The Political-Criminal Nexus: Emerging Violent Threat to Governability in the Twenty-First CenturyRoy Godson, Government, Georgetown UniversityResearch Grant, 1998, 1999 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.
Under Many Fires: Factors Influencing the Adoption of Female Circumcision by Southern Sudanese War-Displaced Women in KhartoumRogaia Abusharaf, Sociology and Anthropology, Tufts UniversityResearch Grant, 2002 The people of Southern Sudan have been enduring the effects of the longest running civil war in the world. This war, which was prompted by the Sudanese government’s policies of Islamization and Arabization adopted since 1983, has led to massive human rights abuses, death, border crossings, and internal displacement. This project examines the impact of displacement on the social world of internally displaced women in Khartoum. The project examines the factors influencing issues of identity transformation and cultural change among women who started to intermarry with the local population and hence adopt cultural practices that are completely alien to the communities from which they descended. The project continues to examine these processes in an effort to illuminate the ways in which displacement threatens the cultural survival of Southern women. So far, intermarriage seems to be a primary factor in cultural change. The broader relationship that this project will continue to investigate is that between war and cultural responses in times of violence and transgression. So far, intermarriage seems to be a primary factor in cultural change.
Ethnic Conflict and Socioeconomic Development in the Niger-Delta Region of NigeriaBolanle Akande Adetoun, Rural Sociology and Demography, Center for Sustainable Development and Gender IssuesResearch Grant, 2002 Since the end of the Cold War, ethnic conflicts scattered all over the world and often taking place within nations (intrastate) have been the most prevalent form of global violence. Most of these ethnic conflicts take place in Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America, with Africa accounting for roughly 50 percent of these varied conflicts. In Nigeria, the decade of the 1990s witnessed an upsurge of violent conflicts in various parts of the country, especially in the southern Niger-Delta region. The region consists of the majority of the southern ethnic minorities and it is where Nigeria derives the crude petroleum oil that is the economic lifeblood of the country. The conflict in the Niger-Delta region is multidimensional; the communities are at conflict with each other, the government, and the multinational oil companies. The lack of socioeconomic development has been at the core of the various conflicts in the Niger-Delta region. The paradox, however, is that the provision of various developmental assistance projects generates substantial intra- and interethnic conflict. Since a lot of national and international investments have gone (and are still going) into Niger-Delta socioeconomic development, the level of effectiveness of these projects/programs and their impacts on conflict prevention and resolution between and within the communities need to be examined. This study therefore addressed the following questions among many others: What are the various issues involved in the various conflicts that have accompanied socioeconomic development in the Niger-Delta Region of Nigeria? How are these issues being handled by all the parties concerned? What is the level of cultural acceptability of these projects and how compatible are they with the needs of the intended beneficiaries? What is the level of collaboration and coordination of developmental activities amongst all the parties involved? What should be the role of the state and other stakeholders in the socioeconomic development of the Niger-Delta Region? What has been the impact of these projects on the quality of life of the people? What are the social strategies for project implementation and operation needed to minimize conflicts and elicit and sustain beneficiaries’ participation over the long term? Conflict analysis, prevention, and resolution should be a central dimension in socioeconomic developmental planning and implementation in the Niger-Delta Region of Nigeria and that of many communities in developing and transitional economies. The study was done mainly in the Warri area of Delta state in the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria. The choice of Warri area, which comprises four local government areas, diverse ethnic groups, and many multinational oil companies, enabled me to have a broad perspective of the various issues involved. The interviews were done in two local government areas and officials of three multinational companies were interviewed. The data for this study thus came from: 1) Primary sources: interviews were held with various stakeholders—community leaders and members, relevant government agencies, and relevant departments of the oil companies and other organizations; and 2) Secondary sources such as newspapers, magazines, government publications, community publications and memoranda, etc. The findings were discussed under the following headings: Conflict and Socioeconomic Development in the Niger-Delta Region of Nigeria.Community Participation in ProjectsCoordination among Development AgenciesShell and Oil-Related Conflict in the Niger-Delta RegionWomen and Oil-Related Conflict in the Niger DeltaHighlight of One National High Conflict-Generating Project and One National Low Conflict-Generating ProjectWarri CrisisNigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Bonny Island CrisisGovernment’s Current Efforts on Socioeconomic Development and Minimizing of Conflicts in the Niger-Delta Area The study concluded by asserting that conflict analysis, prevention, and resolution should be a central dimension in socioeconomic developmental planning and implementation in the Niger-Delta Region of Nigeria and that of many communities in developing and transitional economies. This should start right from the conception of any program\project, during the implementation, and even after.
