Women’s Employment Status, Coercive Control, and Intimate Partner Violence in Mexico

Andreas Villarreal, Sociology, University of Texas at Austin

Research Grant, 2006

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An unresolved issue in the literature on domestic violence is the effect that women’s economic status, and specifically their participation in the labor market, has on their risk of violent victimization. Different theoretical perspectives lead to opposite conclusions regarding the possible effect of women’s employment on their risk of violence. Some theorists argue that employed women are less economically dependent on their partners and are therefore less likely to tolerate abuse. A second theoretical tradition sees violence as a result of power derived from an imbalance in access to resources. Male partners who cannot derive power from their employment status or greater economic resources will use violence to assert their dominance in the relationship. Empirical findings from previous studies examining the relation between women’s employment and the risk of intimate partner violence have also been mixed. Some studies find greater violence toward women who are employed, whereas others find the opposite relation or no relation at all.

My study contributes to this debate by proposing and testing a new conceptual framework in which a woman’s employment status and her risk of violent victimization are both influenced by the level of control exercised by her partner. Controlling men will actively prevent women from working and are also more likely to physically harm their partners. Ignoring the fact that the same men that are likely to physically abuse their partners are also more likely to prevent them from working leads to an incorrect estimation of the effect of women’s employment on their risk of violence. Using a statistical model that takes into account this complex relationship in fact reverses the estimated association between women’s employment and violence. The final results show that employment significantly reduces women’s risk of violence in Mexico. Data for the study are drawn from a sample of over 30,000 Mexican women in intimate relationships. This finding has broad implications given the rapid increase in female labor force participation not only in Mexico but in many other developing countries as well.

The final results show that employment significantly reduces women's risk of violence in Mexico.

My study also contributes to our general knowledge of domestic violence in Mexico. In addition to a woman’s employment status, I also examine the effect that factors such as her age, educational attainment, marital status, urban residence, and violence in her family of origin have on her risk of intimate partner violence. Similarly, my statistical analysis examines how household characteristics such as crowding and the presence of extended family members affects violence against women.

Bibliography

1. Villarreal, Andreas. "Women's Employment Status, Coercive Control and Intimate Partner Violence in Mexico."Journal of Marriage and Family 69 (2007): 418-434.

Operation Fly Trap: Police Suppression and Gang Violence

Susan A. Phillips, Anthropology, Pitzer College

Research Grant, 2005

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This project was intended to be an exploration of the utility and efficiency of a gang task force in Los Angeles, California, examining whether the police’s idea of targeting violence through the drug trade is an effective weapon against gang crime. I wanted to look at impact on the families of those targeted and at gang members’ own views of the causes of violence. The project became the story of a sweep in Los Angeles from beginning to end—and included the moments before and after police action from varying perspectives. For the project, I interviewed a range of individuals, including those targeted (drug dealers and gang members), their families and friends, as well as some law enforcement officials (FBI and Los Angeles Police Department).

Though I originally wanted to interview the families of all 28 individuals targeted in the sweep, people were far more reticent than I had anticipated. There was a level of paranoia in the wake of FBI undercover work that made trusting outsiders difficult. Ultimately, I was able to gain the confidence of the highest-level dealers involved in the case. The project became framed around their experiences and those of their families, and focused primarily on the four key families of those indicted on federal charges, three of whom received over 20-year sentences for drug conspiracy charges.

The purpose of the interviews and statistical analysis I conducted for the project was to find out what happens to the families of those targeted in drug sweeps, to understand the interplay between the drug trade and gang violence, and to test the effectiveness of targeted gang task forces as a method of deterring violence. Participants weighed in on issues, told stories about their lives, and helped me to understand how they framed police action as just one in a series of ongoing life struggles.

Non-gang violence during this period rose in equal measure to the decline in gang violence, leaving the overall number of violent crimes in the targeted neighborhoods identical before and after the task force.

