The Global Sociology Blog

Inequality is bad for us, individually and socially. So say Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (with extensive website). Do you love scatterplots? I hope so because the book is chock full of them, establishing correlations between high levels social inequalities and high levels [...]

Having defeated the Tamil Tigers, the government of Sri Lanka is left with hundreds of child soldiers to rehabilitate. For anyone who has read P.W. Singer‘s book, Children At War, the stories will seem very familiar: BBC NEWS | South Asia | Dark tales of Tamil ex-child soldiers via kwout Go read the whole thing.

It also produces a variety of other social problems, which I will explore in a longer post tomorrow. In the meantime, sociologist Goran Therborn distinguishes between three types of inequalities, all with deleterious effects (hat tip to Mike Buhl for this): The Killing Fields of Inequality | CommonDreams.org via kwout And then goes on to [...]

That is the question asked by Josh Harkinson over at the Blue Marble: Is the U.S. a Failed State? Or Just a Climate Rogue? | Mother Jones via kwout It’s an interesting notion indeed, also in light of the massive financial crisis. One could perfectly argue whether corporate money and corporate media played a part [...]

Here’s to breaking a patriarchal stronghold: Female gondolier ends 900 years of Venetian discrimination | World news | The Guardian via kwout

The problem? The new executive politics: a democratic challenge | open Democracy News Analysis via kwout Saskia Sassen identifies six trends that have led to growth in power of the executive branch relative to the legislative branch: "The growing power of particular state agencies because of corporate economic globalisation: the treasury, the federal reserve, the [...]

Children forced to mine Zimbabwe diamonds | World news | guardian.co.uk via kwout Of course, Mugabe kept control of the police and military… which means reform is very unlikely. And military control over the diamond mines means that the potential revenues that should flow into government coffers are being siphoned into the pockets of Mugabe [...]

Burned alive in Kenya: BBC NEWS | Africa | Horror of Kenya’s ‘witch’ lynchings via kwout This is horrifying, of course, but it is even more so to see how casually people who have participated in these lynchings behave afterward and how just a touch of rationality could put a stop to this: BBC NEWS [...]

The wall-to-wall, cliched-ridden television coverage of Michael Jackson’s death is useless and annoying. Better to turn to the Very Public Sociologist: A Very Public Sociologist: Marxism and Michael Jackson’s Death via kwout He means “alienated” in the Marxian sense, of course. Go read the whole thing.

The liberated women of Afghanistan: IRIN Asia | Asia | Afghanistan | AFGHANISTAN: Anargul, “Self-immolation is the worst” | Gender Issues | Hear our voices via kwout

BBC NEWS | Africa | Blood diamond scheme ‘is failing’ via kwout As Global Witness puts it: combating conflict diamonds – campaigns – global witness via kwout Many other groups have already warned of the problems with the Kimberley Certification Process. Even one of its initiators has sharp words for it. Exclusive: The return of [...]

If you missed this story, please read it (I’ll provide some translation below for the non-French readers). Les enfants perdus du Sénégal – Libération via kwout A "talibé" ("talibanized" seems the closest translation I can think of) is the term used to describe the beggar children who populate the streets of West African countries such [...]

Since the media and blogosphere has been all, well, a-twitter about Twitter, it is not surprising to see explanations for the phenomenon cropping up. Context Crawler dug up this video on the topic:

Le Monde has a very interesting (and interactive) feature on the impact of incarceration on inmates’ perception of (and relationship to) their body along with the bodily transformations that incarceration involves. Le corps incarcéré LEMONDE.FR | 22.06.09 © The corporal trajectory, as described by men and women inmates, includes several broad categories of bodily treatment [...]

How about an entire canton? Swiss offer millionaires a haven away from the poor | World news | The Guardian via kwout Zygmunt Bauman noted previously that it is an obvious trend for the super-rich to voluntarily segregate themselves from the rest of the population and live in their own quasi-country (Richistan) and operating on [...]