Police officers worldwide have encountered significant challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a lack of protective equipment, overwork, and the legality of emergency policing. This study explores how police officers in China have responded to public emergencies during the pandemic, using a comprehensive and multi-channel method of data collection and analysis. The primary and secondary data were obtained from questionnaires (N=713), semi-structured interviews (N=30), and official reports. The “Fengqiao Experience” demonstrates how China relieves pressure on police officers during the pandemic in both the short and long run. The experimental practices of Fengqiao, including material support and training mechanisms, non-contact law enforcement, intelligent analysis combined with big data, grid-based governance, and joint defense mechanisms, prove to be effective. Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic is not only a test for the national governance system and its capabilities but also an opportunity to promote its modernization.
Our study aimed to understand the role of situational factors in instigating people to perform violence against frontline healthcare workers during the coronavirus disease outbreak in India. We performed a thematic analysis of secondary data, collected from online web pages of leading national and regional newspapers. The study proposed a framework linking situational factors and violence through the mechanism of emotional dynamics that led to aggression (stress, tension, and anger). Existing literature suggests that environmental and cognitive factors influence human learning and behaviour, and there is a chronological sequence of several activities to reach the point of committing violence. The current study identified three thematic areas: information deficit, mistrust in government actions, and socio-economic insecurities based on situational factors. False beliefs, rumours, lack of relief material, doubt in government actions, communication gap, and fear for life, land and livelihood were identified as situational factors. The study contributes to building a stronger theoretical foundation for the existing literature and filling the gap in effective intervention strategies for preventing such violent acts in the near future.
The state of prisons in India is poor, especially in relation to overcrowding, healthcare and sanitation. The issue of medical facilities and adequate treatment was brought to light by the Covid-19 pandemic, where overcrowding led to a failure of compliance with the prescribed social distancing norms. This paper deals with the state of prisons in India, highlighting the impact of the pandemic and examining associated changes in incarceration rates. It analyses relevant Supreme Court orders and the effects of alternative house arrest and other state measures. In conclusion, the paper discusses the measures recommended by the United Nations to alleviate the impact of the virus on prisons.
As part of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, law enforcement agencies in Long Island's Suffolk and Nassau Counties reached out to Latino immigrant communities with a message to "educate over enforce." Yet, this messaging did not echo enough in the lives of immigrant communities who were the most vulnerable and hardest hit populations in the area. Based on fieldnotes from sixteen virtual meetings spanning five months (March-July), which are part of a larger qualitative project, we argue that communication gaps persisted and continued to plague community/police relations in several ways. First, the messaging around education was a one-way street with very little input from community members. Second, "light" enforcement still took place with the issuing of summons on social distancing and requiring mask wearing. Third, the closing down of precincts meant that there was no way to access police services, especially in Spanish, the community's language. Finally, law enforcement's response to the community's needs was "virtually" absent. We conclude this examination with lessons learned so police departments can better serve and protect the immigrant community.
The outbreak of COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 30 January 2020. Many nations, including South Africa, have seen an increase in COVID-19 outbreaks in their population, including those working in and incarcerated in correctional centres. Re-sponding to COVID-19 in correctional centres is a major challenge, particularly due to overcrowding and limited medical resources. This paper uses secondary data to investigate the spread of COVID-19 in South African cor-rectional centres. It focuses on the problems faced by the South African Department of Correctional Services in preventing the spread of COVID-19 in its correctional facilities. The author proposes measures to be followed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in such facilities. The findings reveal that despite efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in South African correctional centres, the virus spread rapidly among inmates and prison workers.
The purpose of this study was to understand the phenomenon of marital conflict during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) emergency in South Korea by adapting the vulnerability-stress-adaptation model (VSA; Karney and Bradbury 1995). The public emergency of COVID-19 and social distancing policies caused emotional distress, social isolation, lack of support, and economic crisis in families, increasing the risk of marital conflict. Eleven women who reported experiencing severe marital conflict during the COVID-19 pandemic were interviewed by telephone. The interview data were analyzed through directed content analysis. The women experienced 1) maladaptation to sudden life changes, 2) family role confusion, 3) economic crisis, and 4) invasion of personal space. These adverse experiences, along with the influence of their spouses’ personality traits, led to reduced physical and psychological interaction between the partners and severance of their relationship. Attention must be paid to the mental health and well-being of families to prevent their dissolution. There is an urgent need for community-based psychological intervention and support for families who are house-bound for long periods. Additionally, government policies are necessary to lighten or share the childcare burden on families during the crisis, so women are not compelled to take career breaks.
This study aimed to explore the experiences of gender-based violence, insecurity, and health effect of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown among women and girls three to six weeks into lockdown measures in Nigeria. This was a cross-sectional survey carried out in Nigeria among 1,243 women and girls aged between 10 and 79 from April to May 2020. Data was collected using an online web-based survey platform and analyzed using Microsoft Excel and Epi-Info. There was a statistically significant difference in the experience of violence before and during the COVID-19 lockdown among women and young girls in Nigeria (P = 0.002). During the COVID-19 lockdown, respondents experienced physical (74, 30.8%), sexual (120, 50%), and emotional violence (46, 19.2%). Although various forms of insecurity were experienced among the respondents, the most common form experienced was financial insecurity (960, 77%). 738 respondents (58%) feared getting infected by the virus while 662 (52%) had increased anxiety during this period. The findings highlight some negative unforeseen effects of the lockdown measures taken to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus and protect the people. This has important implications for decision-making for future pandemics and the provision of possible mitigating factors.
