The African Great Lakes Region (GLR) has witnessed some of the most intense violence and protracted conflict of the last half-century. There has been spiralling and sometimes over-lapping conflict in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (hereinafter Zone 1 conflict...

This paper criticizes four typical explanations of settlement of internal conflicts, showing that they fail to give an adequate explanation of the 1998 settlement in Northern Ireland. Instead of inductively searching for recurrent proximate factors or proceeding deductively by applying general...

Changes in collective categories of identity are at the core of social transformation. The causal linkages between identity change, institutional change and change in modes of practice are, however, complex. Developing and adapting ideas from Pierre Bourdieu’s work, this article shows the...

We explore the impact of unsustainable housing commitments on psychological well-being using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We test the hypotheses that (i) housing payment problems, housing arrears and the threat of eviction and repossession have adverse impacts on heads of...

Much scholarly writing on states and state boundaries assumes that these form or at least condition the bounds of identity. The ‘institutionalisation’ process is said to be one where the boundaries of the state become the boundaries of everyday life and imagined community. In an...

This paper criticizes four typical explanations of settlement of internal conflicts, showing that they fail to give an adequate explanation of the 1998 settlement in Northern Ireland. Instead of inductively searching for recurrent proximate factors or proceeding deductively by applying general...

This article criticizes two theoretical strategies of approach to ethnicity and ethnic conflict and proposes an alternative. One strategy emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic or ethno-national bond and the resistance to change of the communities thus formed; it explains these...