Blackfoot Traditional Models of Aggression and HealingRussel Barsh, Native American Studies, University of LethbridgeResearch Grant, 1995, 1996 The Blackfoot of Montana and Alberta were once regarded as the most aggressive tribal people of the North American prairies. Between 1820 and 1870 they repelled Cree, American, and Canadian encroachments, and retained control of Canada’s largest Indian Reserve (the Blood Reserve, Alberta) and second-largest U.S. Indian reservation through treaties negotiated in 1868 through 1877. However, outsiders who lived with Blackfoot people—from eighteenth-century British fur traders to early-twentieth-century ethnographers—witnessed very little interpersonal violence within Blackfoot communities. In Never in Anger, her study of a Canadian Inuit community nearly fifty years ago, anthropologist Jean Briggs explored the paradox of an externally very violent society that is internally peaceful. Briggs focused on child-rearing practices that emphasized respect for the human body, as opposed to the bodies of the marine mammals that comprised the bulk of the Inuit diet. Since Briggs’s study, most Inuit have stopped hunting—and grown considerably more violent towards each other. In Blackfoot country, a thousand miles to the south, interpersonal violence has also increased sharply since the 1950s. With a team of Blackfoot students and elders, researcher Russel Barsh asked two questions: Could the recent growth of interpersonal violence amongst the Blackfoot have been the result of changing child-rearing practices (weak socialization), as well as decreasing economic self-sufficiency (a source of frustration and conflict)? Could self-awareness of changes in child-rearing promote action by the Blackfoot community to address violence through the revival or adaptation of traditional socialization strategies? Participants concluded that Blackfoot traditional child-rearing focused initially on making the child fully human, that is, understanding and accepting social responsibilities, by about age seven. Over the course of nearly three years, Barsh and his team organized a number of retreats with a wide cross-section of Blackfoot “grandmothers and grandfathers”—people highly regarded among their peers as virtuous and knowledgeable. The work began with an All-Smokes ceremony hosted by the research team that was facilitated by members of the Horn Society, one of the traditional sacred societies that keep Blackfoot knowledge. The approach taken was ethnomethodological: helping knowledgeable Blackfoot people address the research question in their own way, challenging them from time to time with empirical evidence and further questions. All work was done in the Blackfoot language, analyzed in Blackfoot, and only summaries and conclusions were translated into English. This made full use of the distinctive semantics and conceptual vocabulary of Blackfoot, and helped protect the intellectual property of Blackfoot participants. At the same time, it was expected that the retreats would foster a wider discussion throughout the community of more than twenty-five thousand Blackfoot people in Alberta and Montana. Participants concluded that Blackfoot traditional child-rearing focused initially on making the child fully human, that is, understanding and accepting social responsibilities, by about age seven. The collective role of the community in this maturation process was underscored, and especially the role of the sacred societies and individual “grandparents” (collectively recognized older teachers or mentors). Self-control and deference to others’ feelings and needs were uppermost, older participants recalled. Contemporary violence was attributed to the breakdown of mentoring relationships between “grandparents” and young children, and to public education programs (although administered by Blackfoot school boards) that stressed information acquisition and individual success, as opposed to kinship, moral philosophy, shared responsibility, and the feelings of others. Consequences of this collaborative community study were mixed. Participants presented their findings and recommendation to Blackfoot educators and elected leaders but were gently rebuffed; mainstream curricula, and mainstream training of teachers and young parents would continue unaltered. Nevertheless, the issues raised continue to be debated within the community. Both Blackfoot researchers completed graduate degrees and are teaching younger Blackfoot professionals at a community college and university. One of the facilitators recently launched a social research institute on the Blood Reserve, as well as a University of Calgary–based Canada Fund for Innovation project, The Virtual Circle, aimed at promoting socially useful research by Native scholars.
Economic Stress and Crime in JapanAki Roberts, Sociology, University of New MexicoResearch Grant, 2002 This research had three main parts. First, I examined the effect of levels of economic stress (income inequality and unemployment) on Japanese crime trends in the forty-seven Japanese prefectures (geographical units similar to provinces or states), with data from ten time points between 1955 and 2000. For the second part, using the prefectural-level time-series data, I examined both short-term (immediate) and long-term (lasting) effects of economic stress variables on violent crimes through “error correction” models. Economic stress, measured by unemployment and within- and between-prefecture income inequality, is significantly and positively associated with robbery rates. In the “error correction” analysis, unemployment and both measures of income inequality also had significant and positive short- and long-run effects on robbery. This suggests that high levels of those economic stress variables increase robbery rates immediately, and also have lasting effects. Unemployment also had significant and positive effects, including short- and long-run, on homicide, but income inequality measures did not. It may be that the nonsignificant results for income inequality reflect the more directly economic nature of robbery compared to homicide. The most common explanation for Japanese postwar crime rates links unique cultural characteristics to a system of exceptionally effective informal social controls that, at the macro level, suggest low levels of social disorganization. However, in general measures of social disorganization (divorce, female labor participation, and urbanization) were not significantly associated with violent crime rates. None of the measures of social disorganization had significant effects in the robbery models. The significant and expected positive effects of divorce on homicide were the only evidence consistent with the social disorganization account. The results of the pooled time-series analysis of forty-seven Japanese prefectures found that economic stress variables were better predictors than social disorganization variables of violent crime trends in postwar Japan. The third part of the research was intended to foster a more general understanding of the relationship between economic stress and crime trends. I examined whether differences in levels of economic stress can account for the changing discrepancy in the United States and Japanese violent crime rates through time-series analysis of data from both countries between 1951 and 2000. The results of the pooled time-series analysis of forty-seven Japanese prefectures found that economic stress variables were better predictors than social disorganization variables of violent crime trends in postwar Japan. However, according to the results of time-series analysis of differences in violent crime rates between United States and Japan, differences in both economic stress and social disorganization measures helped explain the differences in violent crime rates between two countries. These differences were associated with differences in the level of divorce, female labor participation, income inequality, and poverty. A paper on the results of the prefectural-level time-series is under review by the journal Criminology. I am waiting to submit the results from the “error correction” models and time-series analysis on United States and Japan differences to academic journals because I would like to cite the prefectural-level time-series paper if it is accepted for publication in Criminology.
Intimate Violence in Community ContextChristopher R. Browning, Psychology, University of ChicagoResearch Grant, 1999 This research applies the social disorganization perspective on the neighborhood-level determinants of crime to partner violence. The social disorganization approach focuses on the role of neighborhood characteristics such as poverty, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity in limiting the social resources available to achieve shared community goals. Specifically, I hypothesize that trust, attachment to community, and the associated willingness of residents to intervene on behalf of one another—the combination of which has been described as collective efficacy—may help limit the prevalence of violence between intimate partners. The analysis brings data from the 1990 Decennial Census together with the 1994–95 Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Community Survey, the 1994–95 Chicago Homicide Data, and the 1995–97 Chicago Health and Social Life Survey to study the impact of neighborhood characteristics on partner violence, above and beyond the effects of individual characteristics. Findings indicate that collective efficacy is negatively associated with both neighborhood-level intimate homicide rates and self-reports of nonlethal partner violence at the individual level. However, collective efficacy exerts a more powerful regulatory effect on nonlethal violence in neighborhoods where the tolerance of intimate violence is low. Finally, collective efficacy also increases the likelihood that women will disclose conflict in their relationships to various potential sources of support. This research points to the importance of neighborhood environment for regulating violence between intimate partners. Findings indicate that collective efficacy is negatively associated with both neighborhood-level intimate homicide rates and self-reports of nonlethal partner violence at the individual level.
