Abdulkader H. Sinno

Education, Income and Support for Suicide Bombings: Evidence from Six Muslim Countries

The authors examine the effect of educational attainment and income on support for suicide bombing among Muslim publics in six predominantly Muslim countries that have experienced suicide bombings: Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey. The authors make two contributions. First, they present a conceptual model, which has been lacking in the literature. Second, they consider attitudes toward two different targets of suicide bombings: civilians within the respondent’s country and Western military and political personnel in Iraq. The authors find that the effect of educational attainment and income on support for suicide bombings varies across countries and targets.The findings therefore draw attention to the difficulties of making generalizations about Muslim countries and the importance of distinguishing between targets of suicide bombings.

Different groups, different threats: public attitudes towards immigrants‡

ABSTRACT Research on attitudes towards immigrants devotes much attention to the relative effects of economic and social-psychological factors for understanding sentiment towards immigrants, conceived in general terms. In this article, we advance this work by arguing that the context framing immigration concerns leads publics to associate different types of immigrants with different threats. An issue context that diminishes support for one ‘type’ can boost it for another. Evidence from an original survey experiment in Britain supports this claim. Security fears affect attitudes towards Muslim immigrants but economic concerns bear on views towards Eastern Europeans. While concern about crime adversely affects sentiment for East Europeans but casts Muslims more positively, cultural threats have the opposite effect. By shifting the focus onto the qualities of different types of immigrants, we highlight the importance of the target immigrant group for understanding public attitudes.

Armed groups' organizational structure and their strategic options

The organizational structures of armed groups, whether they develop by accident or by design, affect their strategic choices during the conflict and their ability to enter peace agreements. This article explains how frequently encountered structures such as centralized, decentralized, networked, and patronage-based ones affect strategic choices for the organization and its opponents. Only centralized organizations can make use of sophisticated strategies such as ‘divide and conquer’, ‘co-option’, and ‘hearts and minds’, and can engage in successful peace agreements. Centralized armed organizations that do not have a safe haven within the contested territory tend to be very vulnerable, however, which makes peace less attractive to their opponents and explains in part why long-lasting peace agreements between such groups and their opponents are rare.

Discourses on Muslims and welfare across the Atlantic

Discourses linking Muslims and social services are complex and differ across Western countries. This chapter presents a first effort to untangle these discourses by categorizing the frames used to address the topic in newspaper and tabloid articles in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. We analyse qualitatively the contents of a sample of articles from a large comprehensive compilation from US, British and Canadian newspapers from 2000–10. We also consider the political platforms of certain populist parties in Europe, the pronouncements of politicians and the writing and websites of American anti-Muslim activists. We organize this information based on the various frames used in the discourses on Muslims and welfare and then provide tentative explanations for the variation in the use of frame-based discourses across countries and outlets, within countries and over time. We conclude by evaluating the future political and economic impacts of the current discourses on Muslims and welfare.