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Changes in political, social, and economic structures in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democratic governance in 1994 have put men and masculinity/ies under public and scholarly scrutiny. Attention has generally focused on the links between masculinity and violence, particularly among black men from low-income backgrounds, in attempts to understand the widespread levels of sexual violence throughout the country. Together, but in tension with the focus on men and violence, has been a literature that documents gender change in South Africa. This literature argues, for example, that men are embracing fatherhood and becoming more engaged in childcare. Nevertheless, such scholarship is overshadowed by a focus on men and violence. In this article, I reflect on the lives of a group of men living in contemporary Alexandra township, Johannesburg, South Africa, who are exploring what it means to be a man and the issues and challenges they face in their attempts to transition their masculine identities.

We consider the adequacy of the legislative and administrative provisions for environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) in Uganda. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) legislation was enacted in Uganda in 1995. Although it was intended that social impacts would also be considered, the nomenclature, organizational culture and practice of EIA has given an over-emphasis to biophysical issues, with social issues being under considered. Lack of explicit instructions about how to assess social impacts and the positioning of ESIA too late in the project cycle limit the ability of social issues to be properly considered. From document analysis, an on-line survey, in-depth interviews, reflexive practice, and a literature review, we found that there was inadequate public participation, poor follow-up, low levels of capacity in all stakeholders, and political interference in the project approval process. To improve the effectiveness of ESIA in Uganda and other developing countries, we make recommendations to address the challenges facing ESIA practice.

Electricity is an exceptionally inelastic, strategically important commodity. The production and transmission of electricity are highly technologically sophisticated processes, while the uninterrupted supply of electricity is a public good guaranteed by the state and the cost of failure is enormous. The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant economic, social, and political impact on Lithuania and the countries around the globe. The Lithuanian electricity sector is seeking for a rapid transformation to meet its international obligations and effectively meet the needs of Lithuanian society, but the demand and supply shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have had a strong impact on the sector's operations and electricity prices. Changes in commodity markets, large supply and demand shocks have fundamentally changed the status quo of the electricity sector – in 2020 the sector was hit by historic demand shocks, when in December 2021, a record wholesale price of electricity in the Lithuanian market was recorded.

The 'securitisation' of migration is argued to rest on a process of framing migrants as a threat to key values, principally identity. Yet, the socially constructed nature of 'identity' implies the potential for dual usage: support and contestation of the security frame. Using the UK as an illustrative case, this overlooked dynamic is explored through mixed-methods, incorporating elite political and religious discourse (2005–2015) and original public attitudinal survey evidence. The discourse analysis reveals that the preservation of an imperilled British identity ('tolerance') is a frame invoked, in different ways and by different actors, to either support or contest the securitisation of migration. Similarly, British citizens who deeply value the preservation of 'Britishness' have diverse, positive and negative views on migration, challenging the notion that identity as a referent object is deterministically linked to anti-immigration attitudes. The innovative concept of 'counter-securitisation' is utilised and developed, unpicking these nuances and their implications.

This article is a comparative study of how three Danish climate celebrities – an activist, an influencer, and a politician – personalise climate change on Instagram. They engage in personal storytelling about the issue in a way that is closely connected to their public presentation of self and their choice of visual genres. The theoretical framework combines theories of social media aesthetics and publics (Serafinelli, 2018; Papacharissi, 2015), self-presentation (Marshall, 2010), authenticity (Enli, 2015a; Marwick, 2015), and emotion in political communication (Wahl- Jorgensen, 2019). The method is a qualitative case study comparing the three profiles and their overall curational strategy for addressing climate change through particular visual genres and how their personal storytelling is based on performing authenticity, emotion, and connecting with affective publics. The analysis demonstrates how personalising climate change can be performed as coping with climate anxiety, feel-good sustainable consumption, or enthusiastic promotion of Danish green solutions.

Subnational governments in the United States have taken the lead on many aspects of the response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Variation in government activity across states offers the opportunity to analyze responses in comparable settings. We study a common and informative activity among state officials—state legislators' attention to the pandemic on Twitter. We find that legislators' attention to the pandemic strongly correlates with the number of cases in the legislator's state, the national count of new deaths, and the number of pandemic‐related public policies passed within the legislator's state. Furthermore, we find that the degree of responsiveness to pandemic indicators differs significantly across political parties, with Republicans exhibiting weaker responses, on average. Lastly, we find significant differences in the content of tweets about the pandemic by Democratic and Republican legislators, with Democrats focused on health indicators and impacts, and Republicans focused on business impacts and opening the economy.

At the age of 92, Mahathir Mohamad served his country as the Prime Minister for the second time. But unlike his first stint as the head of the government, which lasted 22 years, this time, his tenure was less than two years. His resignation, which was linked to some internal issues within the Pakatan Harapan (PH) allied parties, came at a time when many countries in the world were in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak. Mahathir was aware of the power struggle that was adversely affecting the government's response to combat the virus transmission and reduce the rising number of COVID-19 infection cases. With his long experience in governance and as a former medical officer, Mahathir offered some advice and recommendations to the existing government on ways to address the public health crisis. Since the coronavirus outbreak, the domestic political and economic developments also drew his direct criticism and critical commentaries.