The Relationship Between Theory of Mind, Social Information Processing, and Aggression in Preschool ChildrenKimberly Wright Cassidy, Psychology, Bryn Mawr CollegeResearch Grant, 1997 Much recent research suggests that preschoolers undergo a fundamental change in their ability to understand the internal states (desires, beliefs, emotions) of others (termed theory of mind). Little research has been done to determine the extent to which theory of mind development relates to social adaptation. A second line of research indicates that other social cognitive variables, namely social information processing, are consistently related to maladaptive behavior in middle childhood. This study investigated the links between social cognitive variables and social adaptation in preschool children by investigating the relationship between theory of mind development, social information processing, and social behavior (both prosocial and aggressive behavior). More broadly, this research provided a descriptive study of aggressive behavior in preschoolers as rated by teachers and research observers. Seventy preschool children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds performed a battery of theory of mind measures (measuring understanding of others’ beliefs and understanding of others’ emotions), a measure of social information processing (measuring children’s ability to complete the stages of Dodge’s social information processing model: assessing intentions, generating strategies, evaluating potential strategies and choosing a competent strategy), and several measures of social behavior (with a particular emphasis on physical and relational aggression). Children with better understanding of others' thoughts and feelings were also more likely to be popular with their peers and to be the recipient of prosocial acts by their peers. Overall, preschoolers seemed to have an aggressive “style.” That is, some engaged in no aggression, some engaged in physical aggression only, some engaged in relational aggression only and some engaged in both types of aggression. These percentages were different for boys and girls, with boys being more likely to engage in primarily physical or both kinds of aggression and girls being more likely to engage in relational aggression. Boys who aggressed were seen as possessing fewer social skills, but were also not seen as having more problem behaviors in general (beyond aggression). Girls who aggressed were not rated as deficient in positive social skills, but were rated as engaging in higher levels of other types of problem behaviors. Interestingly, higher levels of aggression were not related to popularity among peers (as rated by peers). In addition, results showed that for boys with less developed language skills, there was a strong negative relationship between social cognitive understanding and physical aggression. That is, boys with below-average language skills relative to their peers who were better able to predict the thoughts of others and who were better able to social problem solve were less likely to engage in physical aggression such as hitting and pushing. Girls’ social-cognitive skills were not related to their level of physical aggression. Children with better understanding of others’ thoughts and feelings were also more likely to be popular with their peers and to be the recipient of prosocial acts by their peers. BibliographyCassidy, K. W., Werner, R. S., Rourke, M., Zubernis, L. S. & Balaraman, G. (2003). "The relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior." Social Development 12: 198-221.Werner, R. S. & Cassidy, K. W. (under review). "The role of social-cognitive abilities in pre-schoolers' aggressive behavior." British Journal of Developmental Psychology.Werner, R. S. & Cassidy, K. W. (under review) "The early correlates of preschool aggressive behavior according to type of aggression and measurement." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
The Peaceful Century: War in Twentieth-Century Latin AmericaMiguel A. Centeno, Sociology, Princeton UniversityResearch Grant, 1997, 1998 Blood and Debt analyzed a double empirical puzzle. Why did the Latin American state fail to develop beyond its limited organizational capacity, and why did international war occur so infrequently on the continent? I demonstrate how the absence of both institutional authority and politically organized violence were bound in a circular, causal relationship. The origins of this unique pattern of development are found in the conditions under which the countries achieved independence. We also need to consider other factors, however, such as Latin America’s actual military experience, the divisions within the societies and within the dominant elites, and the particular sequence of these developments, all of which helped to make the colonial legacy harder to escape. We can begin with perhaps the most interesting empirical puzzle discussed in the book: the relative scarcity of wars (but especially international ones) in Latin America. The continent has not lacked bloodshed and cruelty in its history, but it has, somehow, skipped the organized exercise of violence that so defines other modern nations. It is the difference in political organization that helps account for both Latin American ‘exceptionalism” and differences within the continent. The absence of a strong centralizing state authority best explains the particular distribution and forms of political violence observed on the continent. Because the state developed so late (generally only in the late-nineteenth century and then only intermittently), social, political, racial, regional, and economic conflicts were rarely controlled from above. The Hobbesian function of the state was underdeveloped and what ensued was often the violence of all against all. There were simply too many conflicts occurring within each Latin American state for these countries to have much energy to fight each other. These internal struggles and the never-resolved social and economic divisions produced a military that saw its major responsibility as the protection of an always ill-defined sense of nation from internal enemies. Whether these were Indians, class antagonists, or the supposed communist representatives mattered less than the fact the military gaze was oriented inward. There were simply too many conflicts occurring within each Latin American state for these countries to have much