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"The underlying problem with social justice is the failure to distinguish between negative rights, which protect liberty and property, and positive rights, which provide a license to violate established negative rights." ~ Robert F. Mulligan

Political scientist Eunice Goes explains the vicissitudes of social democracy historically and addresses its contemporary challenges.

Reflecting on the interplay of historical and social scientific concepts, Roland Betancourt discusses the extent to which current social and cultural trends influence the study of the past. Responding to critiques of current research being 'presentist', he argues for the value of historical research through its ability to enlighten understanding of both past and current … Continued

Political Economy seminar
The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History
Speaker: Randall Germain, Carleton University
When: 3-4pm, Wednesday, 24 April, 2024
Where: A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 341, The University of Sydney
About the talk: The idea of history, although present throughout much of the traditional canon of political economy and its internationalized off-shoot – international political economy (IPE) – is today largely erased as a key theoretical feature of IPE research. Where it is included as a part of the research enterprise, it is most often formulated as either context for the problem under investigation, or as a linear unit of account such as t + 1. This represents a theoretical loss for the discipline of IPE, and my effort here is to recenter the idea of history as a core feature of IPE's broad research agenda. To do this, I first revisit how the idea of history is framed in the work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber, to demonstrate that the idea of history was a critical element of the inspiration to political economy (and IPE). I then pick up how the idea of history informs what might be described as 'modern' IPE, most importantly in the work of foundational IPE scholars (Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, David Mitrany, E.H. Carr, Susan Strange and Robert Cox). This intellectual history reveals the important way in which the idea of history can frame the research enterprise of IPE as an examination of transformative change within the global political economy. In period marked by what appear to be deep and disruptive change, the idea of history is a necessary addition to the IPE conceptual and analytical toolkit.

About the speaker: Randall Germain is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada. His teaching and research examine the political economy of global finance, issues and themes associated with economic and financial governance, and theoretical debates within the field of international political economy. His scholarship has been published in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, Global Governance, International Studies Quarterly, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, and Review of International Studies. He is also the author of The International Organization of Credit (CUP, 1997) and Global Politics and Financial Governance (Palgrave, 2010). Most recently he edited Susan Strange and the Future of Global Political Economy (Routledge 2016). His current research explores how the idea of history has informed disciplinary debates in IPE.
The post Seminar: Randall Germain, ‘The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Barry Buzan's Making Global Society: A Study of Humanking Across Three Eras is a big and an ambitious book. In this volume he tells us the story of 50,000 years of humankind by constructing a "world history" (p. xi) with the social structure of humankind as its object of study. In doing so, Buzan has undertaken two main tasks.
The post Global Society needs Global History appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

The emerging strategic agenda for the next EU mandate reveals an ecological step backwards Europe cannot afford to take.

8/14/1935: President Roosevelt signs into law the Social Security Act of 1935. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law in Helvering v. Davis (1937).

IISC President Kelly Bates was honored this Juneteenth holiday as part of the groundbreaking launch of a new exhibit titled "Living History Makers of Color in Hyde Park", a pictorial installation of Boston residents and leaders of color who have made historical contributions locally and nationally. The exhibit features 13 Hyde Park residents of color who... Read More
The post Kelly Bates: A 2023 Living History Maker in Hyde Park, Massachusetts appeared first on Interaction Institute for Social Change.

The ability to manipulate and generate images with new technologies presents various challenges to traditional media reporting and also scholarly communication. However, as Joshua Habgood-Coote discusses the history of fake images shows, rather than heralding a mass breakdown in trust, technological innovations have fed into ongoing social problems around the production of knowledge. We seem … Continued

In E-cigarettes and the Comparative Politics of Harm Reduction: History, Evidence and Policy, Virginia Berridge, Ronald Bayer, Amy L. Fairchild and Wayne Hall scrutinise the history underlying the current debate over electronic cigarettes. Exploring the reasons for contrasting public health approaches to nicotine use in the US, UK and Australia, this edited volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on e-cigarette policy and … Continued

