Looking backward from A Clockwork Orange.

Protracted conflict and violence in Burma have been conducive to the growth of the opium industry, Burma's single financial success in recent years of economic crisis and authoritarian rule. This in turn has fed violence and subsequent humanitarian crisis. This paper argues that the underlying political economy of the conflict has been overlooked, while conflict itself has been treated as a peripheral factor in questions of 'development', and further that the opium dynamic is a vital factor in continued violence and vulnerability for non-combatants in the region. A political economy approach, identifying the beneficiaries of violence, will offer a more holistic and effective approach to the protracted crisis.

Authoritarianism↗

PubMed1999

The social class determinants of income inequality and social cohesion.

The authors argue that Wilkinson's model omits important variables (social class) that make it vulnerable to biases due to model mis-specification. Furthermore, the culture of inequality hypothesis unnecessarily "psychopathologizes" the relatively deprived while omitting social determinants of disease related to production (environmental and occupational hazards) and the capacity of the relatively deprived for collective action. In addition, the hypothesis that being "disrespected" is a fundamental determinant of violence has already been refuted. Shying away from social mechanisms such as exploitation, workplace domination, or classist ideology might avoid conflict but reduce the income inequality model to a set of useful, but simple and wanting associations. Using a nonrecursive structural equation model that tests for reciprocal effects, the authors show that working-class position is negatively associated with social cohesion but positively associated with union membership. Thus, current indicators of social cohesion use middle-class standards for collective action that working-class communities are unlikely to meet. An erroneous characterization of working-class communities as noncohesive could be used to justify paternalistic or punitive social policies. These criticisms should not detract from an acknowledgment of Wilkinson's investigations as a leading empirical contribution to reviving social epidemiology at the end of the century.

Authoritarianism↗