The formal goals of this project were as follows:

1. To analyze the family fallout of a gang sweep
2. To analyze whether or not the gang sweep was successful in reducing violence
3. To analyze insider explanations for gang violence

1. The family fallout of this task force was significant and is an example of structural violence. Here the notion of an “extended” criminal community is useful. For example, the number of direct kinship ties between gang members and the people targeted in the case meant that targeting 28 people in two neighborhoods impacted vulnerable people who were not gang members at a significant rate. Predictably, the families targeted dealt with financial difficulties, eviction, relocation. Sometimes these resulted from having drug proceeds removed from their families and always from the added pressure of having people in the jail, prison, and the court system. Children were frequent victims after the sweep and often their family situation had to change in ways that ranged from living with different family members to being placed in foster care. All of these findings support other recent work on how incarceration punishes by extension, and impacts families and children.

2. One unanticipated finding in the arena of family fallout was the amount of health-related problems noncriminal family members faced. Some children began to suffer from depression or ulcers as well as failure in school. Family members often became ill with stress-related illnesses, including significant weight loss, chronic headaches, rises in blood pressure, eczema, and so forth. Further, at least three deaths can be associated with the family breakdown attendant on Fly Trap. All of the victims were women, all were already in ill health, two were elderly and they all relied heavily on key targeted family members to care for them. My analysis of their deaths utilizes work on illness and social inequality, spousal loss, and trauma (see for example recent work on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina).

3. To analyze whether or not the gang sweep was successful in reducing violence, I conducted a statistical analysis of gang-related and non-gang-related violent crimes (homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape) in the two targeted neighborhoods in the six months before and the six months after the task force. The findings demonstrate a 40% decrease in gang-related violent crime in the two neighborhoods between these two time periods, which seems at first to demonstrate the effectiveness of the task force in meeting its stated goals. However, non-gang violence during this period rose in equal measure to the decline in gang violence, leaving the overall number of violent crimes in the targeted neighborhoods identical before and after the task force. Reasons for this finding might include the disorganizing impact of disrupting the drug trade, the fact that gangs, when strong, actually suppress a degree of non-gang violence, and possibly unnoted changes in policing strategies. In general, then, the task force did impact rates of gang violence but rates of all violence in the neighborhood did not change in the short term after the sweep. In the long term, no significant changes have taken place in terms of the strength of gang and drug structures in the two neighborhoods. I also analyzed drug sales and possession arrests six months before and after the task force and there was no difference between the two time periods. Clearly, more comparative work needs to be done here but the findings seem to point to the effectiveness of sweeps at incarcerating individuals involved in the drug trade and the ineffectiveness of sweeps in combating neighborhood violence either for the long or short term.

4. In order to analyze insider explanations of gang violence, I spoke to people about the causes of gang violence in their neighborhoods. In particular, I reviewed the causes of death for gang members in the two neighborhoods. Drugs did play a role occasionally, but were by no means the only cause of gang violence. What I found was that a) neither of the two main gang feuds causing rampant neighborhood violence was caused by the drug trade; and b) there are different systems internal to gangs that impact violence in neighborhoods. The drug trade is one, street gang politics is another, and a third is prison-level gang politics. There is some overlap as well as many ties between all of these, but they remain distinct systems that sometimes conflict with one another. Leaders in one may not be leaders in the other. Thus those targeted in the Fly Trap drug conspiracy sometimes netted violent individuals and sometimes not; by no means is a drug-related task force a proxy for targeting gang leadership.

In general, the findings of the project stayed true to the anticipated findings of the project as originally outlined to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. The book project that has resulted from this work is structured roughly around the following themes:

1. The drug trade and police surveillance (this includes treatments of snitching and wiretapping)
2. Family fallout (as outlined above)
3. The impact on gang violence (as outlined above)
4. The war on drugs (including sections on uses and expansion of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, evidence issues, appeals, family and target perceptions of governmental wrongdoing)

In the realm of law and society, the findings of this project demonstrate how gangs and the trope of violence are being used to bolster failing drug war machinery in the United States. This complex furthers the ongoing criminalization of communities of color in a manner that cements the networks of violence surrounding those communities.

