Migration Studies

The "Great Frost" of 1740 was one of the coldest winters of the eighteenth century and impacted many countries all over Europe. The years 1740–1741 have long been known as a period of general crisis caused by harvest failures, high prices for staple foods, and excess mortality. Vulnerabilities, coping capacities and adaptation processes varied considerably among different countries. This paper investigates the famine of 1740–1741 in Ireland applying a multi-indicator model developed specifically for the integration of an analysis of pre-famine vulnerability, the Famine Vulnerability Analysis Model (FVAM). Our focus is on Ireland, because famine has played a more outstanding role in Irish national history than in any other European country, due to the "Great Famine" of 1845–1852 and its long-term demographic effects. Our analysis shows that Ireland was already particularly vulnerable to famine in the first half of the eighteenth century. During and after the experience of hardship in 1740–1741, many Irish moved within Ireland or left the country entirely. We regard migration as a form of adaptation and argue that Irish migration in 1740–1741 should be considered as a case of climate-induced migration.

""The Bee Kingdom is a family memoir in progress that will be accompanied by an online visual archive focusing on the life of my maternal grandfather: scientist, beekeeper and Egyptian Romantic poet Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955). Abushady was an instrumental figure, both as a poet and as publisher and founder of the Modernist literary group “Apollo” and its eponymous journal that became the seminal organ of the Romantic poets in the Modern Arabic poetry movement in Egypt’s “Old Regime” (ca. 1920s-40s). He was also a physician and bacteriologist who is still known in certain circles for having definitively revolutionized beekeeping at an international scale. His work started in England, where he attended medical school, and later in Egypt where he returned in 1922 and raised a family. In addition to inventing the first standardized, aluminum honeycomb, which he patented in 1919, Abushady founded, designed, edited and published several early important bee research journals: The Bee World in England, and later The Bee Kingdom in Cairo. Contributors were international and ranged from local bee farmers to renowned entomologists; the latter journal was bilingual English and Arabic. Abushady’s aim in bee husbandry, as in literature, was ecological and cultural richness through selection, experimentation and hybridity.
""

"The aim of the present research was to examine the experience of extended periods of immigration detention from the perspective of previously detained asylum seekers and to identify the consequences of these experiences for life after release. The study sample comprised seventeen adult refugees (sixteen male and one female; average age 42 years), who had been held in immigration detention funded by the Australian government for on average three years and two months. They were interviewed on average three years and eight months following their release and had been granted permanent visa status or such status was imminent. The study employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to explore detention and post-detention experiences, and mental health some years after release. The qualitative component consisted of semi-structured interviews exploring psychological well-being, daily life, significant events, relationships, and ways of coping throughout these periods. This was supplemented with standardised quantitative measures of current mental health and quality of life. All participants were struggling to rebuild their lives in the years following release from immigration detention, and for the majority the difficulties experienced were pervasive. Participants suffered an ongoing sense of insecurity and injustice, difficulties with relationships, profound changes to view of self and poor mental health. Depression and demoralisation, concentration and memory disturbances, and persistent anxiety were very commonly reported. Standardised measures found high rates of depression,
anxiety, PTSD and low quality of life scores. The results strongly suggest that the psychological and interpersonal difficulties participants were suffering at the time of interview were the legacy of their adverse experiences while detained. The current study assists in identifying the characteristics of prolonged immigration detention producing long-term psychological harm."

The objective of this study is to document the reaction of international students to the 11 March 2011 emergency in order to inform and improve disaster management strategies, both public and institutional. The study is based mainly on a questionnaire survey carried out in August 2011 and follow-up interviews with students and other stakeholders. It describes the background of Tohoku University’s School of Engineering and covers six different stages in the evolution of the emergency: (1) immediate response; (2) taking shelter in Sendai; (3) life in the city during the aftermath; (4) sheltering outside Sendai; (5) coming back; plus (6) an overview of the experience. Major findings include: the process of evacuation and safety confirmation was successful, yet the subsequent phases (2 and 3) went on mostly unmanaged; students relied mostly on secondary sources of information to make decisions, mainly family and friends of the same nationality, most of whom probably were not better informed than the students themselves. Based on the findings, suggestions for future disaster planning are advanced, as well as a discussion on the challenges of information provision during crisis.

