Beware the Lawyers

From 'Day in Pictures' from the BBC

Caption reads:
A car blazes in the southern port of Karachi, Pakistan, amid clashes between rival groups of lawyers.

[Update 504 pm]: I had meant that as relatively tongue-in-cheek - violence is bad, of course, but rival lawyers?, really?

However, it seems that so far seven people have died due to the resulting violence.

'And Watch Out for the Women'?

One part of the article I don't understand is this remark:

Police say that five people were killed when rioters set fire to lawyers' chambers in a building adjacent to the city court in downtown Karachi.
They say that those burned to death included a woman.

I'm sorry she, and all of the others, are dead, but is her sex really noteworthy? I thought women could be lawyers in Pakistan, since they can be Prime Ministers. Is this some lingering chivalry on the part of the BBC that women shouldn't be harmed by violence (only those nasty, belligerent men)? Did they perhaps mean to imply that she was not a lawyer?

Anthropology in Everything, Violence Edition

Hmm. A new meme?

First Chris Blattman asks if peace can be instilled. He reports from a rural training center in Liberia:

The second day of our stay we woke up to a small riot. Supplies of food and soap had been delayed from the capitol, and the excoms had taken to the yard, yelling angrily with the staff and refusing to attend classes. Johnson stood in the thick of them, surrounded by two dozen angry youth, hashing it out.

Within an hour, the youth had settled back to their quarters, their elected leaders were holding a consultation, and were preparing to present a list of grievances to the school administration. Nothing was broken, few egos were bruised, and the excoms' anger and frustration was being channeled into a peaceful and institutional process. Such an outcome, Johnson tells me, would have been unthinkable just two moths ago. But they have succeeded in creating new norms of behavior and dispute.

Then, Dani Rodrik posts about a paper exploring the intersection of soccer, culture, and violence. He notes:

I must say the cultural explanation leaves me cold, even though I do not have a good alternative explanation in its place. If you have ever spent time in cabs in Manhattan, you know that it is pretty hard to distinguish the Russian drivers from the Pakistani ones, or the Israeli ones from the Koreans. They all drive like NYC cabbies, even though the "driving culture" in these countries are pretty different.

In response, I'd ask, could it just be another example of acculturation? I imagine that being a successfull NYC cabby requires certain traits for success (traversing the city in some sort of meaningful time frame and also getting a spot at high-frequency fare sites). Don't these guys depend on the number of fares + tips to make a living? What I mean to imply is, the geography, politics (or at least laws) and culture of NYC create an environment that requires certain characteristics in order to succeed. Success (money) is an incentive. Thus, there is an incentive for cabbies to adapt (turn into NYC cabbies). Environment -> Incentives (economics) -> Acculturation (anthropology).

Societal, cultural, norms, including those of interaction, can be very powerful, but like all normative teachings, can be overcome and retaught. What I really want to know is what would happen if the soccer players were faced off against the 'ex-coms'?

The AIDS Political Crisis

In my continuing quest to completely eliminate any free time, I stumbled across AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis - Yet by Alex de Waal on the Social Science Research Council's website.

I haven't bought the book yet, but the Table of Contents and the first chapter, A Manageable Catastrophe, are available online.De Waal's premise is interesting: while we're doing a decent (but not good) job of managing AIDS - getting antiretrovirals to where they are needed, at affordable prices, we haven't focused on eliminating AIDS - changing behavioral patterns to limit incidences of HIV infections. This has two important ramifications:

1. Teenagers in developing countries have a shockingly high likelihood of developing AIDS
2. 'Today's generation faces a greater inequity in global life chances than its predecessors, and this is increasingly due to adult mortality and not child deaths.'

However,

demographic modelling suggests that even at very high prevalence levels - up to 40% or so - can be sustained indefinitely without a fall in the absolute numbers of a population. At that prevalence, the great majority of adults will end their lives early to AIDS. Today's crash in life expectancy will not be quickly reversed... (de Waal 6)

It is this final point - that current population levels will be maintained, but the demographic makeup will shift downward, to a population primarily of children, teenagers, and young adults, that leads de Waal to consider this a 'perpetuated calamity'. As this New York Times article discusses, very young populations contribute to strife and instability:

In poor countries with rapidly growing populations, intense competition for education, jobs and land among the young contributes to discontent and makes it easier for rebel groups to recruit, said Elizabeth Leahy, the primary author of a new report for Population Action, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Hence, the concern, at least from the West.

But it is not a simple matter of government officials ignoring the news. African rulers are canny, with a 'sound appreciation of how power functions.' They know that 'they won't be removed from office or even face political threats on account of AIDS.' (de Waal 2) If the opposite were true, believe that Mbeki and others would not have bothered with the AIDS denial that has so shocked and outraged Westerners. They might privately admit it, but they wouldn't base policy on it.

Sadly, AIDS does not head the population's list of priorities. Concerns such as unemployment, poverty, crime, education and general health improvements regularly outrank AIDS. (7) De Waal ends the chapter:

We should not mistake managing the political and social threats emanating from the AIDS epidemic for an effective response to the immense human tragedy of HIV/AIDS itself... [W]e still lack the kind of evidence we need if we are to be able to design effective policies and programmes to overcome HIV/AIDS. We are not seriously demanding that our leaders prevent HIV infections, and we should not be surprised that they are failing to do so. (10)

I'm intrigued.