individuals or as a neutral juridical technology, the TRC ignored social memory as a normative institutionalized formation with its own political history. And in doing so the TRC ended up stressing memory’s therapeutic possibilities at the expense of establishing its pathogenic connection to institutional violence and that violence’s inherence in economic racism; a connection that would more explicitly relate the TRC’s project with the historical evisceration of apartheid’s economic and spatial violence. In neglecting the hegemonic contours of institutional memory, the TRC failed to develop a self-reflexive relationship to its own technologies of memory and failed to confront the human rights danger in not recalling the disproportionate character of so-called politically motivated institutional violence. The TRC has left an ambivalent and contradictory moral legacy to the degree that it has ceded to future generations an important archive of political terror and violence experience, witnessed largely from the previously unwritten perspective of Black history and embodiment, and yet failed to adequately confront the institutional procedures that reproduce and bureaucratically routinize such violence–an important prophylaxis for future democratic institution building in South Africa.

I have triangulated racialized victim fetishism by the state apparatus—a form of state sorcery—with the human rights notion of disproportionate, surplus-excessive violence, and with specific historical-economic coordinates of production and symbolic consumption. In effect, surplus disproportionate and excessive violence functioned as a cipher or code for excessive, surplus unnarrated, unrecognized and unwanted (by the TRC) historical memory, perception, and experience. By accessing alternative historiographies, located in labor history, in local moral geographies, indigenous norms of healing and “folk” theories of sorcery and the demonic, I posed and began to answer the difficult question of how a political culture fashions power (symbolic and pragmatic) from techniques of production and substances of consumption–a question any truth commission could benefit from contemplating. A question that, if not addressed, leaves all truth commissions in a morass of symptomology and ad hoc moral condemnation that will ultimately make human rights discourse a laughing-stock or a circus-like spectacle. At the same time the salvaging of surplus historical memory tied to surplus and officially unnarrated political violence can promote the subjecthood and agency of those communities and individuals who have been the recipients of consuming colonial and postcolonial intrusions of their person and embodiment. And is not the dignified restoration of subjecthood and personhood one of the primary goals of human rights projects?

Throwing “Paper Stones”: Argentina’s Institutional Collapse

Roberto Gargarella, Law, Chr. Michelsen Institute

Research Grant, 2003, 2004

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My research project is about violence and legal institutions, and is focused on the case of Argentina. In December 2001 Argentina fell into what is considered the deepest crisis of its history. The crisis brought with it the succession of five different presidents in a week, and an extremely fragile political system. In addition, it provoked a serious increase in the number of social protests and the violent repression of those protests. The explanations of the crisis tend to describe it as the product of the character of “corrupt politicians” and “violent protesters.” Consequently, the responses proposed to overcome this situation—responses that may be synthesized in the common cry “get rid of them all” (namely, the political class)—tend to reproduce that simplistic view. In contrast with this view, I am convinced that the crisis has become more permanent and profound as a result of citizens’ lack of political means of expression, as well as their lack of tools for controlling their representatives. I also believe that it will be impossible to overcome the existing difficulties and to end the present level of social violence if we do not improve our understanding of the role of institutions in the development of the crisis. My project aims at improving this understanding.

I am convinced that the crisis has become more permanent and profound as a result of citizens' lack of political means of expression, as well as their lack of tools for controlling their representatives.

The point of departure of my analysis is that the crisis has been triggered and is maintained, at least in part, by an almost total absence of institutional means that enable the people to express their demands and control their representatives. Neither public discourse nor legal and political theory paid sufficient attention to this absence of institutional means. The focus has instead been on individuals rather than rules and on symptoms rather than causes. In my work, I want to fill this vacuum by systematically focusing on the role played by inadequate legal rules in fostering an increasing social violence in the whole country.

The Political-Criminal Nexus: Emerging Violent Threat to Governability in the Twenty-First Century

Roy Godson, Government, Georgetown University

Research Grant, 1998, 1999

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One of the more dangerous contemporary threats to the quality of life is the collaboration of the political establishment with the criminal underworld—the political-criminal nexus (PCN). These partnerships increasingly undermine the rule of law, human rights, and economic development in many parts of the world, especially in states in transition.

The problem is chronic in, for example, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, and Taiwan. Only the forms and balance of power among the players change. In other areas, such as Colombia, the Andes, Afghanistan, Southwest and Southeast Asia, the Balkans and the Caucuses, the problem is more acute, violent, and kaleidoscopic, and often it dominates political, economic, and social life.

