Programme full

Wednesday 15 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 2
The Muslim Internal ‘Other’: Negotiating Identities Among Shi’a Youth in South Lebanon
Fincham, K.
(University of Sussex)
This paper reports on empirical work conducted with youth in predominantly Shi’a communities in south Lebanon.
Unique in the Middle East, Lebanon is a parliamentary democracy with 18 officially recognized religious sects and no
dominant religious group. At the end of the Lebanese Civil War, the 1989 Ta’if Agreement established a system of
governance known as ‘confessionalism’ which attempted to fairly represent the 18 recognized religious sects in
government. According to the Lebanese Constitution, the President must be Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister
Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the Parliament Shi’a Muslim. This makes Lebanon’s system of power-sharing
extremely complex. Although the confessional arrangement was originally intended to deter further sectarian conflict,
significant demographic changes have taken place within the country since the last official population census in 1932.
This has called into question the legitimacy of the current power-sharing arrangement within the country, led to
ongoing feelings of mistrust between religious communities and challenged constructed notions of what it means to be
Lebanese.
The paper focuses on the ways that Shi’a youth in south Lebanon construct and negotiate their identities of gender,
nation and religion within the local context of Lebanon’s complex sectarian balance and within the broader context of
contemporary regional conflict between Shi’a and Sunni communities. In particular, the paper will explore how male
and female Shi’a youth live their lives both as members of the Muslim majority in Lebanon/ the region as well as
Muslim minority ‘others’ in relation to the dominant Sunni Islam.
Youth Negotiating National and Religious Identity in Northern Nigeria
Dunne, M.
(University of Sussex)
Nigeria is a secular federal state with distinct northern and southern geo-political regions that have a heritage that
reaches back to pre-colonial times. It is the most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa with over 300 ethnicities,
400 linguistic groups and a very high proportion of young people. The north of Nigeria is associated with Islam and the
south with Christianity, although significant levels of internal migration and settlement mean that there is usually a mix
of religious, linguistic and ethnic groups in each state. In recent years, however, political discontent and inter–religious
tensions have been heightened by high profile Islamic insurgency in the Northern states.
It is in the context of the historic and current social divisions between North and South, Muslim and Christian, Female
and Male in Nigeria that the research reported in this paper explores how young people in the North expressed and
navigated the intersection of their national and religious identities. The main focus is upon Northern Muslim Youth and
the ways that their discursive constructions of identity are based in a strong nationalist discourse that is consistently
gender inflected. The analysis also traces the ways that the young Northern Muslims’ discourses of belonging
construct both socio-cultural allies and ‘others’ within and beyond the regional and national boundaries.
Rights, Violence and Crime
W119, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
State-corporate Crime and Resistance: Crime-control from Below
Stanczak, D.
(Ulster University)
Increasingly, sociologists and criminologists recognise the social property of the crimes of powerful. An alternative
stream of knowledge informed by the concept of resistance frames state and corporate criminality as a form of social
stigma attached through a process of struggle from below to socially injurious state-corporate actions. This research
adopts a criminological torrent pioneered by Penny Green and Tony Ward (2000, 2004) and Kristian Lasslett (2010,
2012, 2014) who hold that state and/or corporate act acquires the social property of being criminal when an active
moment of popular condemnation is present. This moment, they argue, is organised by resistance movements made
up of civil society. However, in order to excavate the causes behind state-corporate activities that sometimes deviate
from social norms and result in social harms the research explores complex social dynamics and processes
characteristic of the capitalist mode of production at a particular time of its development. To this end, the research is
guided by a theoretical juncture between classical Marxism and Foucault's discourse on modalities of power. With the
use of case study method, the research then investigates what motivates labour organised movements to engage in
101 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University