Social distancing policies have been practiced in different regions around the world to minimize the number of cases of COVID-19. After an outbreak in mid-July 2020, the Hong Kong government adopted a series of administrative measures and strongly encouraged residents to stay at home. This lockdown period provided an opportunity to study variations in levels of aggression when people spend more time than usual in an overcrowded living environment. A total of 185 Hong Kong residents were recruited for this study. Their perceptions of the crowdedness of their living space, aggression level (measured using the BPAQ-SF), proneness to boredom (measured by the BFS-SF), and perceptions of risk regarding COVID-19 were collected via online questionnaires. Perceived crowdedness, proneness to boredom, and perceptions of susceptibility to COVID-19 were found to significantly predict the variance of different types of aggression in a regression model. In a mediation analysis, anger acted as a mediator of the relationship between proneness to boredom and different types of aggression. Participants’ perceptions of their susceptibility to COVID-19 suggested an underlying worry about the contagiousness of the virus, which was in turn associated with feelings of uncertainty and a rise in aggression level.
This paper focuses on Kurdish elites and their quest for a Kurdish state during the Peace Conference that took place in Paris after the First World War. Cross-examining the British, French, Kurdish, and Ottoman sources, this paper shows that despite the failure to establish a Kurdish state in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Ot-toman Empire the Kurdish elites, with their diplomatic and political experience and networking had equal, sometimes better, capacity to the leaders of other delegations in the Peace Conference. To demonstrate this, I fo-cus on Kurdish elites, who were experienced in the imperial statecraft, especially Serif Pasha, Sheikh Abdulkadir, Emin Ali Bedirhan, and Sureyya Bedirhan, lay out the complex relations amongst them and describe their efforts to represent the Kurds from the beginning of the Peace Conference until ratification of Treaty of Sevres on 10 August 1920. In spite of what the available literature suggests, Kurdish elites, using all the available tools at their disposal, negotiated effectively for a Kurdish state. The contribution shows that the Kurdish elites not only presented a series of arguments during the Peace Conference but also laid down the basis for the Kurdish na-tionalism of the decades to come, with a historical narrative and a cartographic imaginary.
The scientific goal of this paper is to conceptualize the phenomenon of ‘strategic exploitation’ of Kurdish political entities and to investigate it as a process that triggered the change in Kurdish actorness from isolated non-state to de facto state. Covering two centuries, the contribution examines actorness and cases of patron-client relations between Kurdish political entities and sovereign states. It answers the question: What was the path of strategic exploitation of the Kurdish political entities and how does it affect the contemporary security policy of Iraqi Kurdistan? Combining the concepts of proxy war, de facto state, and path dependence, it argues that the persistent experience of strategic exploitation shaped the collective strategic thought of Kurdish political entities and has a visible impact on contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan security policy. It applies the process-tracing method based on an analysis of literature on the history of Kurds and Kurdistan to investigate patron-client relations and variability of actorness. The article concludes that the experience of ‘strategic exploitation’ has shaped the main direction of Iraqi Kurdistan security policy. It is expressed in practice as abstaining from an official declaration of secession and diversifying relations with external actors.
This article focuses the emergence of and need for alternative governmentality and Kurdish non-state justice under a conflicted and authoritarian state. It analyses how and why Kurdish de facto judges operate and negotiate prevailing power relations, illustrating the practice of the Kurdish alternative court system before 2000, and the development of local justice in Kurdish towns and cities after 2000. The article maps out the diverse and varied scene of Kurdish parallel justice procedures and mechanisms. The gendered demands and activities of key actors and beneficiaries are analysed, and relations, tensions and political rifts beyond the actual court procedures explored. The article sheds light on the different obstacles and challenges facing women and men under local justice, while also paying attention to ethnic and religious diversities. In this article, the examination of the state and understanding the everyday life of regular people are mainly based on direct ethnographical accounts.
The political and social interaction between the Ottoman Empire and Kurdish tribes, which can be traced back to the first quarter of the 16th century, continued until the modern republic with various continuities and ruptures. This multi-dimensional and complex relationship was neither in the form of absolute loyalty to the sultan, and thus to the Islamic caliph on a religious basis, nor a constant revolt against the authority of the empire in order to preserve their autonomy. Until the beginning of the 20th century, tribes were not only structures used by the Ottoman, Safavid, and Russian empires for their own interests. They were also organizations capable of dominating a certain geographical area and had a vital potential to constantly generate violence and extend it to the empires and even between one another. Contrary to the state, which systematically and regularly perpetrated this violence and institutionalized and justified itself through the monopoly of violence, their inability to do so did not necessarily mean that they were not genuine political organizations and did not have their own agenda. This study, conducted largely in light of archival documents and Ottoman primary sources, aims to examine the boundaries of loyalty and rebellion in the oscillating relationship between Kurdish tribes and the Turkish state.
