Suchergebnisse

Politics in the neoliberal/modern/Western world is structured based upon the assumption that political subjects are atomistic and self-sufficient; these assumptions suppress and deny (inter) dependency, relationality and vulnerability. Yet, the rapid spread of COVID-19 has devastated many communities, drastically changed political and social life, and foregrounded the ways in which vulnerability is an inescapable fact of our existence. Drawing upon Žižek's reading of Lacan's notion of the 'real' and the ethics of care, we analyse the COVID-19 pandemic so as to argue that vulnerability must be understood as a fundamental political concept that merits ongoing attention in our political systems.

AbstractThe newly launched water futures market faces a serious illiquidity problem with scarce trading volume. We examine the causes of the illiquidity based on the futures contract design literature and empirical analysis of spot water markets in the western United States. The primary cause of illiquidity is a lack of effective hedging demand for water futures due to the heterogeneity and limited size of spot water markets. The opaqueness of the water futures settlement index further deters the participation of traders. Moreover, the lack of public information on spot water market transactions also reduces its attraction to speculators.

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in Germany during 1300–1850, introducing a novel database. We document four alternating phases of inequality decline and growth. The Black Death (1347–1352) led to inequality decline, until about 1450. Thereafter, inequality rose steadily. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and the 1627–1629 plague triggered a second phase of inequality reduction. This distinguishes Germany from other European areas where inequality grew monotonically. Inequality growth resumed from about 1700, well before the Industrial Revolution. Our findings offer new material to current debates on the determinants of inequality change in western societies, past and present.

What conditions precipitate militia-inflicted sexual violence during counterinsurgency operations? In our article, we expand on the sexual violence as practice framework by focusing on the issue of commander's tolerance as a form of implicit order. Specifically, we argue that militia-inflicted sexual violence is amplified by two interrelated conditions–the link to the government security forces and the autonomy permitted to the militias in conflict zones. Thus, we refine the logic of sexual violence as practice to understand the finer variations of militia-committed violence. We elaborate our explanations by analyzing Indonesia's peripheral operations in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua.

In West Africa, women's organizations have created the Women's Situation Room (WSR) – a mechanism aimed at preventing and responding to episodes of violence and instability. Drawing on experiences from Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria, the article explores how strategies developed and deployed by WSRs use gender as a productive force to counteract violence. We identify three ways in which WSRs take advantage of gendered constructions: feminist organizing creates the political networks that make the WSRs possible; women's location outside formal politics gives them legitimacy; and maternal constructions of femininity give them the power to disrupt and coopt potentially violent actors.

The research was conducted in Purwodadi Village, Tebing Tinggi District, West Tanjung Jabung Regency, which is located on the easternmost coast of Jambi Province. Astronomically, Tanjung Jabung Barat Regency is located between 0053 - 01041 South Latitude and 103023 - 104021 East Longitude. The research location was chosen deliberately with the consideration that: (1) Purwodadi Village has an integrated system in the development of oil palm farming and cattle farming; (2) the pattern of raising oil palm-cow cattle by the people of Purwodadi Village is carried out semi-intensively; (3) the existence of an oil palm-cattle farming cultivation program in Purwodadi Village carried out by the government and farmer groups.

This paper examines how international education (IE) as a tool of government foreign policy is challenged in an era of new geopolitics, where China's growing ambitions have increased rivalry with the West. It compares U.S. and Canada as cases first, by examining rationales and approaches to IE in both countries, second, IE relations with China before conflict and third, current controversies and government policy responses to IE relations with China. The paper concludes identifying contextual factors that shape each country's engagement with IE, but suggests that moving forward, the future of IE in a world of new geopolitics is likely to be far more complex and conflictual.

The COVID-19 and the resulting global energy crises highlighted the importance of decarbonization and the necessity of shifting the economy from fossil fuels towards renewable energy sources. Sustainable energy transition is also a key element of circular economy, social welfare and justice. In this paper we developed an indicator set and we compiled a composite indicator to measure the performance of the EU Member States regarding the sustainable energy transition between 2007 and 2019. Our results show significant differences which do not follow the usual East-West division of the integration. Both convergence and divergence can be revealed.