Australian War Crimes Trials of the 1980s and 1990s: Law Confronts the Shoah

David Fraser, Law and Social Theory, University of Nottingham

Research Grant, 2007

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This project examines the history of Australian attempts to prosecute alleged Nazi collaborationist war criminals who had found refuge in that country in the aftermath of the Second World War. The study reveals the many difficulties that Australian authorities encountered in this process. More particularly, issues of time and space hindered attempts to bring alleged perpetrators before the bar of justice. The investigations into war criminals took place more than fifty years after the events and in a country distant from the locale in which the atrocities occurred. In addition to these obvious difficulties, the project, based in a detailed study of previously unavailable transcripts, investigative materials, and interviews with participants, reveals apparently irreconcilable differences in the approach to facts and truth between historians engaged as experts and legal professionals.

More careful examination of the archival record, however, reveals that the apparent differences in disciplinary norms were not as significant as might have been thought. History and legal principle were invoked, at different times and for different reasons, in the three cases that were eventually brought before Australian courts, by both defense and prosecution. While normative differences do exist between law’s search for truth within the bounds of criminal trial proceedings and historians’ understandings of the facts, the Australian war crimes trial experience as revealed in this study demonstrates that they can be brought together in a fruitful dialogue that assists in the creation of an invaluable record of tragic historical events.

History and legal principle were invoked, at different times and for different reasons, in the three cases that were eventually brought before Australian courts, by both defense and prosecution.

The Australian war crimes cases uncovered previously unknown eyewitness accounts of the Shoah in remote parts of Ukraine, as well as Soviet legal and historical archives that had not been made available to Western lawyers or historians before these prosecutions. In addition, Australian police and forensic experts conducted operations that resulted in the study of massacre sites and the recovery of the remains of forgotten victims of the Holocaust. This study reveals how the Australian war crimes experience combined legal, historical, and scientific expertise not just to enable prosecutions but to allow for the recovery of historical memory and the memorialization of the Shoah in remote parts of Ukraine. This Australian expertise was subsequently deployed in other international criminal contexts as lawyers and forensic specialists used the experience gained to prosecute alleged perpetrators from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The project reveals the significant ways in which rule of law norms could be invoked in order to ensure both the prosecution of alleged war criminals and the protection of the rights of the accused that are central to Western criminal justice systems. The study demonstrates unequivocally how the demands of historical justice and the rule of law in criminal trials can coexist despite the inherent difficulties involved in balancing these principles in Holocaust perpetrator trials.

Bibliography

1. Fraser, David. Daviborshch's Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.

Violence and Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Study of Kingston, Jamaica

Enrique D. Arias, Political Science, City University of New York, John Jay College

Research Grant, 2009

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This project seeks to understand the political role of armed groups in Kingston, Jamaica. Scholarship on gangs in Jamaica indicates that over the past thirty years criminal groups in that city, which were founded with the support of the country’s two main political parties in the 1960s and 1970s, have become increasingly less political. My findings support this general observation but also suggest that there is a wide variation in the political posture of criminal organizations in Kingston. What accounts for these differences?

Large swaths of the city’s working-class neighborhoods are dominated by politically connected actors that engage in extortion as well drugs and arms trafficking. The core of impoverished areas close to the downtown business district and other older impoverished areas in the southern and southwestern part of the city are often organized as what some refer to as garrison communities in which a single gang dominates an entire neighborhood or parliamentary constituency. Other impoverished regions, often newer settlements or areas that have fallen into poverty over the last 30 or 40 years, have high levels of criminal activity but are subject to a looser form of gang dominance in which smaller, but no less violent, gangs control different streets and compete with each other. Despite this conflict, these smaller gangs, as a result of shared political affiliations, will often work together during elections to protect the neighborhood from outside armed groups.

