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Through the case study of Kyrgyzstan this paper argues that a rapidly increasing availability of drugs in prison is not necessarily deleterious to solidarity and inmate codes. Instead, the fragmentary effect of drugs depends on the forms of prisoner control over drug sale and use. In Kyrgyzstan, prisoners co-opted heroin and reorganized its distribution and consumption through non-market mechanisms. State provision of opioid maintenance therapy incentivized powerful prisoners to move to distributing heroin through a mutual aid fund and according to need. Collectivist prison accommodation, high levels of prisoner mobility and monitoring within and across prisons enabled prisoners to enforce informal bans on drug dealing and on gang formation outside of traditional hierarchies. We argue that in these conditions prisoners organized as consumption-oriented budgetary units rather than profit-driven gangs.

AbstractThis paper furthers the goal of "queering lexicography" (Nossem 2018) by proposing a theoretical approach to analysing dictionary definitions that replaces the traditional descriptive/prescriptive binary with a model of normativity influenced by performativity theory. This is demonstrated by a critical discourse analysis of how entries forlesbian, gay, andhomosexualin four contemporary English dictionaries tacitly positionhomosexualas a neutral term against whichlesbianandgayare sociolinguistically marked. The paper also stresses the need for researchers not only to analyse how normativity is embedded in dictionaries, but to recognize the extent to which lay dictionary-users are already aware of the normative potential of lexicography, whether they embrace it or condemn it. This is explored through an incident in whichMerriam-Webster'saddition of the wordgenderqueerto its online dictionary in 2016 became the subject of public scrutiny and contestation on social media.

AbstractInfrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs) eschew traditional public management to provide distributive goods worldwide. Yet, in Colombia, the context of our study, both the promise of and voters' experience with PPPs hinder incumbent parties in elections when theories of distributive politics expect otherwise. We argue that negative experiences with PPPs introduce a sociotropic turn in individual voting: bad experience crowds out the possibility that promising a new project will improve a voter's own welfare. Studying what are, to our knowledge, all 109 Colombian PPP projects between 1998 and 2014, and over 8,700 individual survey responses, our evidence shows that vote intention for the incumbent executive or his party decreases as experience with more PPPs in respondents' districts increases. Our analysis and results introduce an important agenda for research into the political significance of these legacies of new public management.

The dengbêji bards who usually sing unaccompanied are the cornerstone of Kurdish traditional classical performance. They have sought to preserve the purity of their singing style and technique from the past to the present; and, they have maintained an existence that has been independent of modernization or foreign interchange. On the other hand, in the West especially from the start of the 20th century, classical music has changed in character reflecting cultural, political and technological developments. Opera singers, performance artists who undergo classical voice training have benefited by these technological developments, and are held in high esteem especially in regard to their voice production. Surprisingly, their modern singing techniques have a great deal in common with the age-old techniques of the Kurdish dengbêji. The present study examines both the commonalities and the differences.

This essay provides a brief overview of the dominant trends in Arab media research, paying particular attention to the most common methodologies they rely on. To understand the current state of Arab media scholarship, the article explores the various influences that have played a decisive role in determining the quality and quantity of research productivity. Factors such as the Arab countries' historical roots, traditional societies, patterns in education, and current conflicts in the region are shown to have an impact on Arab scholars' engagement with research. To aid the advancement of theory of Arab media research, this essay advocates for conducting collaborative research and proposes a hybrid approach that merges epistemologies in a culture-sensitive, empirical manner that is capable of making universal generalizations while staying true to the specificities of the region itself.

Abstract
Music is neither a construction of pitches nor a linear arrangement of vocal parts, but rather an energetic shaping through time that integrates articulation, harmony, melody, and rhythm. Music expresses a kind of gesture in the dimension of sounds. In most cases, musical expressions, compared to linguistic expressions, are more like a state of motion or a behavior of sounds originating from physical sensations. Musical gesture can interpret the emotional expression and meaning of music from a perspective that is closer to the nature of music. Such an interpretation is not constrained by the traditional analysis of form and content, self-discipline and heteronomy, subjectivity and objectivity. It is more about how to stimulate the sensory systems to join in and understand the behavior and contents of music expressions in order to synthesize the meaning of music in different dimensions.

The concept of empire persisted throughout much of human history until the emergence of the nation-state structure in the past century. Imperialism, in various forms, continues to exist today. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the breakdown of traditional imperial authority worldwide and the rise of a new kind of power structure. This was the case for the Qing Empire (1644-1911 AD) in China and the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868 AD) in Japan, both of which experienced the collapse of their existing power structures. The imperial crises faced by these two states exhibited similarities and notable differences. This paper aims to provide a concise overview of these two narratives and subsequently compare them, allowing for a deeper understanding of the circumstances and processes that led to and accompanied these distinctive experiences in the Far East during the nineteenth century.