Despite the potential magnitude, there is little understanding of the security threats posed by the PCNs and how and why political-criminal relationships are formed and maintained. Nor has there been systematic study of policy prescriptions for disrupting existing relationships or methods for preventing future ones from developing. Menace to Society (Transaction, 2003) is the first attempt to develop an analytical framework. Case studies of Colombia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia and the Ukraine, and the United States by leading scholars and practitioners answer such key questions as:

How do PCNs get established?
How is a PCN maintained, and destroyed?
What do the participants want from each other in a PCN?
What can be learned from those who have successfully countered the PCN?

When state institutions are weak, as in Nigeria and Colombia, the state often cannot prevent political-criminal collaboration. A lack of checks and balances, either from civil society or opposition political parties, is a key factor.

The findings indicate that political, economic, and cultural factors play a significant role in the formation and evolution of PCNs. When state institutions are weak, as in Nigeria and Colombia, the state often cannot prevent political-criminal collaboration. A lack of checks and balances, either from civil society or opposition political parties, is a key factor. Cultural patterns tend to facilitate this kind of collaboration. In patron-client relationships, individuals, criminal and noncriminal, come to accept that solutions to economic and personal needs and conflicts depend on certain leaders.

Markets and economics are also affected. In many countries, the supply and demand for illegal goods and services, not only drugs, creates a market controlled by criminals who need political help to “run” their business. In Colombia, for example, the scale of illicit funds made creation of a national level PCN a major goal of the cartels. The line between legitimate and illegitimate business is increasingly blurred.

As local problems become global, and global problems have local effects, the complex relations between criminals and political elites appear to explain much, not only about local politics, but also regional and global trends in world politics. These increasingly complicated dynamics have also created a new kind of security challenge, the contours of which are only gradually coming into focus.

There has been some progress in countering the PCN. Lessons can be learned from experiences in Hong Kong and Sicily, for example, where law enforcement has been boosted by cultural changes that have diminished political-criminal collaboration. These examples may illustrate a promising approach that has applicability elsewhere.

Low Serotonin, Cholesterol, and Violent Behavior

Beatrice Golomb, Psychology, University of Southern California

Research Grant, 1996, 1997

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We conducted several studies evaluating the link between physiological factors and violence. First, we reviewed the literature linking low and lowered cholesterol to violence and to lowered brain serotonin activity. (Low brain serotonin activity has been linked to suicide and violence against others; and to reduced “harm avoidance.”) We found that many different classes of literature converged to support a connection, including studies of populations in whom cholesterol was measured, who were followed across time for cause of death (including violent death); studies of suicide in psychiatric populations; studies of violence in institutionalized criminals; and “meta-analyses” (pooled analyses) of clinical trials comparing cholesterol-lowering drugs to placebo, in which the cause of death was stated. In addition to findings in humans, there were also studies in which it was found that monkeys assigned to a cholesterol-lowering diet were more aggressive (toward other monkeys) and had lower measures of brain serotonin than those monkeys that were not so assigned. This study, and a follow-up letter, were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1998.

We found that persons with low cholesterol at baseline were significantly more likely to be arrested for violent crimes against others, an effect that remained present after controlling for potential "confounding" factors (factors that might be linked to both cholesterol and violence, like age, sex, alcohol, and educational status).

In a second study, we collaborated with an investigator from the University of Stockholm, and gained permission from the Swedish government to merge major databases in Sweden, to examine whether low cholesterol was linked to arrests for violent crime against others. Cholesterol had been measured in a population (over seventy thousand individuals) in a region of Sweden called Varmland, in the mid-1960s, and a computerized police database became available in 1966, providing follow-up information on arrests. We gained permission to merge cholesterol information with alcohol information, police arrest records, the Swedish Central Person Registry (which provided information on subjects’ age and sex, for instance), the Swedish education registry, and the Swedish mortality registry. We found that persons with low cholesterol at baseline were significantly more likely to be arrested for violent crimes against others, an effect that remained present after controlling for potential “confounding” factors (factors that might be linked to both cholesterol and violence, like age, sex, alcohol, and educational status). This work was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2000.