Research suggests that framing climate change as a national security issue can shape opinion about climate change. This research is less clear about what exactly constitutes a "national security frame" and what aspects of this frame are most persuasive. We use a survey experiment to compare the relative effects of three types of national security frames we identify. Results show that a frame centered on energy dependence had the strongest effect and was the most consistent across partisanship. Surprisingly, the effects ran in the opposite direction for Democrats and Republicans on both outcomes—negative for Democrats and positive for Republicans. We also show that the energy dependence frame moderated the influence of respondents' affect toward political candidates and parties on their climate change attitudes. The results suggest that the energy dependence frame can shape public opinion, but that it must be tailored to particular audiences to avoid backfire effects.

AbstractThis essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of "low-intensity" and "high-intensity" patriarchal systems.

This article studies the legacy of local dynamics of the War of Independence in local state building in Mexico. The analysis shows that municipalities where local militias were organized have a higher number of public servants and a larger budget per capita in the early 1900s than municipalities with an insurgent legacy, relative to those with no conflict. The results hold when restricting the sample to neighbors and controlling for geographic and economic factors. Historical evidence supports existing theories of intra-elite conflict while highlighting the role of local fiscal councils in municipalities with a legacy of local militias. Decentralization during and after the war strengthened local elites, while the negotiated war termination added a political-elite layer of insurgent leaders, born in conflict with colonial-era economic elites. These findings suggest that the local dynamics of civil warfare can have long-lasting effects on state building, boosting local state capacity in some regions and not in others.

AbstractLocal governments in autocracies typically undercompensate residents for their land and take it through eminent domain, while residents lack effective formal channels for bargaining with them. I find that some residents nonetheless can defend against such predation through extralegal land bargaining. By sending resistance signals to challenge the legitimacy of local governments, publicize their grievances, and garner public sympathy, such residents embarrass governments, make it likely higher-level governments will punish local governments, and spur concessions. Such signals, however, are often costly or unavailable, so only resistant entrepreneurs can send them. I illustrate the argument by treating 'nail-house resistance' in China as a resistance signal: by refusing to vacate their houses, engaging in violence or self-burning, or turning to the media, some residents stop land takings or gain compensation. The findings enrich our understanding of the political and moral economy of land bargaining and institutional change in a transitional autocracy.

Abstract
The year of 2020 witnessed the eruption of Thailand's largest and longest-lasting mass demonstrations since the 2014 military putsch. Despite threats of crackdown, protesters leveraged a host of innovative nonviolent actions to reclaim political space that the regime had previously squeezed. This article sheds light on key mechanisms that underpin nonviolent actions' ability to push back against a trend of shrinking space. We argue that the logic of nonviolent action, tactical and digital creativity, and counteracting repression operates in tandem. First, specific forms of nonviolent action carved out space for popular protest and increased public participation in it despite regime hindrances. Second, particularly tactical and digital creativity sustained this mass participation by reversing some effects of repression. Third, nonviolent responses to this repression encouraged further anti-regime mobilization. We conclude our analysis with some caveats. The Thai case shows that keeping regained space can be difficult.

The Portuguese constitution, passed in April 1976, considered the nationalisations undertaken after the Carnation Revolution to be 'irreversible', prescribing a development model based on state planning. Changes made to the constitutional text, in 1989, allowed for a privatisation programme that curtailed government intervention and reinforced market provision. This mirrored a previous shift in the public sphere. Whereas political debate in 1976 was mostly centred on state-led development models, the next decade witnessed the rise of a pro-market approach. Two crises of the balance of payments encouraged a growing number of economists, businessmen, journalists and politicians to argue for the need to revise the constitution, enhancing the role and scope of markets. This article focuses on the rise of a neoliberal intellectual field in Portugal between 1976 and 1989, analysing its efforts to overcome the legacy of the Carnation Revolution and build a competitive market order in a semiperipheral context.

Although the scientific debate in the field of business economics is rich in contributions to the subject of sustainability, they mainly focus on a specific aspect represented by sustainability reporting. Consistent with this bibliographic evidence, the aim of this study was to investigate a sustainability management model in local authorities, which, by examining the dimensions of sustainability, goes beyond the focus of reporting highlighted in the literature to consider the entire sustainability cycle (from planning to measurement). To this end, the methodology of the single case study with multiple units of analysis is used, examining the case of an Italian local authority that has experimented with the sustainability management model described in this paper. The analysis of the case leads to some concluding remarks on the strengths and weaknesses of the model, contributing to the scientific debate on sustainability management and providing useful indications for public managers and political decision-makers.

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate's identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning's (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices.