Examining complexities of forest cover change during armed conflict on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast

The effects of armed conflict on biodiversity are an emerging concern in conservation due in part to the occurrence of war in biodiversity hotspots, though few studies have addressed it. We investigate this topic by examining changes in forest cover on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua from 1978 to 1993, a period covering their civil war. We predict an increase in forest cover between pre- and post-conflict periods as residents abandoned agriculture plots and migrated from conflict areas. We used a remote sensing approach to detect changes in forest cover area and fragmentation at two study sites. Results confirmed that in the first 5–7 years of the conflict, reforestation was greater than deforestation, but in the latter years of the conflict deforested land almost doubled that which was reforested. Although some forest loss was due to Category 4 Hurricane Joan, several conflict-related factors were partially responsible for these results, such as mass human migration and land reform. Understanding how and why forest cover changes during periods of conflict can help conservationists protect resources both during war and in the tumultuous period following the cessation of violence when nascent governments lack the power to effectively govern and community institutions are fractured by war. In areas where the livelihoods of people are directly dependent on local resources, anticipating ecological and social impacts can help improve future conservation efforts.     

Gender and the dynamics of mobility: reflections on African migrant mothers and ‘transit migration’ in Morocco

By describing the everyday lives of African migrant mothers and their children in Morocco, this paper highlights how migration and ‘immobility’ in so-called ‘transit countries’ are gendering and gendered experiences. Relying on migrants' narratives, the paper demonstrates how migrants' transitions to motherhood create both specific and gendered spaces for agency and particular and gendered constraints upon agency that shape women migrants' mobility dynamics in space and time.     

Muslim Youth in Canadian Schools: Education and the Politics of Religious Identity

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of the schooling experiences of Muslim youth in Canada who are committed to maintaining an Islamic lifestyle despite the pressures of conformity to the dominant culture. Little attention has been paid to how religious identity intersects with other forms of social difference, such as race and gender in the schooling experiences of minoritized youth. Using a case study often Muslim students and parents, this article demonstrates how Muslim students were able to negotiate and maintain their religious identities within secular public schools. The participants' narratives address the challenges of peer pressure, racism, and Islamophobia. Their stories reveal how Muslim students are located at the nexus of social difference based on their race, gender, and religious identity. The discussion further explores the dynamics through which these youth were able to negotiate the continuity of their Islamic identity and practices within schools despite the challenges that they faced. Building upon existing theories of identity maintenance and construction, this research demonstrates how the interplay of the core factors of ambivalence, role performance, and interaction and isolation are implicated in the way Muslim students negotiate the politics of religious identity in their schooling experiences.     

Associations between Mental Health and Ebola-Related Health Behaviors: A Regionally Representative Cross-sectional Survey in Post-conflict Sierra Leone

BackgroundLittle attention has been paid to potential relationships between mental health, trauma, and personal exposures to Ebola virus disease (EVD) and health behaviors in post-conflict West Africa. We tested a conceptual model linking mental health and trauma to EVD risk behaviors and EVD prevention behaviors.ConclusionsIn post-conflict settings, past war trauma and mental health problems are associated with health behaviors related to combatting EVD. The associations between war trauma and both EVD risk behaviors and EVD prevention behaviors may be mediated through two key mental health variables: depression and PTSD symptoms. Considering the role of mental health in the prevention of disease transmission may help fight continuing and future Ebola outbreaks in post-conflict Sierra Leone. This sample is specific to Freetown and the Western Area and may not be representative of all of Sierra Leone. In addition, our main outcomes as well as personal EVD exposure, war exposures, and mental health predictors rely on self-report, and therefore raise the possibility of common methods bias. However, the findings of this study may be relevant for understanding dynamics related to EVD and mental health in other major capital cities in the EVD-affected countries of West Africa.     