energy to fight each other. How do wars make states? Wars provide both the means and the incentive to centralize power. Given external threats, states seek to protect their internal situation by imposing their control over as much of their own territory as possible. Wars also help build nations. They do so by both providing the dramaturgical materials for nationalist liturgies and by providing avenues and opportunities for the subject population to establish possibly more cooperative relations with the state. Through the massification of armies, wars also help define citizenship. In general, the standard bellicist model assumes a relatively smoothly operating feedback loop. External threats generate military needs. These include fiscal and manpower resources. The first are satisfied though some already-existing administrative capacity (which in turns grows and makes fiscal extraction easier). The newly augmented organizational capacity and new funds further encourage and support the establishment of centralized authority. The manpower needs lead to conscription and to citizenship claims in exchange for granting the state such power. Meanwhile, the external threat gives rise to both elite unity and a broader sense of collective identity. The latter (along with the heroic deeds of the actual conflict) help develop an official nationalist ethos (which in turn helps consolidate elite unity). Both of these contribute the legitimacy of centralized authority. The combination of institutionalized authority, citizenship claims, and nationalism are the essential components of a modern nation-state. In Latin America, the process was generally quite different. The fiscal response to military needs could not be met through an expanded administrative capacity as one barely existed. The kinds of wars fought and the same limited state organizational capability precluded massive mobilization. Instead, the professionalization following the 1890s produced socially isolated, small, and relatively privileged armed forces. External threats did not automatically translate into support or self-identification, but were precluded from doing so by social divisions. Given the absence of any core sense of nation, external threats often aggravated domestic divisions. These produced divided and isolated elites and a generally excluded majority without a sense of citizenship. The results of war on the continent were generally negative, in that it mostly brought about debt, economic breakdown and political chaos. When it had a positive economic effect, it was too often in the form of providing a state with new “rents,” but not forcing it to do more with what it already had undertaken. Positive political results (as in greater centralization) were usually accompanied by authoritarian rule and rarely with any parallel rise in popular participation.
The Mind of the SegregationistDavid Chappell, History, University of ArkansasResearch Grant, 1999 The biggest result so far of my project, “The Mind of the Segregationist,” is one-third of my book, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (2004, University of North Carolina Press). An advance review in the Atlantic Monthly (November 2003) assessed the book as “one of the three or four most important books on the civil rights movement.” My summary of the book appears as the lead article in the Journal of the Historical Society (Spring 2003). Still in the works is the larger project the grant supported, an entire book devoted to segregationist propaganda and strategy, tentatively titled The Mind of the Segregationist. I have drafted about half of that manuscript—most of the three most important chapters: on constitutional arguments, on religious arguments, and on the “classics” of segregationist thought (Herman Talmadge’s You and Segregation, Judge Tom Brady’s Black Monday, James J. Kilpatrick’s series of “Interposition” editorials, former Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Byrnes’s article in U.S. News and World Report, etc.). My HFG grant covered travel expenses to the archives of prominent segregationists, and of southern leaders who wrestled with segregationism but decided not to support it. The most interesting in the latter category was the popular evangelist Billy Graham. Graham and his father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell (a prominent conservative southern Presbyterian editor and former missionary, who answered much of Graham’s mail and guided him on practical and spiritual questions), both declared publicly, in Life magazine in 1956, that segregation could not be biblically or constitutionally justified. Ebony magazine made much of Graham’s stance, praising him lavishly in September 1957, but historians have ignored it—along with Graham’s refusal to practice segregation in his southern “crusades” after 1954 or so and his public endorsement of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957. Segregationists attacked Graham for deviating from what they understood as the conservative course on race. Graham was often soft-spoken about his integrationist stance after 1956, but he stuck to it. Graham’s position on race would have been career suicide had he run for public office. Elected southern leaders went the opposite way, achieving near unanimity in their “Southern Manifesto” of opposition to the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions of 1954 and 1955 (Lyndon Johnson, Estes Kefauver, and Al Gore Sr. were the only southern senators who declined to sign). Graham, however, remained one of the most popular figures in the South, and on most issues one of the most conservative. The archival record suggests that segregationism, though it was the leading issue in southern election campaigns from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, did not go as deep in southern white culture and psychology as historians have hitherto thought. Other religious leaders of the white South were closer to Graham than to the elected politicians. Both the Southern Baptist Convention and the (southern) Presbyterian Church in the U.S. voted by strong majorities to support public school desegregation in 1954. The vote in the SBC, the more democratic of the two all-southern denominations, was roughly nine thousand to fifty. Segregationists attacked their own churches in order to promote segregationism, though surprisingly few congregations achieved enough unity or militance on