ABSTRACT

In this article, I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Kabul to argue that threat production should be understood as a mechanism of racial capitalism. Based on 15 months of fieldwork, including confidential security reports, observations of segregation systems, and Afghan media accounts, the analysis shows how private security companies in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan profited from the racialized presumption of Afghan dangerousness. Through numerical rating systems, selective knowledge production, and curated media summaries, Afghans were depicted as inherently threatening. These representations were reinforced by segregation regimes that divided the city into “foreigner” and Afghan zones, alongside wage hierarchies that paid Afghan guards a fraction of their Western counterparts for identical labour. The construction of Afghans as perpetual threats generated continuous demand for security services, allowing private companies to profit by selling protection from dangers they themselves (re)produced. I suggest that this process demonstrates how racial capitalism adapts in conflict zones, creating new markets not through resource extraction or land seizure but through the continual manufacture of racialized insecurity. While grounded in Kabul, the analysis contributes to broader debates on empire, capitalism, and security by highlighting how the commodification of racialized danger is increasingly central to the global security economy.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

While most research on the radical right attempts to identify the one central voting motive among its supporters, few studies have sought to differentiate between different types of voters. Given this research gap, we assume that there are multiple paths to the radical right and that different groups have different motives for their support for this party family. Based on different waves of the ESS, we conduct a cluster analysis in order to classify the ideological heterogeneity within the electorates of 15 Western European radical right parties across three conflict dimensions (redistribution, cultural liberalism, migration). We distinguish between four types of voters, analyse their social characteristics and try to identify different voting motives, ranging from defending economic status hierarchies to processing economic insecurities or protesting the loss of cultural hegemony. On the basis of these findings, we discuss what holds the electoral coalition of the radical right together and what can potentially divide it.

The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT

Scholars have demonstrated how (neo)colonialism has produced durable North-South hierarchies in knowledge production about crime and punishment. Yet, most of these studies emphasize the epistemic “weight of empire” in ways that obscure the relational dynamics under which local bureaucrats domesticate imperial policy experiments at the margins of postcolonial cities. By taking the case of the Tactical System of Crime Analysis (STAD) in Santiago, Chile, this article explores how and why police officers and data analysts respond to “colonial situations” behind predictive policing as they navigate its underlying “broken windows” philosophy demanded by bank lenders and reinforced by US advisors. Drawing upon ethnographic observations within a Comisaria in Santiago, I argue that police officers and professionals negotiate the (neo)colonial conditions of policing through ambivalent morality —a set of hybrid discourses concerning individual choices that allows officers to inflict the criminal stigma upon the poor and assign responsibility for crime. Officers and data analysts interpret US “broken windows” philosophy through fragmented scripts and counterscripts that both reinforce and decenter poverty and personal choices as the primary sources of crime. Drawing upon these narratives, these agents define who is a criminal, what crimes deserve to be suppressed, and under what conditions somebody could legitimately break the law. This study not only shows how police officers and professionals redefine policing in moral terms but also illustrates the simultaneous attraction to and denial of neocolonial power while disclosing the symbolic mechanisms (i.e., scripts and counterscripts) under which this hybridity disrupts a simplistic replication of US “broken windows” discourse at the margins of Santiago.

ABSTRACT

The link between educational attainment and attitudes towards out-groups stands out as one of the most consistent statistical associations in the social and political sciences. However, a recent analysis of survey data from the United States finds that the relationship between higher education and out-group prejudice depends on the content of education. In this Research Note, we replicate that study's analysis of tertiary-level academic majors within a European context and extend it to include academic specializations below the tertiary level. Our analyses of European Social Survey (ESS) data, spanning 32 countries and over 120,000 respondents, reveal substantial variation in the association between field of study and anti-immigrant prejudice. Specifically, we find that individuals with degrees in arts, humanities, and social sciences express more positive views towards immigrants than those with degrees in other fields. A similar, though less pronounced, pattern emerges among individuals with lower levels of educational attainment. These findings challenge simplistic and politicized notions of the impact of higher education, offering a more nuanced understanding of educational attainment and its so-called “liberalizing effect.”

