Search results

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that offering entry into a lottery as an incentive to those who participate in research studies represents a challenge to the principle of informed, coercion‐free consent that is considered an essential ingredient of permissible recruitment to studies. This is, first, because information about the chances of winning in this context is normally unavailable to potential participants and, without this, they cannot accurately weigh up the risks and potential benefits of participation. Second, even when this information is available, such an incentive capitalizes, I contend, on the difficulty of weighing up small probabilities, exploiting the fact that people tend to be beset by cognitive biases that make it challenging to make decisions rationally. The resulting conclusion is that we should not view lotteries as more ethical than simply paying participants, when the latter is feasible.

Information literacy (IL) has been considered by Library and Information Studies (LIS) research and praxis to be vital in helping citizens be 'informed', 'active' and 'engaged' within society. LIS discourse has explored different conceptions of citizenship and its relationship with IL within the paradigm of liberal democratic societies. Critical IL approaches have in turn promoted a citizenship of personal agency, empowerment, challenging the status quo and the pursuit of social justice, as well as focusing on what has been termed 'political literacy'. However, critical information literacy has also problematised some of the approaches to citizenship found in LIS discourse. Despite the complexity of the subject, empirical study into these issues is still severely lacking. This research moves to start addressing this need by investigating how IL is understood and enacted from the perspective of UK citizenship. Using a qualitative approach of semi-structured interviews with five UK citizens based in Oxford, UK, in the summer of 2019, it set out to establish the relationship between IL and citizenship in a personal context. It was found to be understood and enacted through the development of socially-constructed personal citizenship information landscapes, oriented to a personal sense of citizenship, agency, motivation and empowerment. These personal landscapes challenge some of the established IL paradigms of 'informed', 'active' and 'engaged' citizens, as well as related concepts of information 'wealth' and 'poverty'. They also raise questions of the role of personal ethics in decision making as citizens and potential tensions with 'acceptable' norms. These findings help to further problematise the dynamic between IL and citizenship, and challenge LIS research and praxis not just to promote specific values and goals, but also to work towards a greater understanding of the personal contexts shaping that dynamic.

Within the context of upstream operations, one must engage with events within particular boundaries of space and time. Understanding processes within these areas can also result in awareness of the emergence of particular groups and ideas. The emergence of Da'ish in 2014, was the result of the fragmentation of Iraq and the increasingly sectarian attempts to fill the post-Saddam vacuum. Mabon considers political organisation in Iraq across the 20th century, focussing upon the rise and fall of the sovereign state, and suggests that by considering events through the lens of sovereignty, we are better equipped to understand events. Mabon analyses the Iraqi state, before turning to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, considering the process of deba'athification and the establishment of Shi'a government in Baghdad, mass unemployment, and sectarian violence. The penetration of the Iraqi state by external actors, namely Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose geopolitical agendas—framed as support for sectarian kin—fed into the continued fragmentation of the state. From this, it is possible to see how Sunni communities became marginalised and securitised, resulting in what Giorgio Agamben (Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995) has termed 'bare life'. It is these conditions that gave rise to the emergence of Da'ish.

In recent years, the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran has become increasingly influential in shaping the nature of Middle Eastern politics, with the two exerting influence across the region in an attempt to increase their own power and to reduce that of the other. Amidst an increasingly fractious region, this article explores Saudi Arabia's attempts to securitize Iran to actors in the US. The signing of the nuclear agreement and the failure of the US to move beyond normal politics signal the failure of Riyadh's efforts to securitize Iran. Understanding the nature of relationships in the region, particularly between Riyadh and Tehran and between Riyadh and Washington, helps to understand the changing nature of regional politics and ultimately, the emergence of a more pro-active Saudi foreign policy.

This article applies the concept of securitization to the Middle East with a focus upon the securitization of the Shi'a other. Such processes occur across time and space and are not restricted to state borders, escaping the Westphalian straitjacket. As a consequence, one must consider the construction of space and political structures across the region in order to understand the traction that such moves can find. It appears then, that in seeking to maintain short-term survival, regimes have sacrificed long-term stability, but the impacts of such moves transcend the typically linear constructed audiences within securitization moves. A key contribution of this article is to consider the extent to which audiences within the Middle East, both intended and unintended, transcend the linear audiences found within conventional processes of securitization. The article uses two case studies as a means of exploring the extent to which securitization can be applied to the Middle East. Such an approach helps us to identify the logics that are involved within the process of securitization, with consideration of the idea that we can populate a broad framework about the universal application of securitization to context specific cases.

Over the past year, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has experienced a period of rapid transformation under the direction of a new Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the son of the current King. Domestically, Bin Salman has overseen political reform in the upper echelons of the al-Saud ruling family, whilst embarking on a more pro-actively anti-Iranian foreign policy. This article looks at the actions of the new crown prince to explore the impact of Bin Salman's influence on both the Kingdom and the Middle East more broadly.

This article explores the emergence of Hizballah, the Party of God, and the development of its ideas of resistance at a local and regional level. It begins by considering the emergence of Hizballah and the Lebanese context through the lens of Giorgio Agamben's work on bare life. It suggests that these conditions existed in Lebanon—amidst the Shi'a community—and asks how people came together to reject the condition of 'being thus'. Conventional approaches suggest that this occurred through Hizballah's ideas of resistance, yet this has largely been under-conceptualized. To do this, it looks at the role of the Karbala Narrative in helping the group draw support from Shi'a Muslims in Lebanon, while also locating itself at the vanguard of resistance in the Middle East. With the emergence of Da'ish in the summer of 2014, this position was challenged. By reflecting on speeches from prominent Hizballah figures, the severity of the threat can be seen, justifying the Party of God's involvement in Syria. It concludes by arguing that the need to maintain its geopolitical influence has required military action in Syria, which has ultimately led to the creation of bare life.

Defence date: 7 April 2017 ; Examining Board: Professor Christian Reus-Smit, formerly EUI/University of Queensland, Supervisor; Professor Philippe Schmitter, European University Institute (Emeritus); Professor Laurence Whitehead, University of Oxford; Professor Ayşe Zarakol, University of Cambridge ; This dissertation takes as its focus the emergence of guardian political order – a hybrid political system in which elected officials must contend with non-elected 'reserved domains' dominated by state elites that exercise a 'tutelary' or 'guardian' function in relation to the overall polity – in modern Turkey and Thailand in the second half of the twentieth century. Its central objective is to explain how guardian regimes emerge and consolidate, and why they assume their distinctive regime morphology – a hybrid constitutional structure bifurcated between elected institutions and unelected tutelary ones. This broad inquiry into puzzling 'regime outcomes' entails a subsidiary set of questions. Given that hybrid regimes generally tend to follow in the wake of authoritarian ones, what would induce authoritarian incumbent elites to cede their monopoly of power to a political system bifurcated in this way? How do we explain the substantial variation in the institutional design of guardian structures in different cases when they first come to life? Why have guardian hybrid regimes proved so durable and long-lasting? Finally, how can we account for distinctive regime trajectories – the patterns of ideological–institutional reconfiguration that guardian hybrid regimes undergo over time? This dissertation advances a novel theory of how guardian hybrid regimes come about, the shape they take when they are born, how they reproduce (institutionally speaking) over time, and also how they adapt or change over time both institutionally and ideologically. It argues that guardian hybrid regimes emerge as contingent outcomes of intra-elite conflict during historical breakpoints in national political development. During these 'critical junctures' traditional state elites engage in intense factional contestation over the task of fashioning a new, post-authoritarian political system. Deep, longstanding socio-political cleavages in the body politic and the particular quality of the domestic and international security environment condition elite conflict and elite choices over regime structure during the critical juncture and shape the eventual 'architecture' of the new political system. This explains the distinctive institutional morphology of guardian hybrid regimes – a bifurcation of the overall framework of political authority within the state between elected institutions (the 'political realm') and guardian tutelary ones (the 'deep state'). Once established, guardian hybrid regimes are sustained and reproduced by institutional complexes of socially-embedded notions of legitimate political authority and strategic bureaucratic incumbency. These complexes consist in three mutually reinforcing elements that generate mechanisms of inherent institutional reproduction: a hegemonic state ideology (HSI); a 'monist' public sphere, and; periodic 'strategic' interventions by guardian actors to 'discipline' the political realm. Guardian hybrid regimes are also adaptive. In the wake of guardian settlements, processes of reaction and counterreaction to those settlements produce transitions through different institutional–ideological configurations as different guardian actors jockey for primacy within the deep state in response to varying challenges from the political firmament. I develop this argument and ground these claims through a critical juncture-path dependence analytical framework. Path-dependent explanations in comparative-historical analysis unfold through a sequence of analytical elements or components – critical junctures and antecedent conditions, institutional reproduction, reactive sequences and final outcomes – that work together to provide robust explanations of institutional outcomes, including patterns of regime development.

Five years after people took to the streets in protest at political organisation across the Middle East, the consequences of these actions remain. As the protests gained traction, states began to fragment and regimes sought to retain power, whatever the cost. While a great deal of focus has been upon what happened, very little attention has been paid to the role of agency within the context of the fragmenting sovereignty and political change. This article contributes to these debates by applying the work of Giorgio Agamben to the post-Arab Uprisings Middle East, to understand the relationship between rulers and ruled along with the fragmentation of the sovereign state. The article argues for the need to bring agency back into conceptual debates about sovereignty within the Middle East. It concludes by presenting a framework that offers an approach building upon Agamben's bare life.

A Slovene collective emerging in the wake of Tito's death and shaped by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) are a performance art movement founded in 1984 in Ljubljana, northern Slovenia. Together with their most influential delivery system the group Laibach they examine Vaclav Havel's Post-Totalitarian Age, and operate as nexus between East and West in the context of postcommunism. This article interrogates how with the employ of relatively unique and willfully provocative strategies of Retrogardism, re-mythologisation, and Over-identification, Laibach interrogate contexts of the unfinished narrative of Communism, the aestheticized-political of totalitarianism, and the legacy of Yugoslavian Self-management Socialism. Retrogardism has been re-contextualised by cultural theorist Marina Gržinić as the new "ism" from the East, and Slavoj Žižek champions Laibach's acts of disruptive Over-identification. Other diverse subjects such as ideological discourse, Suprematism, "Balkanisation" and the wider notion of European identity, in particular Western chauvinism, are all fertile ground for Laibach's controversial provocation and are subject to analysis. The ludic presence of Laibach and the NSK reveals the mechanisms of these discursive fields, whilst simultaneously appearing to reaffirm such, often to an alarming and disconcerting degree.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of execution practices in England and their extraordinary transformation from 1660 to 1900. Agonizing execution rituals were once common. Male traitors were hanged, disembowelled while still alive, then decapitated and quartered. Female traitors were burned alive. And common criminals slowly choked to death beneath wooden crossbeams erected at the margins of towns. Some of their bodies were either left to rot on roadside gibbets or dissected by anatomy instructors. Two centuries later, only murderers and traitors were executed - both by hanging - and they died alone, usually quickly, and behind prison walls. In this major contribution to the history of crime and punishment in England, Simon Devereaux reveals how urban growth, and the unique public culture it produced, challenged and largely displaced those traditional elites who valued the old 'Bloody Code' as an instrument of their rule.

"This book charts the history of execution laws and practices in the era of the "Bloody Code" and their extraordinary transformation by 1900. Innovative and comprehensive, this work will find an audience with scholars interested in the history of crime and punishment in England"

This paper uses Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception as a theoretical approach that allows us to see how emergency legislations operate in the region as mechanisms of control and dominant paradigms of governance. Relying on Egypt as a case study, this paper traces the significance of emergency rule throughout Mubarak's era up until Al Sisi's 2014 Constitution. It applies a four-stage analytical framework to investigate whether or not Egypt was indeed ruled by the exception throughout its turbulent recent history, while under the guise of Emergency Rule. In doing so, we aim to provide an analysis of the legal structures that shape Egyptian politics, while also adding to debates on the State of Exception, particularly on its application in the non-Western world.

In early February 2011, people took to the streets of Manama, Bahrain, protesting against the political system of the Al Khalifa monarchy. Although initially occurring along non-sectarian lines, the protests were quickly framed as such and, as a consequence, the nature of the protests changed. This article engages with this process of sectarianism, exploring how space became contested and how such sites took on political – and sectarian – meanings. In the article, we argue that by framing the protests in such a way, the Al Khalifa regime was able to create a master narrative that impacted upon all facets of Bahraini society, at home and abroad.