Böcker av Agnes Katalin Koos

The book ventures into the explanation of intra-state communal conflict, more narrowly of the conflict between majority and minority communal groups, and develops arguments that highlight the causal impact of intergroup economic inequality. Its quest for empirical support has led to the compilation of three large, inter-related datasets, typifying the condition of minorities worldwide. They are mainly based on the Ethnic Power Relations, Minorities at Risk, and Quality of Government data, yet also involve information from a multitude of other sources, such as national statistics, cross-national demographic surveys, and the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples. The group-level data, featuring 860 communal groups, show that an impressive forty-five percent of the world's population do not belong to the majority communal group in their country. As reasonably feared, minorities are in general politically less empowered than their pluralities, and also poorer. Results from multivariate regression analysis corroborate the deleterious impact of horizontal economic inequality on inter-group hostility, measured either as group grievance or violent conflict. The double measurement substantiates the intuition that not all low-to-medium strength hostility is doomed to develop into violent conflict. In fortunate conditions, intergroup disputes can be solved, or compromises may be reached without turning to violence. Part of the analytical efforts have been directed towards detecting the differences between the causes of communal and non-communal social conflicts; and also towards deciphering which institutional conditions aggravate and which mitigate communal conflicts. A large number of variables in the regression models attempt to operationalize constellations that influence the evolution of conflicts either toward peaceful solutions or toward armed collision. The policy implications of the findings are not trivial. Positive discrimination, which in the United States is known as Affirmative Action, is often resisted by denying the unfortunate facts that make it necessary. In addition, currently the policies recommended for heterogeneous societies are also fiercely debated between advocates of power-sharing arrangements and those who would like to facilitate the communal homogenization of each state. This latter type of constitutional engineering is at variance with the political empowerment of minorities, a measure that could alleviate tensions rooted in economic disadvantages.

Horizons is a critical inventory of value-related thinking, demonstrating that the mind has the ability to profile a distinctive circumstance in diverse ways. Readers are first invited to a historical inquiry into typical configurations of values, their collisions, and the worldviews that drive them. They are then introduced to the epistemologies employed by the social sciences, so that they are better able to gauge the potential of these disciplines for coming to terms with values. Axiology is portrayed as a field that has broken free from its neo-Kantian roots, benefiting from challenging new conceptual frames based in documents with global reach-mainly the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.After scrutiny of what various sociological models claim about values and the way in which empirical surveys approach them, Horizons reaffirms the assumption that social life and its dynamics condition the fate of values. Yet, for the sake of more accurate accounts, research should consider to a greater extent social stratification, and pressing macrosocial problems such as environmental protection, sustainable development, and attainment of some form of global equity. Social sciences' limitations modulate their ability to serve as an unequivocal guide for value choices. These limitations are a problem because of the significance of the process of dialogue and deliberation in value-related fields. Rather than advancing the allegedly universal characteristics of any one culture, in a world consisting of many civilizations, the imperative is to acknowledge pluralism and discern what is held in common.