What specific opportunities and risks do immigrants face in a labour market oriented towards flexibility? How different are their experiences depending on origin country, legal status, gender, or socioeconomic background? Building on empirical research in three cities of the Netherlands, the life and work stories of migrants coming from Brazil in various conditions are compared and discussed. Attention is paid to the particular case of domestic and care services, their recent expansion in the European Union and their bonds with transnational labour. By bringing together the voices of migrants and some very influential contributions from social theory, this book addresses important questions regarding the actual operation and consequences of territorial, organizational and citizenship borders. The concluding suggestion is that borders are dividing not only the origin and destination countries of migrants: they are also dividing migrants themselves based on their specific position in legal and social structures.

"Asabiyya: Re-Interpreting Value Change in Globalized Societies

Almas Heshmati
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies (CESIS); Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Arno Tausch
Innsbruck University - Faculty of Political Science and Sociology - Department of Political Science; Corvinus University Budapest - Department of Economics; Vienna University; University of Fribourg, Switzerland

September 1, 2009

IZA Discussion Paper No. 4459


Abstract:     
This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led members of the economic profession, most notably, Barro, 2004 to analyze the connections between some dimensions of recent sociological religious value research (like the strength of the belief in hell) with economic growth. The present essay starts from this methodological position, and, like Barro links value systems with economic performance. The belief in or the fear of hell is part and parcel of a larger set of traditional values. With the free available country-wide data from the World Values Survey, we re-interpret Barro’s thesis in a much wider and macro-sociological framework. We further develop the well-known Inglehart/Welzel, 2003, 2003 map of global values, and develop the idea of “Asabiyya” (“social cohesion”), inherent in classic Arab historiography, first described by Ibn Khaldun (1332 to 1406) in his work “Muqaddimah,” as a counter-model to both Barro and Inglehart/Welzel, 2003, 2003.

A frequently asked question is whether “modernization” without “spiritual values” in a globalized world economy and world society possible in the long run. Starting from our multivariate analysis of the World Values Survey data (principal component analysis), it is shown that rather two factors are decisive in understanding global value change: a continuum of “traditional versus secular,” and a continuum “cheating versus active society.” Asabiyya is defined then empirically by the residuals from the two factor scores. Asabiyya in the 21st Century, as a way out from the modernization trap of societies, characterized by large-scale social anomaly, is a high secularism combined with a high active society score, thus avoiding the “modernization trap” of an increasingly secular society, which accepts cheating on taxes; accepts government benefits fraud and taking bribes. This re-discovery of the “active society paradigm,” inherent in Etzioni’s sociological theory, for cross-national research on religion and economic growth also shows that the “active society” of volunteer organization work is the best societal medicine against this kind of value decay, which is so common, according to our study, in countries like France, Brazil, or most of East Central Europe and the former USSR.

An active form of religious or non-religious humanism, which provides a noble motivation for such activities as volunteer social services, is a very necessary precondition for social cohesion in the 21st Century. Finally, we show on the basis of these data and with very recent IMF data and prognoses (2009) about economic growth in the world system for 2009 and 2010 that economic growth in the current world crisis is far more connected with these dimensions than with the belief in hell, as stipulated by Barro. We also control for the negative effects of Kearney’s globalization index on current and future economic growth in our equations. We conclude that not a society based on fear is needed in the first place, but an active society of volunteer social work.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 42

Keywords: Index Numbers and Aggregation, International Relations and International Political Economy, Religion, Bureaucracy, Administrative Processes in Public Organizations, Corruption

JEL Classification: C43, F5, Z12, D73

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Date posted: October 21, 2009 
Suggested Citation

Heshmati , Almas and Tausch, Arno , Asabiyya: Re-Interpreting Value Change in Globalized Societies (September 1, 2009). IZA Discussion Paper No. 4459. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1484630 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1484630"