In a third study, we collaborated with investigators from the Helsinki Heart Study in Finland to examine whether there was a connection between “insulin sensitivity” and future suicide and accident, studying persons who had been screened for possible participation in the Helsinki Heart Study. (The “insulin resistance” syndrome is a prediabetic condition that includes a suite of correlated findings: persons with insulin resistance tend to have low HDL-cholesterol, high systolic blood pressure, and high “body mass index,” that is, weight as a function of height. Insulin sensitivity, then, refers to persons who are at the other end of the spectrum on these measures, with high HDL-cholesterol, and low systolic blood pressure and body mass index.) We hypothesized that people with markers of insulin sensitivity might be at higher risk of accidental death and suicide (though at lower risk of heart disease). We showed a biochemical mechanism by which insulin sensitivity would be expected to be linked to reduced delivery of tryptophan to the brain (and thus, potentially, reduced serotonin production, because tryptophan is the substrate for the “rate-limiting” reaction in serotonin production). The study found that people with one or more insulin sensitivity markers, including high HDL-cholesterol, low systolic blood pressure, and low body mass index, were more likely to experience death from accident and suicide than persons without these factors; and the more markers of insulin sensitivity they had, the greater this risk became. This finding was published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2002.

Bibliography

1. Golomb BA. "Cholesterol and violence: Is there a connection?" Annals of Internal Medicine 1998; 128:478-487.

2. Golomb B. "Cholesterol and violence: is there a connection?" Annals of Internal Medicine 1998; 129:669-70.

3. Golomb BA, Stattin H, Mednick SA. "Low cholesterol and violent crime." Journal of Psychiatric Research 2000; 34:301-309.

4. Golomb BA, Tenkanen L, Alikoski T, et al. "Insulin sensitivity markers: Predictors of accidents and suicides in Helsinki Heart Study screenees." Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2002; 55:1-7.

Translations of Antisemitism: The History of Jews and Violence in Indonesia

Jeffrey Hadler, Anthropology

Research Grant, 1999

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I conceived my research project in May, 1998, in the aftermath of the fall of President Soeharto in Indonesia. That month saw horrendous violence committed against the Chinese community in Jakarta—torture, rape, and murder. The dehumanizing rhetoric that accompanied this violence reminded me of European antisemitic discourse of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: describing a people who were urban, parasitic, exploitative, and antinationalistic, who participated in occult and deviant dietary and sexual rituals.

Scholars have assumed that Indonesian antisemitism is a case of “antisemitism without Jews”; that current anti-Jewish rhetoric is borrowed from Middle Eastern anti-Zionist propaganda. This viewpoint is limited. In my research I analyze the history and role of the Jewish community during the period of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. I assess the position of both Dutch and so-called “oriental” or “Baghdadi” Jews in the economic and social life of the colony, discussing the role of Zionism and imperial antisemitism, and paying particular attention to the interactions of the Jews and the Indonesians. I scrutinize the antisemitic rhetoric of the Vaderlandsche Club, an Indies racist organization that channeled funds to and was eventually superseded in the 1930s by the Dutch Nazi Party, and I analyze the particular antisemitism cultivated by the Axis during the Japanese occupation.

In post-Soeharto Indonesia, there has been a curious revival of antisemitism, an effort to equate political "reformasi" and Zionism.

Indonesian colonial Jewry cut across official colonial categories, with Dutch, Arab, Chinese, and even “native” congregants. The community maintained a Zionist newspaper, “Erets Israel,” that was published from 1926 until the Japanese occupation. Jews met in the one synagogue in Surabaya and held services in Masonic Lodges and Theosophical Halls (two other groups reviled by conspiracy theorists today). In post-Soeharto Indonesia, there has been a curious revival of antisemitism, an effort to equate political “reformasi” and Zionism. The Surabaya synagogue has drawn the attention of Australian Lubavitchers and is now a sort of Jewish mission field. My research consisted then of two related projects. On one hand I undertook archival research into the history of the Jewish community in colonial Indonesia. The results of this research have been presented at conferences and are the subject of a forthcoming article.

My second project was more ethnographic and is ongoing—a study of the small community of Indonesian Jews in Jakarta and Surabaya and their relationship to both an Indonesian state that does not recognize Judaism as a religion and to a community of Muslim neighbors who are increasingly angry with Israel, the United States, and the perceived role of international Zionists in destabilizing Indonesia and the Islamic world. Furthermore I speculate about whether the ideological justifications for current anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia were not maintained throughout the New Order in easily translated antisemitism. If the violence of the late 1960s was hung on an anticommunist reed, then the racist rhetoric of 1998 echoed with antisemitism. Chinese are depicted as antinationalists, practitioners of native labor abuse and then reflexive capital flight. Such shadowy “conglomerates” and peripatetic urban exploiters are as Jewish as they are Chinese stereotypes. Of course Southeast Asians have a much longer experience of Chinese contact than they do Jewish interaction. However, in the face of state-sanctioned silence when it came to discussions of the Chinese, it is plausible that anti-Chinese rhetoric migrated towards antisemitism in the Soeharto era. This second project, since it involves a living and potentially threatened community, is far more difficult to publicize.

