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Climatic catastrophes affect living conditions and especially the agricultural sector. There is recognition that weather is one the main drivers of food insecurity in Kenya. Nations that are politically stable tend to enhance accountability and prepare so that they can respond appropriately to climatic catastrophes. Declining food production when the demand is high will cause deficits which in turn will lead to inflation and high food prices. The gap between demand and maize production has put maize at the center of the food security debate in Kenya. Maize is the most important cereal contributing greatly to food security. The last three Kenyan general elections (2007, 2013, 2017) sparked violence which greatly impacted on the food security of the nation. As a result, many Kenyans were left food insecure, leading to unnecessary deaths caused by hunger and malnutrition. The government represents pillars of change within the food security of the nation and improved agriculture and food security is applauded by citizens. When governance is poor, there may be a hindrance by complex political debates and, if approved, inadequate investments may be made within the agriculture sector. The objective of this study was to assess drought, governance, politics, and food stability within Kenya before and after elections. ; M-DS

[…] Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives by Alex de Waal, LSE Review of Books, June 12, […]

[…] Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives by Alex de Waal, LSE Review of Books, June 12, […]

AbstractDeparting from the canons of the cultural and material turns, this paper emphasizes the shortcomings that each body of work has shown in addressing political transformations. So doing, it argues that shifting relations between materiality and language occasion different kinds of politics. Specifically, the paper offers a new interpretation of one of the most critical epochs in the political history of modern Iran, by illustrating that the confluence of the material and linguistic worlds in the Islamic Republic during the 1980s, brought about a distinct political field in which relations between words and their material referents became fixed at the level of multitudes. This blocked public processes of performativity and resignification of signs in ways that might have threatened the centrality of the revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini. What developed was a social milieu in which Khomeini never faced the possibility of defeat in politics.

"The global financial crisis, which started in the United States in 2007, spread to Europe in 2009. It especially hit Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, countries which have introduced the single currency, the euro. These eurozone countries no longer have monetary policy autonomy, so they do not have the option of devaluation to increase competitiveness. The crisis has shown that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) created in 1993, and which led to the single currency in 1999, is faulty. Its built-in asymmetry, with centralised monetary policy and decentralised fiscal policy, should be expected to create problems. Part of the response to the crisis so far has been incremental moves towards fiscal and banking union, which will mean a deepening of European integration at a time when many observers believed that a certain equilibrium had been reached after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. This book focuses on these developments as well as analysing other economic policies that affect the general economic welfare of the EU, including agriculture, trade and immigration policies. The book puts the eurozone crisis into the wider context of deepening and widening."--Publisher's website.

AbstractWithin the academy we are taught to look for silence – as a noun. We are counselled to find gaps in the literature or empirical case studies that have yet to be researched in order to bring our own voice to the issues that they raise. But, there is a tension with the other face of silence, when it assumes the form of a verb. Silence and silencing have therefore been integral motivators for the entire spectrum of 'critical' literature within international studies, not only to show what cannot be spoken or thought about within international studies but also, at times, how this can be a deliberate political practice. But there remains a hope. The hope is that the catalyst for transformation – not merely change – is within that which we already know and that which we already have the ability to articulate or to speak. But should we take these assumptions for granted? It is at this precise point where the concerns of Richard K. Ashley with dissidence can combine with the conceptual provocations of the case of the Pirahã people of western Amazonia to generate some uncertainty about the revelations that 'critical' scholarship often wants to provide.