'Remembering to forget': public secrecy and memory of sexual violence in the Bangladesh war of 1971

This article explores the processes through which the 'public secrecy' of rape during the Bangladesh war of 1971 operates within the present-day ethnographic context. It examines contemporary commemorations of the war and of women who have achieved local and national fame as rape victims (euphemistically referred to as 'war heroines'). The article analyses the discrepancy between raped women's national position as icons of 'honour' and their local reception through sanctions and constant khota (sarcastic/censorious remarks expressing scorn and evoking the unpleasant events). By exploring the relationship between scorn, honour, rape, sexuality, narratives of remembrance, and the emergence of 'public secrets'– and how these are interwoven by the subjectivity of the raped – the article argues that memories of rape are simultaneously located within the ambiguities of revelation and of concealment which are indispensable to the operations of power. In the process the article establishes the relationship between secrecy and memory. Further, a focus on the intersubjective domain of memory provides methodological and ethical tools with which to engage with narratives of the past relating to wartime violence.     

Weapons injuries during and after periods of conflict: retrospective analysis.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the relative frequency of weapon injuries during conflict and after periods of conflict in the absence of disarmament. DESIGN: Retrospective analysis of a database of war wounds. SETTING: Region with a protracted conflict between rival combatant groups and a subsequent transition to the uncontested military authority of a single power. SUBJECTS: 2332 people who received weapons injuries during the conflict or post-conflict periods and were admitted to hospital within 24 hours of injury. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Percentage change in mean monthly admission rate by weapon type between conflict and post-conflict periods; annual incidence of injury by weapon type during conflict and post-conflict periods; percentage change in annual incidence by weapon type between conflict and post-conflict periods. RESULTS: Mean monthly admission rates for injuries from fragmentation munitions decreased by 8% between conflict and post-conflict periods and by 23% for injuries from mines and 32% for gunshot injuries. The decline in admissions for all injuries was 23%. After adjustment for population growth over the study period, declines in annual incidence were 22% for fragmentation munitions injuries, 34% for mine injuries, and 40% for gunshot injuries. The decline in incidence for all injuries was 33%. In-hospital mortality from weapons related injuries increased from 2.5% to 6.1% (P < 0.001) between conflict and post-conflict periods. CONCLUSIONS: In this setting, continued availability of weapons is associated with increased mortality and a level of injuries from weapons that is only somewhat reduced from that observed during a period of conflict.     

Community-Centered Responses to Ebola in Urban Liberia: The View from Below

BackgroundThe West African Ebola epidemic has demonstrated that the existing range of medical and epidemiological responses to emerging disease outbreaks is insufficient, especially in post-conflict contexts with exceedingly poor healthcare infrastructures. In this context, community-based responses have proven vital for containing Ebola virus disease (EVD) and shifting the epidemic curve. Despite a surge in interest in local innovations that effectively contained the epidemic, the mechanisms for community-based response remain unclear. This study provides baseline information on community-based epidemic control priorities and identifies innovative local strategies for containing EVD in Liberia.Conclusions/SignificanceLocal communities’ strategies and recommendations give insight into how urban Liberian communities contained the EVD outbreak while navigating the systemic failures of the initial state and international response. Communities in urban Liberia adapted to the epidemic using multiple coping strategies. In the absence of health, infrastructural and material supports, local people engaged in self-reliance in order to contain the epidemic at the micro-social level. These innovations were regarded as necessary, but as less desirable than a well-supported health-systems based response; and were seen as involving considerable individual, social, and public health costs, including heightened vulnerability to infection.     

Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Comparing Mental Illness Narratives of Haredi Male Patients and their Rabbis

By comparing versions of mental illness narratives – told by Haredi (Utraorthodox Jews) male patients of a mental health clinic in Israel and by their rabbis – this paper relates to two distinct, yet interrelated, theoretical questions: the place and agency of narrators, and the tension between experience and representation. A pair of narratives exemplifies a pattern in which the patients (Talmudic students) tell a narrative of a sudden breakdown related to a dramatic meeting with a non-human figure (often, a woman) or force. Their rabbis, by contrast, tell a narrative that emphasizes their students' mundane symptoms, ``abnormal' and ``immoral' behavior, and use a local adaptation of a Western psychological explanatory model. A dynamic of inclusion and exclusion emerges as students are seeking legitimization and avoidance of stigma, while their rabbis are silencing themes that challenge social and cultural orders. The different narratives are further interpreted in the context of the micropolitics of the interviews and of identity politics between the Haredim and secular Israelis. This social dynamics shows how differently placed social actors-narrators-interpreters construct differently contested and diverse cultural narratives of a seemingly shared reality.     

The politics of scorn in Syria and the agency of narrated involvement

Recent uprisings across the Arab world raise the question of how populations living under dictatorial regimes moved from apparent quiescence to active revolt. The question is particularly acute for Syria, where the Asad regime has ruled not simply through coercion, but also by enforcing a culture of everyday cynicism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Aleppo in 2008‐9, I argue that everyday Syrian narratives that lament or scorn the self are a way of radically identifying oneself with a contemptible situation, and inviting that fact to be witnessed and empathized with. I term the radical identification enacted in these narratives ‘involvement’. In order to understand why these narratives do not merely reproduce a cynical political culture in the same way that private mockery of the regime does, I propose a model of agency that develops the theme of authentic voice. I argue that the self‐scorning voice sounds authentically through the combined agency of the involved subject and the empathetic witness. By enacting involvement, narratives that scorn and lament the self defy the culture of political cynicism and prepare the ground for revolt.     

Reconciling conflicts in a one-male society: the case of geladas (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Theropithecus gelada</Emphasis>)

Animals derive benefits from living in social groups but sociality also has its costs in that animals must compete with others for resources and mating opportunities. To cope with the conflict aftermath and social damage caused by competitive aggression, several group-living species use a variety of peace-keeping strategies. The affinitive post-conflict reunion of former opponents, defined as reconciliation, is the primary peace-keeping mechanism. In this study, we provide evidence for the occurrence of reconciliation and test some hypotheses on this post-conflict mechanism in geladas (Theropithecus gelada), a species often neglected in the study of post-conflict dynamics. The conciliatory contacts were uniformly distributed across the different sex–class combinations. Different from baboons, geladas did not show any particular kind of affinitive reconciliation behaviour. Notwithstanding the presence of a linear hierarchy, the dominance relationships did not affect the reconciliation dynamics. According to the valuable relationship hypothesis, coalitionary support seems to be a good predictor for a high level of conciliatory contacts. Finally, at an immediate level reconciliation plays a role in reducing renewed attacks by aggressors, which sought conciliatory contact more frequently than victims. In conclusion, even though the study of post-conflict behaviour in geladas needs to be continued, the patchy nature of their social network is a good model for testing some of the theoretical assumptions about primate conflict resolution.     

The presence of the past: youth,memory making and the politics of self-determination in southeastern Nigeria

This article focuses on recent reconstructions of Igbo ‘memory’ by the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign state of Biafra (MASSOB). MASSOB is a second-generation Igbo separatist movement that draws on a collection of ‘memory repertoires’ to agitate for the self-determination and exit of the Igbo ethnic group from the Nigerian state into an alternative political and administrative arrangement known as the Republic of Biafra. The core issues relate to dual narratives generated by the Nigerian–Biafran War. While the state shapes the official history, memories and narratives of the war to suit its own vision, interests and politics, MASSOB contests these official views as the sole legitimate framework for remembering and interpreting the war, but still connects to the war as a war of Igbo national liberation. These contestations provide the context for the enactment of memory claims and counterclaims, and their association with political violence in contemporary Nigeria.     