The revolutionary violence that swept Kyiv's Maidan Square on the night of February 21, 2014 unleashed the forces of Ukrainian nationalism and, ultimately, Russian revanchism, and resulted in, among other things, the first full-scale land war in Europe since 1945.President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the Maidan the "first victory" in Ukraine's fight for independence from Russia. Yet too often lost in the tributes to Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity' are two simple, though ramifying, questions: What was the Maidan really about? And did things have to turn out this way?Revisiting the events of that time may help us more fully understand how we arrived at this fateful moment in world affairs.So, what precipitated the Maidan Revolution?In November 2013, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych rejected the terms of the European Union Association Agreement in favor of a $15 billion credit agreement offered by the Russian Federation. Many in the western part of Ukraine had supported the EU deal, as it would have, in their view, secured Ukraine's future within Europe.But, as the Europeans, Americans, Ukrainians and Russians knew full well, the association agreement with Brussels wasn't merely a trade deal. Section 2.3 of the EU-Ukraine association agenda would have required the signatories to:"...take measures to foster military cooperation and cooperation of technical character between the EU and Ukraine [and] encourage and facilitate direct cooperation on concrete activities, jointly identified by both sides, between relevant Ukrainian institutions and CFSP/CSDP agencies and bodies such as the European Defence Agency, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, the European Union Satellite Centre and the European Security and Defence College."In other words, the trade deal also included the encouragement of military interoperability with forces viewed, rightly or wrongly, by the Russian government as a threat to Russian national security.In addition, the EU association agenda required Ukraine to put up barriers to trade with Russia. An alternative proposal put forward by Romano Prodi (former Italian Prime Minister and EU Commission president) would have allowed Ukraine to trade with both Russia and the EU but was rejected by Brussels.Yanukovych's rejection of the EU agreement brought thousands of protesters to Kyiv's Independence (Maidan) Square. Yet policy disagreements over issues of trade and national security can and are routinely adjudicated via democratic procedures, as they are in the U.S. and Europe. And such an adjudication was eminently possible, even as late as the morning of February 21, 2014, when a deal brokered by Russia and the EU was struck between Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition that included a revision of Ukraine's constitution, the creation of a unity government, and an early presidential election to be held 10 months later in December 2014.But on the night of February 21, Yanukovych fled, and a new government was installed by voluntarist rather than democratic means. The immediate post-Maidan government included the far-right Svoboda Party, whose members, according to a contemporaneous Reuters report, held "five senior roles in Ukraine's new government including the post of deputy prime minister."Edmund Wilson once wrote that "it is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some other country than one's own." And that was a trap into which the Obama administration — along with almost the entirety of the American media, intelligentsia and think tank world — fell in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan.It would be fair of critics of this view (and there are many) to ask: What were their alternatives to the Obama administration's support for the Maidan and Kyiv's post-revolutionary government?Mr. Obama might have said "A deal was struck. Stick to it." This would have required a degree of statesmanship unusual to any American president. But, as Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer observed only a month later, "...there was a deal that was cut with the European foreign ministers. That deal was abrogated and the Americans were very happy to jump on that immediately in ways that would have been completely unacceptable to anyone in the U.S. administration if we had been on the other side."And so, the U.S. lent its support to the post-Maidan government (and the Anti-Terrorist Operation, or ATO, launched in April 2014) against the largely, but of course far from entirely, indigenous uprising in the Donbas. Thus began the first phase of the war, which lasted until the evening of February 24, 2022 and cost 14,000 dead and 1.5 million refugees.In addition to the ATO, Kyiv also pursued a policy of decommunization in the east (later cited by Putin as among his many grievances with post-Maidan Kyiv) and repeatedly refused to implement the Minsk Accords. As a former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, Jack F. Matlock, noted in Responsible Statecraft, "The war might have been prevented — probably would have been prevented — if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO."The second phase of the war opened on the evening of February 24, 2022, as some 190,000 Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The costs to Ukraine have been staggering.The World Economic Forum recently estimated that the cost of Ukrainian reconstruction will reach $1 trillion. Still more, "Approximately 20% of the country's farmland has been wrecked and 30% of land either littered with landmines or unexploded ordnance." Casualty estimates are known to be among the most closely held state secrets during wartime, but some, like former Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, have estimated Ukraine suffered a combined 500,000 dead and wounded in its war with Russia. Meanwhile, the population of Ukraine has plummeted from 45.5 million in 2013 to an estimated 37 million today.Looking back, the warnings issued by a small minority in the winter of 2014, including, but not limited to: the present authors; Professor Stephen F. Cohen; The Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven; Ambassador Jack Matlock; Professor John J. Mearsheimer; and others were dismissed by the Obama administration, policymakers, the media and the most influential think tanks in Washington. Yet the effort to wrest Ukraine into the West's orbit via revolutionary violence, despite the objections of fully a third of that country, has been nothing short of catastrophic.

Here is plotted some time series, from Busby et al. "Cascading risks: Understanding the 2021 winter blackout in Texas," Energy Research & Social Science Volume 77, July 2021, 102106. Source: Busby et al. (2021). For CoRev: The relevant line is the red one.

Sharing some of the conversations within his new edited volumes, Exploring Religious Diversity and Covenantal Pluralism in Asia, Dennis R. Hoover compares global instances of religious diversity and religious uniformity and their respective impacts upon social harmony. In many societies throughout history, lack of religious uniformity has often been feared as a source of social … Continued

Two weeks ago, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida to condemn the state's new social studies framework for "pushing propaganda on our children" that "people benefited from slavery." But is that really true?
The post Florida's African-American History Standards: So Much Less Than Meets the Eye appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Taking a broad sweep of the history of empirical social research and its use by the state, Steve Fuller argues that as data analysis moves increasingly to commercial non-state actors, researchers and civil servants might learn from and harness the empiricist style of 'data surfacing' deployed by data analytics companies. Civil servants were the original … Continued