The project consisted of approximately 100 open-ended qualitative interviews conducted with leaders of different working-class communities in the city as well as members of civic organizations and policymakers and approximately 400 residents of two communities dominated by different types of armed gangs. One of these neighborhoods is located in the Kingston Western Constituency, next to the historic downtown commercial area, and the other is located in eastern Kingston in the Mountain View Road area, a region characterized by impoverished formerly middle-class housing developments. From the 1960s until mid-2010, a powerful hierarchical gang controlled much of the Kingston Western Constituency. The portion of the Mountain View Road area I studied is led by a set of decentralized gangs that negotiate local control and fight amongst themselves. The armed groups that operate in the two areas are both active supporters of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), one of the two dominant parties in the country. Where many consider western Kingston a key stronghold for the JLP’s armed wing for the entire country, the JLP-controlled neighborhoods on Mountain View Road are a key component of the JLP’s armed operation in eastern Kingston. A close analysis of the two areas, however, suggests that that the armed group in western Kingston maintains a much stronger link to the JLP and, despite the fact that the JLP has won every election in the Kingston Western Constituency since independence in 1962, plays a very active role in the voting process, attacking residents who refuse to turn out for elections. The armed actors on Mountain View Road, on the other hand, display comparatively less interest in actual voter turnout despite the fact that that the constituencies in that region have been the site of considerable electoral contestation over the past two decades.

Evidence gathered suggests that what drives gang-led political violence in the two areas is not the historic question of party affiliation but the criminal dynamics and interests affecting each area and the role that connections to the state play in those armed projects.

Evidence gathered suggests that what drives gang-led political violence in the two areas is not the historic question of party affiliation but the criminal dynamics and interests affecting each area and the role that connections to the state play in those armed projects. The gang that controlled Kingston Western was involved in a multifaceted criminal enterprise focused on international arms and narcotics trafficking, mass extortion of downtown businesses, and obtaining government contracts and patronage. The leadership of the gang depended on close connections with the government for protection from law enforcement and access to contracts. Thus, while the electoral outcome in the area was always a given, the leadership of the gang sought to boost turnout in its efforts to display its power and efficacy to party leadership. The result is a criminal enterprise that trades on political connections and, thus, at times acts as a political gang. The gangs in eastern Kingston, however, are involved in much more limited extortion activities and they receive comparatively little in the way of government contracts. The gangs make most of their money on the international and local retail arms and drug trade that is articulated through corrupt police. Thus, while party contacts may be important in providing some protection against arrest, they are much less important to these gangs than to their counterparts in the west. The result is a set of gangs with a political identity and connections that has less interest in taking actions to bolster those connections or directly profit from them.

This project is part of a larger three city, six neighborhood, study that examines similar processes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Medellin, Colombia. The project as a whole examines the role of armed actors in providing security as well as their involvement in elections and policy making.

Irish Religious Demography and Conflict, 1659–1926

Kerby A. Miller, History, University of Missouri

Research Grant, 2006

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The goal of this project was to collect and analyze historical data (official and unofficial) on the numbers of Irish Catholics and Protestants (the latter divided between Anglicans and Dissenters), who inhabited Ireland’s various administrative and census districts (townlands, parishes, baronies, counties, and provinces), to better understand how and why their geographical and demographic relationships changed between the mid-17th and early 20th centuries. My collaborators—Professor Liam Kennedy of the Queen’s University of Belfast and Dr. Brian Gurrin of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth—and I have found that:

(1) The demographic experiences of the Anglicans and Presbyterians in Ulster, Ireland’s only northern province (most of which now comprises Northern Ireland) were significantly and often dramatically different, at least from the early 1700s through the 1880s. In various, fundamental ways, these findings challenge the notion that Irish history is the story of only two [different and antagonistic] traditions—one homogenously Protestant, the other Catholic—particularly since the Ulster Presbyterian experiences of mass emigration (and even susceptibility to the Great Famine of 1845–52) often appear to be much more similar to those of Ireland’s Catholics than to those of the members of the Church of Ireland (the island’s legally established religion until 1869).

These findings challenge the notion that Irish history is the story of only two [different and antagonistic] traditions—one homogenously Protestant, the other Catholic.

(2) the demographic data from Ireland’s three southern provinces (Leinster, Munster, and Connacht) indicate that the proportional and even the absolute sizes of their Protestant populations (overwhelmingly Anglican) declined in the mid-18th century. These findings challenge the argument that the decline of the southern Irish Protestant population was related directly to the rise of Irish Catholic nationalism, which was not pronounced until the early 19th century.