ABSTRACT

In this research note, we map the power elite in Greenland, amidst the current geopolitical interest in the nation. Using social network analysis, we identify a power elite of 123 individuals as the central circle in an extensive affiliation network data on 3412 positions held by a total 2052 individuals in 456 affiliations. We find an integrated and cohesive power elite dominated by actors from politics and public and private enterprises. When comparing this central circle to the previous studies of power elites in the former colonial power and current sovereign, Denmark, the political sector and the state are stronger in Greenland at the expense of the private sector. However, while the elite is integrated, we also identify potentials of fracturing. Thus we find a division between politicians—who are more likely to have childhood and educational ties to Greenland—and other elite groups—in particular private business—who are more likely to have academic degrees, be male and live in the Capital, Nuuk. The network of the elite is also clearly clustered around the strength of affiliation with Greenlandic society. We conclude by discussing how the potential fracturing of the Greenlandic elite along ethnic division lines may lead to a lack of cohesion and legitimacy entering the current geopolitical tensions surrounding the world's largest island.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 5, Page 951-952, December 2025.

The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 76, Issue 5, Page 1214-1215, December 2025.

ABSTRACT

Past studies have yielded important findings on the stratification and consequences of parenting, but it remains inconclusive how the stratification of parenting changes as children grow and how parenting at different developmental stages creates cumulative advantages for children. To examine these questions, this paper analyzes data from the 2010 to 2018 China Family Panel Study, drawing on a sample of N = 1129 children. It employs Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), linear regression, and the Regression-with-Residuals (RWR) method to investigate the patterns, determinants, and consequences of parenting in China. This research yields several novel and important findings. First, CFA results indicate the presence of a latent construct underlying all dimensions of parenting, suggesting a pattern of concerted cultivation. Second, after controlling for family finances and structural factors, parental education robustly predicts all dimensions of parenting, highlighting a pattern of cultural capital stratification. Third, the strength of educational stratification in parenting decreases with age, supporting an age-as-leveler perspective in understanding the stratification of parenting. Fourth, RWR analyses reveal that Chinese concerted cultivation in childhood and early adolescence generates cumulative—though declining—advantages in children's cognitive abilities. This paper extends cross-cultural perspectives on the cultural capital theory of parenting, introduces an age-as-leveler perspective on the stratification of parenting, and highlights the cumulative function of parenting in social reproduction.

ABSTRACT

Due to their geographical dispersion, many families face challenges in exchanging support over long distances. While family theories emphasise the importance of a systemic approach to family relationships, reciprocity—a core feature of these relationships—is still predominantly studied within specific dyads, such as the parent-child relationship, rather than within the broader family network and its spatial context. This study addresses this gap by examining whether family members reciprocally exchange material and emotional support, and how these exchanges relate to spatial characteristics at three levels: the individual (past migration, degree of urbanisation), the dyadic tie (physical distance between members) and the network (spatial dispersion). Using a national sample of 549 adults living in Switzerland, who named important family members and identified available support, we apply a multilevel network approach. Results show that only reciprocity in material support declines with residential distance when controlling for both in-person and remote contact. Moreover, reciprocity is more likely in large, tightly-knit families, and—specifically for emotional support—in spatially dispersed ones. This last finding suggests that reciprocating emotional support is a key mechanism through which families maintain long-distance relationships. Another takeaway is that cultivating mutually supportive ties must be understood not only through dyadic distance and contact between individual members, but in relation to the spatial and network context of the family as a whole.

ABSTRACT

Whether students educated in different ability tracks in secondary education develop different levels of civic and democratic engagement is yet unclear. To explore this issue, we focus on how schools bring students of different tracks and family backgrounds together, and whether such between-school differences are associated with varying growth rates in civic and democratic engagement during secondary education. Using newly collected 4-year panel data starting at the very beginning of the Dutch tracked educational system, the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values (DAPDV), we study developments in institutional trust, societal interest, voting intention, and political knowledge. Growth curve models show that much of the variation between tracks and between schools is rather stable, although track differences in institutional trust became more pronounced. Although schools that are more compositionally diverse vary from homogeneous schools, track differences are largely present already at the start of secondary education. Within-individual transition models show that students moving up to more advanced tracks do gain in political knowledge.