This article explores the impact of tourism gentrification on the residents of the Kasbah in the city of Tangier, Morocco. It utilizes qualitative methods to reveal how the Kasbah has become a site of contention between the Moroccan neoliberal state, the foreign investors and settlers, and the residents of Tangier as they negotiate place and identity. The paper will examine how the process of tourism gentrification is not only reinforcing a demographic shift in the Kasbah by displacing the locals but also how the foreign urban settlers are increasingly becoming the filter through which traditional Moroccan culture is conspicuously produced and legitimized. The article will end with a discussion on the mixed contentions surrounding the gentrifying presence of the foreign urban settlers on the residents of the Kasbah and the city of Tangier.

AbstractAt this point, little is known about local government responses to the economic crisis caused by COVID‐19. This crisis is happening on Main Streets around the nation. This article examines how some local governments are taking collective action in partnership with other governments as well as with organizations at the local and regional levels. What is unique is that collective action is rare as it relates to traditional economic development practices, yet it is occurring and leading to offerings of multi‐institutional grants and low‐interest loans. However, some newer supply‐ and demand‐side actions are the result of a lack of resources and need for expediency. Practitioners can learn about the collaborative economic development actions that governments are taking and how these partnerships can stabilize their local economies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dented China's image as an efficient party-state, given how an effort to cover up the outbreak and the resulting delays in reporting led to the virus spreading beyond its origins in Wuhan in Hubei province to the rest of the country as well as rapidly across the world. This article examines China's massive external propaganda effort launched as part of the effort to repair the damage to its global image and interests. It notes how China has not let the situation stop it from pursuing its traditional foreign policy and security interests, including, of competition with the USA. The article also argues that it is the ruling Communist Party of China's concerns about its legitimacy at home that have determined the nature and scale of Chinese responses to the pandemic outside its borders.

AbstractThis paper provides a Consent Justification for benefit–cost analysis (BCA). The Consent Justification is based on a tendency toward actual compensation. A substantial justification for using BCA as a tool is the actual Pareto test, called the Consent Justification, in combination with the net present value criterion for individual projects. The traditional justification, the potential compensation test (PCT), is unsatisfactory on several grounds. In addition, the PCT occupies the uneasy position of being the source of extended criticisms in the economic literature and especially in the legal and philosophy literature. The argument for the Consent Justification lies not only in the deficiencies of the PCT, but also, especially, in a showing through simulation that all tend to gain across a portfolio of projects which is not large but rather robust with respect to errors and assumptions.

This paper looks at the development of an electoral gender gap over time, using, for the first time, actual ballot data collected in the Austrian state of Vienna. Vienna recorded female and male ballots separately in the years from 1954 to 1991. Firstly, using this unique design, we conclude that the traditional gender gap (males more left-leaning) existed up to 1969 and then changed into the modern gender gap (females more left-leaning), from that date. These results confirm the considerable literature based on survey data. As an alternative explanation for the observed pattern we explore the gender gap in voting for the central vs the flank parties. We can confirm survey-based findings that male voters support more extreme positions than female voters, and link this observation to the "social-harmony" gender gap.

Indo-Pacific has been among the most contested regions in the past decade. After China demonstrated its ambitious goal in reviving maritime silk road with its military and economic presence, United States, India, Japan, and Australia formed a new coalition to counter this strategy. This paper aims to examine the position of Indonesia as a traditional regional maritime power in the context of this changing maritime landscape of the Indo-Pacific region. In doing so, this paper develops the concept of "the three faces of maritime power" which distinguishes maritime power into hard, soft, and normative maritime power. The findings of this paper indicates that Indonesia demonstrates less of its hard and soft power, but it capitalizes on its normative power to demonstrate its presence in the new maritime landscape of the Indo Pacific

The article provides a complementary view to those accounts of the growth of public administration education in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe that (a) explain its development primarily as a reflection of changes in administrative cultures while (b) emphasizing the ongoing process of curricular diversification. Rather, the article shifts the focus on the internal dynamics of higher education. It shows that the development of Romanian public administration education can be attributed, to a considerable extent, to unique opportunities arising in a period of post-communist re-institutionalization, of which enterprising academics ably took advantage. It further argues that, curricular variety notwithstanding, public administration departments in this country may be growing more alike in other respects. In so doing, the article contributes to an expansion of the traditional narrative of the growth of public administration education in post-communist Europe.

AbstractWe use a stock's returns on days when important macroeconomic news is released to form a hedge portfolio, which is long (short) in stocks which have a sensitive (insensitive) reaction to the surprise component of the macroeconomic news. This macroeconomic hedge portfolio (MHP) earns a risk premium of about 5% p.a. over time and a similar premium when used as a risk factor in an asset pricing model. This premium can be interpreted as a cost of an insurance against unexpected changes in an investor's marginal utility. We show that risk premiums associated with the MHP are estimated with a higher precision than traditional macroeconomic tracking portfolios. Furthermore, when the MHP is present in a common factor model, risk factors like high minus low lose much of their ability to explain the cross section of stock returns.