Because of its immense size and complexity, this is an ongoing project. Only a small proportion of our findings have been published to date (March, 2011). However, one book and several major articles are now in progress; and we anticipate many more to follow.

Criminal Retaliation: A Qualitative Study of Social Control Beyond the Law

Bruce A. Jacobs, Criminology, University of Missouri, St. Louis

Research Grant, 2003

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Despite its preeminent role in regulating disputes between and among street criminals, retaliation has received scant attention from criminological researchers. Existing studies explore retaliation only tangentially, with little or no consideration of its situational and contextual dynamics. Even when retaliation is examined in its own right, the circumstances in which payback is enacted typically receive less attention than the factors that mediate the availability of law. As a result, the structure, process, and forms of retaliation in the real world setting of urban American street crime remain poorly understood. This study explores the face of modern day retaliation from the perspective of currently active criminals who have experienced it first-hand, as offenders, victims, or both. The study explores the retaliatory ethic among street criminals and the vocabularies of motive that offenders adopt to justify its role as the preferred mode of extralegal social control. It also examines the structure, process, and contingent forms of retaliation, offering a typology to organize the data. Part of this examination is the ways in which gender shapes the context and dynamics of retaliatory events for both male and female street criminals. The study also investigates the phenomenon of imperfect retaliation—acts of reprisal committed against parties not responsible for the instigating affront. The reasons for imperfect retaliation and their implications for crime displacement beyond the law are specifically explored.

Qualitative analysis revealed the importance of two axial factors around which retaliatory strikes could best be understood: whether such strikes occur immediately after the affront, and whether the strikes involve face-to-face contact with the person responsible for the affront.

Qualitative analysis revealed the importance of two axial factors around which retaliatory strikes could best be understood: whether such strikes occur immediately after the affront, and whether the strikes involve face-to-face contact with the person responsible for the affront. Immediate reprisal that involves face-to-face contact was called reflexive retaliation. Immediate reprisal that involves no face-to-face contact was called reflexively displaced retaliation. When retaliation is delayed, an added contingency appears—whether or not the delay is desired by the retaliating party. This permits four additional possibilities. Face-to-face retaliation where the delay is desired was called calculated retaliation. Face-to-face retaliation where the delay is not desired was called deferred retaliation. Retaliation without face-to-face contact where the delay is desired was called sneaky retaliation. Retaliation without face-to-face contact with the violator where the delay was undesired by the retaliating party is called imperfect retaliation.

Ethnic Identity, Collective Action and Conflict: An Experimental Approach

Macartan Humphreys, Political Science, Harvard University

Research Grant, 2003

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A large literature shows that ethnically homogenous communities often do a better job than diverse communities of producing satisfactory schools and health care, adequate sanitation, low levels of crime, and other essential outcomes that depend on community-wide cooperation. This project seeks to find out why. The research indicates that the principal obstacle to cooperation in diverse groups is not ethnic favoritism or a lack of consensus on what should be done but rather the stronger expectations of reciprocity that exist within than across ethnic communities. The results offer important lessons for policymakers committed to improving the welfare of people living in diverse communities.

The study was conducted in a neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, that has both high levels of diversity and low levels of public goods provision. The researchers used behavioral games to explore how the ethnicity of the person with whom one is interacting shapes social behavior. Hundreds of local participants interacted with various partners in strategic games involving the allocation of money and the completion of joint tasks. Each game was designed to capture a different channel through which ethnic diversity might affect social cooperation. Many of the subsequent findings debunk long-standing explanations for diversity’s adverse effects.

When given the opportunity to act altruistically in an anonymous fashion, individuals did not choose to benefit coethnics disproportionately. Yet when anonymity was removed, subjects behaved very differently.