Theories of civic culture and democratization have tended to ignore stateless nations like the Kurds. This brings up the question of what civic culture looks like for these groups and whether the status of statelessness has in-fluenced the civic culture of Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Analyzing the first merged large-N dataset including Kurds from Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, this paper shows that the last hundred years of Kurdish political movements have strongly influenced the civic culture of Kurds. Being Kurdish in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq has a significant ef-fect on levels of political trust and support as well as the correlation of these indicators with levels of support for a democratic political system. Overall, this paper finds that being Kurdish has a strong positive effect on support for democracy versus autocracy in all three countries.
This study explores the long-standing conflict over Kurdish self-determination as it played out in three cases of negotiations conducted between the governments of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and the representatives of Kurdish movements from the 1970s onwards. Drawing on conflict and negotiations studies, the paper seeks to explain (a) why efforts at negotiating the conflict in question have not been successful and (b) what reasons account for this failure. To this end, the study first conceptualizes the Kurdish question as a constitutive conflict of self-determination grounded in a dynamic contest between direct rule and self-rule. Second, it systematically links the failure of negotiations to the absence of substantive commitments by the states involved, the lack of collective action on the part of the Kurdish actors, and negative third-party involvement. The objective is to provide a theoretically guided and empirically informed conceptual approach to the failed politics of negotiating the Kurdish self-determination conflict.
Most of the recent academic literature has focused on the macro politics of the Kurdish situation within Iraq and there is little scholarship about the younger generation of Kurds coming of age during the autonomous Kurdish rule. Unlike their forebears, they have no direct memory of the decades-long repression campaigns. For them, the history starts with the inception of a semi-autonomous Kurdish enclave and de facto self-rule after the first Gulf War in 1991. Studying 'Generation 2000', the Kurdish millennials who came of age in the aftermath of the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers vital insights into the dynamics of a region that experienced great socio-political transformation.
The thesis of internal colonialism offers a controversial center-periphery approach to the diffusion model when explaining the persistence of peripheral ethnic identities in Western nation-states. Associating persistent nationalist mobilization in the ethnically different peripheral regions with the cultural division of labor showed some potential in explaining the cases observed in the British Isles, Brittany and Quebec. In some other cases with solid peripheral national economies, such as Basque Country and Catalonia, however, the thesis of internal colonialism was considered paradoxical and became the target of criticism. This study examines the role of internal colonialism in the radicalization of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. The empirical field research based on in-depth interviews with PKK militants from three consecutive generations provides qualitative evidence regarding the impacts of colonial settings in this process. Social consequences emerging from internal colonialism constitute an essential motivation and justification expressed by actors involved in armed struggle against what they define as Turkish colonial rule.
Individuals who are strongly oriented towards market-based values are more likely to devalue groups identified as "unprofitable" from an economic point of view. Drawing on insights from Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), this study explores economically legitimized prejudice in light of a far-reaching economization of the institutional and cultural structure. Multilevel models using data from the European Social Survey (2018) show that hostility towards immigrants is expressed more among individuals who strongly embrace market-based values and in countries where the institutional structure is dominated by the economy and non-economic social institutions are enfeebled (institutional imbalance). Aggregated market-based values (a "marketized anomic culture") mediate the effect of a) individual market-based values and b) institutional imbalance on anti-immigrant attitudes. This study contributes to a better understanding of group prejudice under conditions of economization. It shows that applying IAT within a multilevel framework offers a fruitful explanation not only for crime but for other sociological phenomena.
Group-Focused Enmity describes the idea that different outgroup-specific prejudices can be aggregated to a lar ger syndrome of inequality-based derogation of others. This focus section brings together three studies on Group-Focused Enmity that had been registered and peer-reviewed before they were conducted. All of the reports advance the Group-Focused Enmity literature in important ways and demonstrate the fruitfulness of the concept. They also show that using sophisticated methods can help us to address novel and exciting questions, and demonstrate the opportunities that preregistration offers for studies analysing secondary data.
Group-focused enmity (GFE) and related research have mostly focused on variable-centred analyses such as structural equation modelling and factor analysis, implicitly assuming that the results apply uniformly to all participants in the sample. Person-centred research questions and analysis methods, which investigate unobserved heterogeneity in the sample, have been lacking in GFE research. Nonetheless, initial evidence exists from research on Islamophobia and GFE that various unobserved latent classes (i.e., subgroups) differing in their average prejudice can be identified within one dataset. In this manuscript, we applied factor mixture modelling to investigate unobserved heterogeneity using the data of the German GFE survey 2011. We found two latent classes of equivalent factor-analytical composition with consistently high versus low expressions of target-specific prejudice. No comparison of latent GFE means was possible. Membership in the high prejudice latent class was associated with higher age, right-wing political orientation, high right-wing authoritarianism and high social dominance orientation. Our findings demonstrate the importance of exploring unobserved heterogeneity in attitudes research and outline how person-centred research can complement variable-centred research in order to understand social-psychological phenomena.1