Mechanisms Underlying “Pathological” Forms of Aggression in Rats

Jozsef Haller, Biology, Institute of Experimental Medicine

Research Grant, 2001, 2002

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The involvement of the overproduction of stress hormones (glucocorticoids) in the etiology of mood disorders (e.g., anxiety and depression) is well established. In contrast, the psychopathological consequences of glucocorticoid underproduction received comparatively little attention, despite the fact that disparate human studies suggest an involvement of glucocorticoid deficiency in abnormal human aggression. We have recently reported that experimentally induced glucocorticoid insufficiency induces abnormal forms of aggression in rats. Such rats target their attacks to vulnerable parts (mainly the head) of their opponents. In addition, intention signaling (threat behavior) is deficient in these rats. These data suggest that glucocorticoid deficiency is a risk factor in the etiology of aggression-related psychopathologies.

In the present work, we aimed at understanding the mechanisms of glucocorticoid insufficiency–induced aggression, with special reference to mechanisms involved in fear and anxiety. In addition, possibilities of counteracting the behavioral anomaly are surveyed.

In the experiments performed so far, we have shown that chronic but not acute glucocorticoid deficiency facilitates aberrant attacks. An acute suppression of glucocorticoid synthesis decreased aggressive behavior without affecting attack targeting. In contrast, chronic glucocorticoid deficiency did not affect the level of aggressiveness, but increased attacks aimed at vulnerable body parts of the opponents, and decreased intention signaling. Glucocorticoid deficiency did not affect anxiety levels in nonsocial settings but induced signs of anxiety in the social interaction test of anxiety. This suggests that glucocorticoid deficiency disrupts social behavior in challenging situations without affecting anxiety levels in general. Glucocorticoid deficiency also induced deviant cardiovascular responses in challenging situations. Rats with experimentally induced glucocorticoid deficiency showed decreased heart rate increases when challenged with an opponent in familiar or unfamiliar environments. The difference was not due to differences in work load, as glucocoticoid deficiency did not affect locomotion in either setting. Notably, violent criminals were shown to have decreased basal heart rates and decreased cardiovascular reactivity in challenging situations.

This suggests that glucocorticoid deficiency disrupts social behavior in challenging situations without affecting anxiety levels in general.

We have also studied the effects of glucocoticoid deficiency on the aggression-induced activation of various brain centers. We have assessed the neuronal activation patterns induced by aggressive behavior in rats. The so-called cFos technique employed provided results largely consistent with those provided earlier by lesion and stimulation techniques. We have noticed, however, that the activation of a neuronal path involving the hypothalamic attack area, mediodorsal thalamus, and frontal cortical areas is a prerequisite of attacks. We have also noticed that the activation patterns of brain centers involved in aggression control were not affected by glucocorticoid deficiency. In contrast, glucocorticoid deficiency induced a strong activation of the brain centers involved in the stress response and fear. Currently, we investigate the connections and the neurochemical nature of neurons involved in aggression control, to get more insights into the neural control of glucocorticoid deficiency–induced abnormal aggression.

The data presented above suggest that fear is an important determinant of glucocorticoid deficiency–induced aggression. Therefore, we assessed whether anxiolytics are able to suppress the abnormal behavioral pattern induced by glucocorticoid deficiency. Surprisingly, the serotonergic anxiolytic buspirone aggravated rather than ameliorated the behavioral anomaly. Studies are currently being performed with other anxiolytics and compounds used for treating aggression-related human disorders.

Social Dominance and Coercive Strategies of Resource Control in Children

Patricia H. Hawley, Psychology, Southern Connecticut State University

Research Grant, 2001

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Aggressive behavior has traditionally been considered an indicator of psychological or behavioral maladaptation (impulsivity, social cognitive deficits) that puts the child at risk for peer rejection. Yet we casually observe that many high-status and well-accepted individuals (e.g., CEOs, political leaders) are modestly aggressive in their own right. Is aggression in some contexts adaptive and socially competent?

A strategy-based evolutionary perspective on resource control and social dominance suggests that there are at least two types of aggressive individuals: those who engage in purely coercive strategies of resource control (e.g., make threats of harm) and those who balance coercion with prosocial strategies (e.g., promise reciprocation, friendship). Hypothesized here is that those who balance the two strategies enjoy high resource control and high status. Furthermore, these children were hypothesized to be relatively socially skilled, in contrast to prevailing views that suggest aggressive children are particularly unskilled.