Remembering Collective Violence: Broadening the Notion of Traumatic Memory in Post-Conflict Rehabilitation

In the aftermath of war and armed conflict, individuals and communities face the challenge of dealing with recollections of violence and atrocity. This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of processes of remembering and forgetting histories of violence in post-conflict communities and to reflect on related implications for trauma rehabilitation in post-conflict settings. Starting from the observation that memory operates at the core of PTSD symptomatology, we more closely explore how this notion of traumatic memory is conceptualized within PTSD-centered research and interventions. Subsequently, we aim to broaden this understanding of traumatic memory and post-trauma care by connecting to findings from social memory studies and transcultural trauma research. Drawing on an analysis of scholarly literature, this analysis develops into a perspective on memory that moves beyond a symptomatic framing toward an understanding of memory that emphasizes its relational, political, moral, and cultural nature. Post-conflict memory is presented as inextricably embedded in communal relations, involving ongoing trade-offs between individual and collective responses to trauma and a complex negotiation of speech and silence. In a concluding discussion, we develop implications of this broadened understanding for post-conflict trauma-focused rehabilitation.     

A European project on health problems, mental disorders and cross-cultural aspects of developing effective rehabilitation procedures for refugee and immigrant youth

The project is an international comparative study on risk and protective factors of adolescent health and well-being, with particular focus on youth with immigrant (or refugee) experience. This is a comprehensive study on the quality of life and health outcomes of adolescent youth that looks at group-specific differences within different socio-cultural contexts across six European countries, including those of post-conflict communities. The research project combines both quantitative and qualitative methods, using a common set up across all countries involved with the goal of collecting data on 3500 adolescents that are strictly comparable to allow cross-country analyses. It is particularly aimed at increasing the understanding of acculturation processes of a particularly sensitive population of adolescent refugees and immigrants and of the influence that the interaction of contextual and developmental factors has on their mental health and psychological well-being. in COll. Antropol. 27 (2003) 2: 431–438     

A European project on health problems, mental disorders and cross-cultural aspects of developing effective rehabilitation procedures for refugee and immigrant youth

The present paper describes the conceptual framework, rationale and methods of an international comparative study on risk and protective factors of adolescent health and well-being, with particular focus on youth with immigrant (or refugee) experience. This is a comprehensive study on the quality of life and health outcomes of adolescent youth that looks at group-specific differences within different socio-cultural contexts across six European countries, including those of post-conflict communities. The research project combines both quantitative and qualitative methods, using a common set-up across all countries involved with the goal of collecting data on 3,500 adolescents that are strictly comparable to allow cross-country analyses. It is particularly aimed at increasing the understanding of acculturation processes of a particularly sensitive population of adolescent refugees and immigrants and of the influence that the interaction of contextual and developmental factors has on their mental health and psychological well-being.     

Not-the-Troubles: Disinterring the Marginalised Stories of the Ordinary and the Everyday

ABSTRACT

Urban studies of Belfast, Northern Ireland, thoroughly explore the contested or post-conflict city. However, these ‘grand narratives’ do not necessarily accord with people’s day-to-day experiences. Although the ordinary and the everyday are the lifeblood of anthropological inquiry, the mundane in Belfast dwells on the narratorial margin, as academic and political loci predominantly align to the Troubles: to the protagonists, the causes or the peace-building aftermath. Ten by Nine (Tenx9) is a monthly, public storytelling night showcasing ordinary people and their true, personal, everyday stories, juxtaposing the funny, poignant and educational, and celebrating the quotidian. Retelling Belfast at Tenx9 challenges hegemonic discourse by moving the mundane from the margin to the centre, opening up a space for small ‘t’ troubles to be shared. The communitas at Tenx9 promotes a sense of belonging in the city outwith Troubled narratives and storytelling, an ancient Irish oral culture, becomes a new form of symbolic practice.     

‘Pregnancy Has Its Advantages’: The Voices of Street Connected Children and Youth in Eldoret,Kenya

Objective

Little is known about the reproductive health or family planning needs of street-connected children and youth in resource-constrained countries. The study objective was to describe how street-connected children and youth (SCCY) in Eldoret, Kenya, perceive pregnancy.

