Given that social institutions are the basis of any society, they must ideally operate in unison with functional necessities for any society to function and then flourish. The plethora of issues confronting Nigeria as a country may be traced back to weak, incompetent, and dysfunctional social institutions that have failed to alter the status quo. According to Talcott Parsons, society is analogo...

Psychoanalytic social theorists who work in the relational tradition have analyzed the psychodynamics of enemy systems and identified persistent themes in the operation of these systems. Although enemy systems often involve enmity between ethnic, national or cultural groups, the psychodynamic symptoms of such systems are observable when social groups cast familiar outgroups as enemies. In conte...

Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions, in contrast to what would be suggested by a reasoning extending the Coase Theorem to politics? Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions because of differences in the beliefs and ideologies of their peoples or leaders? Or are inefficiencies in politics and economics the outcome of social and distributional conflicts? Thi...

Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 30, No. 2, Winter 2004, pp. 227-254. SEUNG-WHAN CHOI is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Security and Defence Studies, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He will join the faculty of the University of Illinois, Chicago in August 2004. He specializes in international politics (terrorism and international conf...

In this essay, I will discuss the ideological structure of current postcolonial English language politics in the world, arguing that despite the “advances” in post-Independence nationalist rhetoric in most “postcolonial” countries, the debates on language continue to rehash tired voices of pragmatism and linguistic nationalism. I further argue that what is usually “notable” in current postcolon...

THE creed of science as value-neutral, and our experience of medicine's capacity to be perverted into a demoralizing "discourse of power", together strengthen our wish that psychiatry should be free of politics, as from Szasz to Solzhenitsyn, we confront the evils of conditioning and the disabling of dissidents as disturbed and insane.' But four hundred years ago, official dogma, the Elizabetha...

It is believed that the multi dimensional dilemma has been prevailing in the country for the last two decades in the field of economy, social development and politics which have caused scary reactions in the society in general and to youth in particular. As a result, a pro-social behavior in the society is hardly witnessed. This paper investigates the pro-social behavior of society in terms of ...

the internet, the one that is of the greatest interest from the point of view of this article is that of the political area, more specifically understanding how the internet can cause changes in political structures in the sense of promoting a growing democratization. When one talks about politics, there are two branches that have to be analyzed: on one side you have the State, with its structu...