Two independently measured resource control strategies (prosocial and coercive) give rise to five resource control groups: prosocial controllers (high prosocial control, low coercive control); coercive controllers (high coercive, low prosocial); bistrategic controllers (high on both); noncontrollers (low on both); and typical children (midrange on both).

Teachers described bistrategic controllers as being supreme resource controllers. Additionally, these children were similar to prosocial controllers in terms of positive characteristics as well as similar to coercive controllers in terms of negative characteristics.

One hundred and sixty-three preschoolers participated in this study. Teachers were asked via questionnaire about the children’s resource control abilities and strategies (prosocial, coercive), personalities, aggressive behavior, and social skills. The children were interviewed for their verbal ability, moral reasoning (e.g., “Is it right or wrong to take a toy from another child?”), and social problem-solving skills (e.g., “What would you do to get a turn?”). We also assessed whether the children were esteemed by peers by asking each child to nominate peers who they most liked. Those who received the most nominations were considered well-accepted.

Teachers described bistrategic controllers as being supreme resource controllers. Additionally, these children were similar to prosocial controllers in terms of positive characteristics as well as similar to coercive controllers in terms of negative characteristics. For example, bistrategics were well above average on peer acceptance and highest on attention to social cues (they know how they make others feel) and emotional manipulation (they can pretend to be angry/sad to get what they want). Prosocial controllers were rated equally as accepted and equally skilled as the bistrategics, but not emotionally manipulative. Coercive controllers were neither accepted nor skilled, but, like bistrategics, highly manipulative. The bistrategic personality profile stands out as low on anxiety and high on extroversion. They were rated high on all types of aggressive behavior (hitting, social exclusion) like coercive controllers, but uniquely high in relational aggression (i.e., social exclusion; “you can’t play with us”). Despite their aggression, they were the least likely to admit to using coercion and most likely to claim to use competent strategies on the social problem-solving measure. Furthermore, they were the most developed in their moral reasoning. Last, they as a group received the most “like most” nominations from their peers.

The approach applied here highlights the utility of exploring different subgroups of aggressive children. Aggressiveness paired with prosociality may be in some ways adaptive and, rather than being associated with skills deficits, appears to be associated with indicators of social competence.

Bibliography

1. Hawley, P.H. (2003). Strategies of control, aggression, and morality in preschoolers: An evolutionary perspective. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 85, 213-235.

2. Hawley, P.H. (2003). Prosocial and coercive configurations of resource control in early adolescence: A case for the well-adapted Machiavellian. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 49, 279-309 (Special volume: Aggression and adaptation: The bright side to bad behavior).

Military Training, Violence, and Human Rights: The School of the Americas

Lesley Gill, Anthropology, American University

Research Grant, 2001

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Training and arming international terrorists has long been a practice of the U.S. government. Yet confronting the seamy side of the United States’ involvement in global affairs has never been easy for U.S. citizens because of widespread amnesia about twentieth-century U.S. empire building. My project examined a notorious U.S. military training school for Latin Americans—the School of the Americas (SOA)—and explored how the United States built a transnational military apparatus in the Americas over the last half of the twentieth century and trained some of the western hemisphere’s most infamous human rights abusers.

It argues that the SOA facilitated the expansion of state-sponsored violence in the Americas.

The research examined how the U.S. military formed “professional” soldiers who defined their agendas in distinctive ways and whom the U.S. depended on for cooperation but did not entirely trust. It considered the lessons soldiers—U.S. and Latin American—learned about the dirty wars that raged across Latin America and the extent to which the soldiers were then willing to accept, excuse, or condemn the violation of human rights. It further explored the relationship between the order produced by security forces and the disorder wrought on thousands of people during and after the Cold War, and it asked how this shaped the demand for military training in the present. Finally, the project considered how the U.S. government dealt with its own citizens who demanded that the School of the Americas be closed, and who staged large, annual demonstrations against the SOA. To accomplish these objectives, I drew on the experiences and perspectives of three different groups: U.S. and Latin American soldiers who train at the School of the Americas, Andean coca growers who currently bear the brunt of state-sponsored violence in the Americas, and U.S. activists who oppose the U.S. military’s policies.

A book based on my findings will be published by Duke University Press (The School of the Americas: Military Training, Political Violence and Impunity in the Americas, 2004). It argues that the SOA facilitated the expansion of state-sponsored violence in the Americas. The School did so not only by teaching trainees a variety of combat skills. It also provided them with an opportunity to construct relationships with U.S. officers and to participate in a world of power, comfort, and consumer opportunities that the U.S. military describes as “the American Way of Life.”