Monday 12th August - Friday 16th August 2002
Prague, Czech Republic

Session 4: Gang Violence, Soccer Hooligans and Uncivil Society

Catherine Leung - An Analysis of Gang Violence - A Sub cultural Perspective
Hong Kong University

Gang violence is strongly affected by gang subcultures. However, the contents of gang subcultures vary significantly with the changing norms and values of the modern societies. Through observations, focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with thirty-four street gang youths, new types of gang subcultures and violent patterns can be identified in the researched community.

According to the research data, four typologies of violence, namely the ‘High-High’ type, ‘High-Low’ type, ‘Low-High’ type and “Low-Low’ type, can be identified regarding the ratio and the seriousness of violence employed by the researched subjects during conflicts with other gangs. Likewise, four different kinds of gang subcultures, the ‘Triad Subculture’, ‘Friendship Subculture’, ‘Semi-Triad Subculture’ and ‘Recreational Subculture’, also can be distinguished affecting the exhibition of the four types of gang violent behaviours in the researched community.

This paper gives clear delineation on how the different subcultures make the gang members have different perceptions on the fighting powers of their own gangs and on their own mobilization power to other gang members during conflict situations. Eventually, gangs of different subcultures make different decisions on whether to fight or not when they are in conflicts with the other gangs. In this research, three gang response styles, the ‘Fighting Style’, the ‘Opportunity Style’ and the Avoidance Style’ can be recognized. This will be depicted in details in the paper.

Finally, suggestions on the ways to deal with gang violence owing to different subcultures will be given at the end of the paper. They include interventions on individual, group and community level.

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Przemyslaw Piotrowski - Soccer Hooliganism in Poland: The Extent, Dynamism and Psychosocial Conditions
Institute of Applied Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

The article presents the findings of long lasting research on the subculture of football hooligans in Poland. The following issues are presented. The first part features development of a sport related violence in Poland and describes distinctive characteristics of Polish football hooliganism. The second part of the article is devoted to the psychosocial analysis of the phenomenon, based on few year prophylactic program addressed to boys from "high risk groups". Participation in hooligan groups is discussed in terms of coping with the sense of alienation. The likelihood of forming a high level sense of alienation is increased by the following predispositions: high aggressiveness, low self-esteem, external locus of control and pathological factors in the family. Apart from such factors, two major elements influence football hooliganism in Poland, namely media reports and connections to skinhead subculture.

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Ebenezer Obadare - White-Collar Fundamentalism: Youth, Religious Violence & Uncivil Society in Nigeria
London School of Economics, United Kingdom

Religious fundamentalism, ubiquitous in social commentary and critical discourse after September 11, is not a new phenomenon. Nor, given available evidence, is it the preserve of any ethical or metaphysical tradition. Yet, in the contemporary era, three notable patterns have made a systematic inquiry into the nature of fundamentalism de rigueur. These are the undeniable frequency of fundamentalist violence especially in the peripheral formations of the global system, the alarming involvement of highly educated and urban based youth in the fundamentalist movement, and the rather unanticipated transference of radical Islamism to the socially excluded areas of advanced capitalist societies. Under what specific conditions are educated younger citizens impelled towards religious fundamentalism; and what are the implications of growing sectarian violence involving the youth for civil society? These are two of the important dilemmas that this research seeks to unravel. Nigeria offers a perfect analytic template for a number of fascinating reasons. Home to a historically politically engaged youth sector, it has witnessed a growing incidence of fundamentalist violence involving educated youth both within and outside the universities since the beginning of the 1980s. For all its portentous implications, this phenomenon, captured in this study as ‘white-collar fundamentalism’ is yet to receive a systematic and coherent treatment in the literature, even though the metaphysic impulse itself continues to frame reflexes within the larger struggle for political values in Nigeria. The study hopes to fill this void in the scholarship, employing a combination of critical textual analysis and structured interviews and focus group discussions with identified respondents. The obvious conceptual crucible for the study is the interlacing between the forces unleashed by the global process of modernity and the massive disarticulation of the youth sector. In Nigeria, nay Africa, this condition has been worsened by the all too familiar postcolonial anomie and the attendant immiseration of civil society at large. The groping for a spiritual anchor and identity that all too often explodes in fundamentalist rage thus emerges as a response to the consequent variability of ‘meaning’ and the demise of ‘old certainties’.