The lack of diverse participants in our research can lead to issues of generalizability, inability to address social and health disparities, and perpetuation of stereotypes, among many other issues. For example, it became quite clear during COVID-19 in the United States, the inequities that existed in health care access and quality and disparities in health outcomes for minoritized communities. Such inequities and disparities are also found in research practice in many fields, including cognitive science. For example, research with Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations has been highlighted as problematic (Ceci, Kahan, & Braman, 2010; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), yet the inclusion of diverse participants in research remains lacking.

Whistleblowing in government institutions is a controversial topic regarding its impact on employees, companies and society. Although whistleblowers face a dilemma, the majority of fraud disclosures originate from employees or internal parties. The impact of professionalism, ethical sensitivity, and personal cost on whistleblowing intention is investigated in this study. The purposive sampling method was used to choose 54 tax employees from KPP Pratama Bukittinggi in West Sumatra as respondents. The result found professionalism and personal cost had an effect on whistleblowing intention, while ethical sensitivity had no effect. These findings can be used by the government and policymakers to improve professionalism in their work and boost whistleblower protection.

This article explores heteropian, utopian and dystopian places in Erlend O. Nødtvedt's 2017 novel, Vestlandet, in order to better understand how the author uses references to regional historical and contemporary figures and events to construct what Edward Said labeled a cultural archive in a larger anti-imperialist project. Language, landscape, and identity form the core of Nødtvedt's project. This raucously humorous novel activates the Foucauldian heteropias of indefinitely accumulating time and of the festival, as well as Marc Augé's notion of the non-place in order to comment upon the perceived cultural and political divide between western and eastern Norway.

"Trude Dijkstra discusses how Chinese religion and philosophy were represented in printed works produced in the Dutch Republic between 1595 and 1700. By focusing on books, newspapers, learned journals, and pamphlets, this study sheds new light on the cultural encounter between China and western Europe in the early modern period. Form, content, and material-technical aspects of different media in Dutch and French are analysed, providing new insights into the ways in which readers could take note of Chinese religion and philosophy. This study thereby demonstrates that there was no singular image of Chinese religion and philosophy, but rather a varied array of notions on the subject"--

This philosophical exploration navigates the slippery terrains of the Sacred between Secularism and Fundamentalism. Renegotiating the Sacred attempts to map out the landscape of religious consciousness of the Filipinos in contemporary time by critically rereading both the Western and local thinkers who grappled with this theme. By contesting the predominance of the binary 'profane-sacred' as lens of interpretation, especially when it comes to philosophy of religion, this multi-disciplinary research tries to unravel the knots and knurls of the sacred and its entanglement into the dizzying web of socio-cultural structures, political tensions, economic marginalization, and philosophical-theological questions

What are the implications for Brexit for manufacturing supply chains? This is the focus of a new open-access paper just available in Regional Studies, co-authored by Alex de Ruyter, David Hearne and Raquel Ortega-Argilés. We look at the impact of post-Brexit trade dis-integration on the automotive sector in the East and West Midlands of the UK as a long-run slow burn process and consider the ramifications for industrial policy and resilience. We suggest these are illuminating case studies given their vulnerabilities to Brexit disruption due to the intricate nature of the auto supply chain's trading relationships with the EU.

In February, I wrote that the most compelling reasons that Russian President Vladimir Putin amassed soldiers on the Ukraine border were external. Specifically, Putin wanted to put pressure on the new coalition government in Berlin, to capitalize upon the perceived weaknesses of the current Joe Biden administration in the United States and to stop an increasingly western-facing Ukraine growing in its military cooperation with the U.S. and other NATO members. While these facts explain why Putin acted now, the complex explanation of how we got here must include the internal elements that propel Putin time and again to exert flagrant acts of aggression against sovereign nation states.