Contrary to the prevalent notion that shared preferences facilitate collective action within ethnic groups, differences in goals and priorities among participants were not found to be structured along ethnic lines. Nor was there evidence that subjects favored the welfare of their coethnics over that of non-coethnics. When given the opportunity to act altruistically in an anonymous fashion, individuals did not choose to benefit coethnics disproportionately. Yet when anonymity was removed, subjects behaved very differently. With their actions publicly observed, subjects gave significantly more to coethnics, expected their partners to reciprocate, and expected that they would be sanctioned for a failure to cooperate. This effect was most pronounced among individuals who were otherwise least likely to cooperate.

These results suggest that what may look like ethnic favoritism is, in fact, a set of reciprocity norms—stronger among coethnics than among non-coethnics—that make it possible for members of more homogeneous communities to take risks, invest, and cooperate without the fear of getting cheated. Such norms may be more subject to change than deeply held ethnic antipathies—a powerful finding for policymakers seeking to design social institutions and promote development in diverse societies.

Bibliography

1. Humphreys, Macartan. Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (with J Habyarimana, D Posner, and J Weinstein). New York: Russell Sage Press, 2009.

By Right of War: The Discipline and Practice of International Law in Imperial Russia, 1868–1917

Peter Holquist, History, University of Pennsylvania

Research Grant, 2008

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This project addresses the emergence and consolidation of the international law of war. The intellectual lineage for the law of war dates back at least to Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). But it was only from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century that the law of war as we know it today, such as the criteria for distinguishing “legal combatants” from “illegal combatants,” crystallized. My study traces the historical foundations of this international legal order and tests the methodological presumptions about its origin and functioning.

As historians and legal scholars have demonstrated, international law of war (now often termed “international humanitarian law”) took form and was codified in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It emerged from a series of conferences and agreements, most notably the 1874 Brussels Conference on Proposed Rules for Military Warfare and the two Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. In this period, the Russian empire played a preeminent role in codifying and extending the international law of war. By way of illustration, the Russian government in 1868 introduced the rationalization that it was the “laws of humanity” that justified the laws of war in the St. Petersburg Declaration banning explosive bullets. It was the Russian government that convened, and drafted the preparatory materials for, both the 1874 Brussels Conference and the 1899 Hague Conference, gatherings which hammered out the key principles of what became the “laws and customs of war.” And the first international use of the term “crimes against humanity” in a penal sense came in 1915, in an Allied note to the Ottoman Empire regarding the Armenian genocide; the Russian government was responsible for inserting that phrase. The concepts developed at that time, and which the Russian empire played a key role in crafting, continue to serve as the framework for international humanitarian law today.

The project, in other words, asks by what means, and to what degree, can one bring people's conduct, even in extremis, into line with normative and ethical prescriptions.

We are left, though, with a dilemma: Why did officials of the Russian empire, famously ungoverned by the rule of law at home, insistently press the case that all states, the Russian empire included, be brought under an emerging system of codified international law? My study encompasses two distinct areas of analysis. First, it traces how international law emerged as a discipline in Imperial Russia and came to flourish there. This is a story of intellectual and diplomatic history. The second half of the project measures the extent to which these normative principles shaped actual policy. It takes the form of military and political history, examining the Russian army in three cases of military occupation: Bulgaria and Anatolia in 1877–78; Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion, 1900–1901; and Galicia and Armenia during the First World War. The project, in other words, asks by what means, and to what degree, can one bring people’s conduct, even in extremis, into line with normative and ethical prescriptions.

Bibliography

1. Holquist, Peter. "Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Urmia and Astrabad), October 1914-December 1917," in Borderlands, eds. Eric Weitz and Omer Bartov (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011).

2. Holquist, Peter. "The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia, 1915- Feb. 1917," in A Question of Genocide, 1915: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek, and Norman Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 151-74.

3. Holquist, Peter. "In accord with State Interests and the People's Wishes: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia's Resettlement Administration," Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 151-79.

4. Holquist, Peter. "The Role of Personality in the First (1914-1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina" in John Klier, ed., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in European History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 52-73.