the question to withhold funds from the denomination or to withdraw from it, or even to threaten to do so. Integrationists ridiculed the absurd attempts of a few lay and clerical leaders on the fringe of the segregation movement to use the Bible to justify segregation. But the integrationist reaction seems to have exaggerated the extent and the influence of biblical arguments among segregationists. Far more common than segregationist “proof-texting” in the records of both religious and secular segregationists are statements of an increasingly heated anticlericalism. The southern white churches ended up conflicted, passive, and relatively silent on race questions. As frustrating as that silence was to Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, it was also frustrating to the segregationists who felt abandoned and betrayed by their own churches. The segregationists recognized that their cause was greatly weakened by their inability to match what the Black leader Fred Shuttlesworth called his “weapons of spiritual warfare.” The archival record suggests that segregationism, though it was the leading issue in southern election campaigns from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, did not go as deep in southern white culture and psychology as historians have hitherto thought. The further one went below the surface of opinion polls and demagogic single-issue campaigns, the less solidarity and confidence one found among white southerners on segregation. Their segregationism did not have nearly the cultural and spiritual resonance that the defense of slavery had had one hundred years earlier. In the slavery struggle, the South’s leading ministers and theologians confidently and resourcefully claimed slavery was a “positive” good, sanctioned by the Bible as well as the Constitution and classical philosophy. There is nothing like that confidence and commitment to segregation a hundred years later: though the opinion polls show overwhelming numbers “favor” segregation, they do not show how much white southerners were willing to sacrifice to defend segregation. The polls do not reveal the deep conflict among white southerners over how best to defend segregation. If we seek to understand how an impoverished, disfranchised, and unarmed minority succeeded in overthrowing the system of segregation, we must learn how they found and exploited the fissures and pressure points in southern white society. The conflict between the white South’s political and religious institutions helps us begin to understand that although white southerners overwhelmingly supported segregation, they were not about to make significant sacrifices to defend it, and the were incapable of unifying behind any particular strategy of defense. Had American liberals grasped that basic truth about the white South, they might have found the nerve to challenge segregation a lot earlier and more effectively than they did. As things turned out, American liberals were instead dragged with little preparation into the wake of an indigenous Black southern movement. That movement’s greatest gift, my research suggests, was that its leaders understood the white South better than the liberals—or the racist politicians who represented the white South—did.
Mental Representations of Attachment in Twins: A Study of Monozygotic Female Pairs Concordant and Discordant for Abnormally Aggressive BehaviorJohn N. Constantino, Psychiatry, Washington University School of MedicineResearch Grant, 2001, 2002 Previous research has suggested a link between the quality of early social relationships and the development of aggression. This association is most pronounced when children are maltreated, but the mechanism by which social experience influences social developmental outcome is poorly understood. One possible mechanism is that relationship-relevant experiences are incorporated into an internal working model (mental representation) of social relationships that is used on a moment-to-moment basis in the context of social interaction. Most previous studies of attachment characteristics and psychopathology have not been able to control adequately for the possibility that any observed association might be due to genetic influences that independently affect both. This study represents an initial step in elucidating the genetic structure of mental representations of attachment (MRA) and the extent to which MRA in turn might mediate the development of abnormally aggressive behavior. Specifically, this study examines concordance in attachment status among pairs of female adolescent monozygotic twins, as well as their non-twin siblings (NTS) and relates attachment classification to several parameters of antisocial development. The results to date indicate that mental representations of attachment are substantially influenced by shared environmental influences and are associated with current levels of aggressive behavior, as well as histories of arrest and symptoms of conduct disorder. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) has been completed on 40 pairs of identical female twins, concordant or discordant for a presence or absence of conduct disorder. The AAI is an established, one-hour, audiotaped interview that assesses an adult or adolescent subject’s current state of mind with respect to relationships. It inquires about the subject’s own early relationships with caregivers, and about previous experience with separation, loss, or trauma. It classifies an individual’s mental representation of attachment into one of four categories (secure-autonomous, insecure-dismissing, insecure-preoccupied, insecure-unresolved), which correspond to the four attachment categories used to classify parent-infant dyads in the Ainsworth Strange Situation.The results to date indicate that mental representations of attachment are substantially influenced by shared environmental influences and are associated with current levels of aggressive behavior, as well as histories of arrest and symptoms of conduct disorder. These findings support the notion that mental representations of attachment are, in large part, a function of environmental factors, and that they may play a mediating role in the development of abnormally aggressive patterns of behavior. Interventions that promote the development of secure parent-child relationships early in life may help prevent the development of abnormally aggressive patterns of behavior.