ABSTRACT

This article advances the study of racial extremism by analyzing how its practices of violence and sexuality are marked on the bodies of participants in the form of scars, physical stances, abuse, tattoos, pregnancy, injury, strength and size, using an extraordinarily rich and extensive set of narratives collected from lengthy in-person interviews with 47 former members of U.S. extremist white supremacist groups. It asks how embodied practices of violence and sexuality enable extremist white supremacist groups and actors, how embodied practices of violence and sexuality disable these groups and actors, and how gender matters in embodied practices in these groups. As a lens into embodied practices of violence, interview narratives about participants' preparation and deployment of their bodies in violent situations are analyzed, with attention to the gendered nature of these processes. Similarly, interviewees' narratives about their racialization of sexuality and sexual transactions are analyzed to understand embodied practices of sexuality and their gendered aspects. The embodiment of racist violence is found to be important in making racial extremism a visceral aspect of the lives of its adherents. This is highly gendered, as women and men use and experience violence in different ways. The embodiment of racist sexuality is found to be an iterative process of assessing one's sexuality and the value of one's sexual body to others, a process that serves as a portal to women's victimization while allowing some women to gain access and influence in a highly misogynistic world.

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to sociological scholarship on climate change by examining the development of the voluntary carbon offset market in Finland. While intended to address the collective challenge of climate change, voluntary carbon offsetting has faced criticism for commodifying emissions and shifting responsibility to specific actors. Enabled by voluntary carbon markets, emissions and climate impacts are attributed to companies and individuals, reflecting the idea that each entity possesses its ‘own’ emissions that they can choose to offset. However, this attribution does not happen on its own. The present study thus examines how the collective problem of acting on climate change is coordinated through particular moral engagements. We focus on the socio-legal formatting of the voluntary carbon offset market in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state. We trace the trajectory of Compensate, a key Finnish offset provider whose activities sparked public controversy and led to criminal charges for violating the country's Money Collection Act as well as a legislative reform aimed at formalising voluntary offsets. The controversy centred on the nature of voluntary offsets and whether to consider them to be generally beneficial climate actions or self-interested activities. Based on the theory of the sociology of engagements, our analysis shows how actors engage in moral and political coordination in order to foster and sustain engagements with climate change. More broadly, our case demonstrates that producing and facilitating engagement with climate change through a voluntary market is not merely a matter of implementing effective instruments and arrangements—leading ultimately to the individualisation of climate action—but a result of complex moral and socio-legal formations. We conclude that the formatting of particularised climate engagements is a collectively produced process that necessitates an analysis of the shared moral coordination involved.

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how working-class young people enroled at college in London, Rochdale and Morecambe perceive of university. It argues that university represents a great risk, associated with high levels of debt, which does deter some students, but at the same time, university is imagined as a meaningful vehicle for dignity and respect, which students place greater value on than the prospect of benefitting from the so-called “graduate premium”. Broadly, then, it argues that the desire to attend university is predicated on three factors: the calculation of risk versus reward, the “migrant effect” for the children of migrants or those who migrated directly, and thirdly, the pursuit of dignity and respect.

ABSTRACT

There is increasing recognition of the use of family violence by children and young people, and the need to build the evidence base on understanding this form of violence. Adolescent family violence (AFV, also referred to as adolescent violence in the home) refers to the use of violence by a young person against another family member within the home, and can include physical, verbal, emotional, psychological, financial and/or sexual abuse and property damage. This article presents findings from a secondary analysis of data from the Adolescent Family Violence in Australia (AFVA) study—the first national study of the nature, prevalence and impacts of AFV in Australia. The AFVA study involved an online survey of 5021 young people aged 16–20. Drawing from a subset of this survey data, this article aims to better understand how correlations between disability, poor mental health and use of AFV relate to young people's experiences of child abuse. The findings provide further evidence that young people's use of family violence in the home is interrelated to their own family violence victimisation during childhood. Findings presented here reiterate the need to recognise and respond to children experiencing family violence as victim-survivors in their own right. Early and age-appropriate child-centred interventions would create opportunities to mitigate adverse outcomes, including poor mental health and the intergenerational transmission of violence.