Endocrine Disruption of Aggression: What We Can Learn About Humans by Studying Fish

Ethan D. Clotfelter, Biology, Amherst College

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Research Grant, 2006

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Hundreds of chemicals are known to interfere with the vertebrate endocrine system. These endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) differ from more traditional toxins in that they have myriad sublethal behavioral and physiological effects. One endpoint that is frequently affected by endocrine disruption is aggressive behavior, due to its underlying hormonal basis. Fortunately, because the endocrine system is remarkably conserved among vertebrates, we can study the effects of EDCs on aggression in relatively simple animals such as fish.

This study focused on EDCs called phytoestrogens, which are plant compounds that are structurally similar to our endogenous estrogens. Phytoestrogens are released into the environment wherever plant material is processed and concentrated, including sewage treatment plants, agricultural fields, and wood pulp mills. Humans are exposed to phytoestrogens via dietary sources such as soybeans, chickpeas, and flaxseed. My laboratory uses the fighting fish Betta splendens, a species well-known for its stereotyped aggressive displays, as a research organism with which to evaluate the effects of phytoestrogens on vertebrate behavior and physiology.

In our first experiments, my students and I exposed male B. splendens to the following concentrations of waterborne phytoestrogens using a 28-day semistatic experimental design: 17β-estradiol (an endogenous estrogen that we used as a positive control; 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000 ng/L), genistein (1, 10, 100, 1000 µg/L), equol (10, 100, 1000 µg/L), or β-sitosterol (10, 100, 1000 µg/L). The lower concentrations of each chemical are similar to those that animals experience in nature. Aggressive behavior in response to a mirror stimulus, a common index of agonistic behavior in fishes, was significantly decreased in several of the phytoestrogen treatment groups. These changes in behavior were not the result, however, of decreased overall activity, as we found no effects of phytoestrogens on spontaneous swimming behavior.

The decrease in 11-KT and the increases in serotonergic and dopaminergic activity are all consistent with the behavioral results we obtained.

In order to explain these changes in aggression, we examined two probable physiological mechanisms: sex steroid hormones in the bloodstream and neurotransmitters in the brain. With respect to steroid hormones, we assayed levels of the primary fish androgen, 11-ketotestosterone (11-KT), and found that fish exposed to phytoestrogens for 28 days had decreased 11-KT levels. More specifically, we found that genistein and 17β-estradiol (positive control) caused slight reductions in circulating 11-KT levels, while β-sitosterol significantly decreased concentrations of this androgen. To address the second question, we measured the concentration and metabolism of serotonin and dopamine, two monoamine neurotransmitters known to modulate aggressive behavior in vertebrates. We found that: (i) 17β-estradiol and β-sitosterol increased serotonin metabolism to its primary metabolite (5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid), (ii) equol and genistein increased dopamine levels, and (iii) β-sitosterol increased dopamine metabolism to its primary metabolite (3, 4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid). The decrease in 11-KT and the increases in serotonergic and dopaminergic activity are all consistent with the behavioral results we obtained.

The significance of these findings is that low doses of phytoestrogens are capable of altering species-typical aggressive behavior in vertebrates by interfering with the normal functioning of the neuroendocrine system. The implication for humans is that elevated phytoestrogen consumption, whether through the diet or dietary supplements, has the potential to cause subtle yet significant physiological—and perhaps behavioral—changes.

Scrutinizing the Gray Zones: Dynamics of Collective Violence in Contemporary Argentina

Javier Auyero, Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Research Grant, 2005

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Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent—particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival research, statistical analysis, and multisited fieldwork, and taking heed of the perspective of contentious politics, this work provides the first available analytic description of the origins, course, meanings, and outcomes of the December 2001 wave of lootings in Argentina. The research scrutinizes the gray zone where the actions and networks of both party activists and law enforcement officials meet and mesh. The research, furthermore, makes a case for the study of the gray zone in less spectacular, but equally relevant, forms of political activity. Clandestine connections between established political actors, I argue, count in the making of collective violence and in routine political life.

The research scrutinizes the gray zone where the actions and networks of both party activists and law enforcement officials meet and mesh.

Bibliography

1. Auyero, Javier. "L'Espace des luttes." Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 160 (2006): 122-132.

2. Auyero, Javier. Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

3. Auyero, Javier. "The Political Makings of the 2001 Lootings in Argentina." Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006): 1-25.