Methods

This qualitative study was conducted between August 2013 and February 2014. A total of 65 SCCY aged 11–24 years were purposively sampled from the three referral points: 1) A dedicated study clinic for vulnerable children and youth at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH); 2) Primary locations in which street children reside known as “bases/barracks”; and 3) Street youth community-based organizations. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, and translated into English. Content analysis was performed after thematic coding by 4 independent coders.

Results

The majority of SCCY interviewed were male (69%) and sexually active (81.5%). None had gone beyond primary level of education. The strong desire for SCCY to go through conventional life experiences including marriage and child bearing was evident. Sub-themes around desired pregnancies included: sense of identity with other SCCY, sense of hope, male ego, lineage, source of income, and avoiding stigmatization. The desire for children was highly gendered with male SCCY more focused on their social status in the street community, while for females it was primarily for survival on the street. Female SCCY generally lacked agency around reproductive health issues and faced gender-based violence. Abortions (either assisted or self-induced), infanticide, and child abandonment were reported. Respondents described a lucrative market for babies born to SCCY and alleged that healthcare workers were known to abduct these babies following hospital deliveries.

Conclusion

Our findings indicate gender differences in the reasons why SCCY become pregnant and have children. We also noted gender inequalities in reproductive health decisions. SCCY friendly interventions that provide tailored reproductive health services are needed.     

Hybrid simulation modelling of networks of heterogeneous care homes and the inter-facility spread of Covid-19 by sharing staff

Although system dynamics [SD] and agent-based modelling [ABM] have individually served as effective tools to understand the Covid-19 dynamics, combining these methods in a hybrid simulation model can help address Covid-19 questions and study systems and settings that are difficult to study with a single approach. To examine the spread and outbreak of Covid-19 across multiple care homes via bank/agency staff and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions targeting this group, we develop an integrated hybrid simulation model combining the advantages of SD and ABM. We also demonstrate how we use several approaches adapted from both SD and ABM practices to build confidence in this model in response to the lack of systematic approaches to validate hybrid models. Our modelling results show that the risk of infection for residents in care homes using bank/agency staff was significantly higher than those not using bank/agency staff (Relative risk [RR] 2.65, 95% CI 2.57–2.72). Bank/agency staff working across several care homes had a higher risk of infection compared with permanent staff working in a single care home (RR 1.55, 95%CI 1.52–1.58). The RR of infection for residents is negatively correlated to bank/agency staff’s adherence to weekly PCR testing. Within a network of heterogeneous care homes, using bank/agency staff had the most impact on care homes with lower intra-facility transmission risks, higher staff-to-resident ratio, and smaller size. Forming bubbles of care homes had no or limited impact on the spread of Covid-19. This modelling study has implications for policy makers considering developing effective interventions targeting staff working across care homes during the ongoing and future pandemics.     

Hyphenated Selves: Muslim American Youth Negotiating Identities on the Fault Lines of Global Conflict

In the wake of the events of September 11, Muslim-American youth found that the multiple cultures within which they live were suddenly and alarmingly in conflict. The developmental consequences of living in a world fractured by religious and ethnic terror have yet to be determined for Muslim youth in the United States. This exploratory, mixed-method study begins to examine how Muslim youth negotiate their identities in these challenging times. Documented in the surveys, narrated in the interviews, and drawn into their identity maps, Muslim-American youth (n = 70) ages 12 to 18, vividly portrayed their interior lives as a dialectic labor of psychological reconciliation – piecing together what we call hyphenated selves. The results show that Muslim youth experience discrimination, sometimes to an extreme degree. We observed diversity in how youth deal with the challenges of growing up Muslim in post 9/11 US, ranging from “telling nobody” to policing each other within the Muslim community. In addition we found that males and females negotiate their Muslim and American identities in different ways.