ABSTRACT

In the past decade, scholars of international migration have made remarkable strides in unpacking the complex infrastructures that channel cross-border mobility by investigating the operation of profit-oriented migration industries and the regulatory tussles of multilevel migration governance. However, little work has combined the insights of both to reveal how they interact to facilitate or inhibit the growth of particular migration regimes. This article integrates the two strands by reconceptualizing them as part of the same global field, which offers resources for exploring how the struggle for profit intersects with competitions over regulatory capital. It clarifies these dynamics through a case study of the sale of citizenship to wealthy individuals. Focusing first on the involvement of regulatory capital in the competition around economic capital, it shows how and with what outcomes countries and firms cooperate or compete in the system, leading to program resilience or risks. Then turning to the involvement of economic capital in competitions leveraging regulatory capital, it reveals how global powers can influence the citizenship policies of other countries and how third powers dominate in different ways, impacting program growth and profitability. The upshot offers greater traction for examining the limits of state sovereignty and reveals how migration regimes are produced within uneven global playing fields structured by fundamental doxa.

ABSTRACT

People with higher education hold more positive attitudes towards immigrants than those without. Previous studies have attempted to net out selection mechanisms to examine whether there is a causal effect of higher education on attitudes towards immigrants. However, parental higher education has been largely neglected as a likely source of this selection. Using UKHLS data on individuals and their parents for the UK and employing the khb decomposition model, we examine if and why parental education influences attitudes towards immigrants. First, we show that, net of individual educational attainment, individuals whose parents have a university degree are more likely to have more positive attitudes towards immigrants. More highly educated people have more positive attitudes, but parental education reinforces this association or compensates for low educational attainment. Second, we illustrate that the relationship between parental higher education and attitudes towards immigrants is mediated by two mechanisms: parental socialisation and individual education. In contrast, socio-economic positioning while growing up makes a negligible contribution. Our findings suggest that formative years are crucial for the development of attitudes towards immigrants later in life and that educational inequalities of today affect the attitudes towards immigrants of tomorrow.

ABSTRACT

Elites are increasingly visible in academic and political discourse owing to their disproportionate power in shaping policy. For the most part, however, elites have been viewed in race-blind terms. In this paper, we advance a racialized perspective on elite studies by highlighting three salient ways that race matters for elite views on inequality and redistribution. First, we focus on elites as racialized actors whose racial identities impact their perspectives on social policies. Second, we examine the effect of holding a historical perspective of racialized inequality on elites' redistributive preferences. Third, we highlight the importance of attending to the racialization of social policies, distinguishing between redistributive measures framed in race-neutral and race-conscious terms. We demonstrate the utility of a racialized approach to elite studies by analyzing survey data collected from political, economic, and civil service elites in South Africa. Findings show that elites' racialized identities shape their redistributive preferences, as do their historical understandings of racialized inequality, but these effects vary depending on whether elites are evaluating race-conscious or race-neutral policies.

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, non-voting among the British working class has increased substantially, contributing to widening class-based inequality in electoral participation. This study examines the impact of occupational class mobility on the intergenerational transmission of electoral participation in two ways. First, by applying Diagonal Reference Models to data from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study covering eight General Elections. Through this, we estimate the impact of mobility on the relative influence of class of origin and class of destination. Second, by examining patterns of non-voting during the early years of adulthood in order to estimate the degree to which class patterns of non-voting among occupationally mature adults reflect processes of prior self-selection, rather than the pattern of non-voting associated with occupational class of destination. The findings indicate that upwardly mobile individuals are more likely to vote, but only after they have experienced occupational mobility into the middle class, thus suggesting a process of acculturation into the class of destination that diminishes the influence of their class origins. Conversely, individuals who are downwardly mobile from the middle class are less likely to vote. However, this lower level of participation is already apparent earlier in life, before they experience adult occupational mobility. This suggests a pre-existing pattern indicative of selection effects. These dynamics, in the context of balanced patterns of upward and downward mobility, reinforce class inequalities in electoral participation and suggest that relative differences in turnout between social classes are likely to remain stable or even widen.