Pluralism and Political Conflict in Indonesia

Page range: 81-10

Resolving the Paradox of Holding People Responsible

Regardless of justification, it is commonplace throughout the U.S. criminal justice system as in everyday life to teach our offenders and children alike that wrong actions “have consequences,” namely, those authority figures promise to impose upon them. We do so in the name of holding people responsible for their actions, or in legal parlance in civil law, holding them accountable or liable. I noticed that in Norwegian, responsibility, accountability and liability translate into one word, ansvar, which I have translated from Germanic to Latin roots as “responsiveness.” In practice, the state of being responsive to others with whom one conflicts occurs when empathy moves one to recognize and accommodate the interests of others, in Roger Fisher’s terms, to shift focus from position to interests, a shift I observed as a victim-offender mediator. When we hold people responsible, we dictate rules to replace rather than invite and encourage assumption of responsibility for how ones’ actions affect others; we require obedience in place of building capacity for self-control. In legal terms, we adjudicate rather than mediate our differences. I turn from the paradox to identifying ways in which responsibility is also engendered rather than taken in our relations, inside and outside the criminal justice system, in our daily lives. I seek to recognize and encourage transition in our political culture from control by power over others to control by sharing power with others, in moments of conflict as in all our moments of cooperation

Criminology as a Force for Human Tolerance

Criminology traditionally has been the study of twin forms of intolerance--crime and punishment. Punishment can only increase crime. Criminology ought to become a study of how to alleviate crime and punishment by engineering tolerance of greater varieties of human behavior, where social control takes on positive connations. A framework is outlined for making criminology a force for human tolerance

Piety and Redistributive Preferences in the Muslim World

This article tests two competing theories of the relationship between piety and redistributive preferences in the Muslim world. The first, drawn from the new political economy of religion, holds that more pious individuals of any faith should oppose redistributive economic policies. The second, drawn from Islamic scripture, holds that pious Muslims should favor more redistributive economic policies. Employing survey data from twenty-five countries, the authors find that there is no clear relationship between piety and redistributive preferences among Muslims. The authors find that more pious Muslims are less likely to favor government efforts to eliminate income inequality, but they find only inconsistent evidence that more pious Muslims support governments taking responsibility for the well-being of the poor. The findings offer little evidence to suggest that either scriptural or organizational factors unique to Islam create distinct economic policy preferences

Methods for Modeling Social Factors in Language Shift

In this paper we expand our understanding of language endangerment by shifting the focus from small language communities to minority language communities with speaker populations in the millions. We argue for a methodological shift toward examining language shift scenarios more broadly and quantitatively for two main reasons: 1) it is becoming increasingly clear that a large speaker population does not protect against language shift (Anderbeck 2013); 2) we need to make a distinction between the symptoms and the causes of language shift, where factors such as a dwindling number of child speakers should be seen as symptoms of language shift that are caused by other factors (Himmelmann 2010). In this paper we use Indonesia as a case study and analyze a sample of the 2010 census. We treat language choice as a sociolinguistic variable and analyze the correlation between six social factors and language choice (local languages vs. the national language, Indonesian). These results provide a starting point for creating more comprehensive models of the sociolinguistics of language shift