bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Islamist Parties in Libya after Gaddafi
Authors: Trauthig Inga K. , Badi Emadeddin
Published: February 2024

In Chapter 3, Inga K. Trauthig and Emadeddin Badi look at the trajectories of two Islamist actors in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi: the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood (LMB) and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Considering their historical role in Libya--as a political party and as a previously underground Salafi-jihadist-aligned movement, respectively--the chapter considers the limitations that they faced in trying to advance themselves in the fragile democracy that followed. It demonstrates that while the LMB was able to entrench itself into Libyan political structures, the LIFG morphed into a largely ineffective force.
Women in Jihadist Practices of Governance
Authors: Cook Joana
Published: February 2024

In Chapter 9, Joana Cook considers how Islamist ideologues have influenced the role and status of women in jihadist efforts at governance. First, this chapter outlines key ideologues that have influenced the jihadist movement, particularly how they have approached the roles of women within concepts of governance. This chapter then draws on the case studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS and demonstrates that ISIS’ prioritization of the establishment of a caliphate, whereby they governed over a territory the size of the UK, meant that a demographic not yet seen in transnational jihadist groups was impacted like never before. Considering women who joined ISIS as members, women who had to live as residents under ISIS-seized territory, and women abducted, trafficked, and enslaved by ISIS, Cook contrasts this to al-Qaeda, who engaged women in much more limited terms due in part to their focus on attacking the far enemy, where governance was never achieved to the same extent.
Houthi Governance
Authors: Al-Dawsari Nadwa
Published: February 2024

In Chapter 12, Nadwa al-Dawsari looks at the Houthis in Yemen, particularly examining their relationship with tribes. Exploring the Houthis’ history with the Zaydi revivalist movement and Iran, the chapter discusses how this history has informed their approach to tribes in Yemen today. Al-Dawsari details how since taking power in 2014, the Houthis co-opt and manipulate tribal structures or use highly coercive or violent tactics against tribes in order to maintain power in the regions they control. This includes isolating many tribal leaders from their populations, while simultaneously recruiting and developing support among tribal youth and children. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that Islamist groups like the Houthis can efficiently use a combination of social engineering, religious indoctrination, and violence as a means to strengthen their grip on power.
‘Extremism in All Things Is Wrong’
Authors: Maher Shiraz
Published: February 2024

In Chapter 16, Shiraz Maher considers the attempts by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to recast the way in which one of the sources of Islamic law--the hadith--are understood and implemented. In doing so, Bin Salman presents a significant challenge to the clerical establishment and has begun redefining the very foundational pact on which the modern Saudi state was created. The implications are profound for the broader Islamic world too, because Bin Salman effectively argues that the traditional approach towards the vast majority of Islamic law has been too narrow and should be reconsidered in more progressive, liberal ways.
Seeking an Argument II
Authors: Leite Adam
Published: February 2024

The Global Epistemic Priority Thesis is roughly the thesis that the evidence for the totality of our beliefs about the world is limited to what is given to us by our experiential states. This chapter completes the case that this thesis does not arise out of the commitments of everyday epistemic life. The Global Epistemic Priority Thesis is not supported by considerations about the role of experiential and other non-factive mental states in folk-psychological explanations of belief revisions. Even if proximal folk-psychological explanations of belief revisions always appeal to other mental states, it does not follow that those mental states are the evidence to which we are responding when we hold our beliefs on the basis of evidence. The Global Priority Thesis likewise isn’t supported by the explanation of error or by consideration of the “New Evil Demon” scenario in which one’s epistemic twin is globally deceived by an evil demon.
Dangerous Jokes
Authors: Horisk Claire
Published: February 2024

This book argues that the real problem with so-called offensive jokes—such as racist, sexist, and ethnic jokes—is not that they are offensive but that they are harmful, because they transmit and reinforce stereotypes and ideas that contribute to a network of unjust disadvantage for the derogated group. It distinguishes between belittling jokes, which shore up unjust disadvantage for social groups, and disparaging jokes, which derogate powerful groups such as doctors but do not contribute to unjust disadvantage. It uses philosophy of language and linguistics to argue that both belittling and disparaging jokes communicate ideas by generalized conversational implicature, and to argue that defenses of derogatory remarks as “just a joke” are inadequate, because jokes can be used to convey what people believe to be true. The argument focuses on jokes in ordinary conversation, showing that canonical accounts of cooperative conversation need to be enriched: some people have greater power to shift the common ground of a conversation, and to introduce new presuppositions, than others, and there are alliances that exclude some parties to the conversation, and yet are powerful in setting the future course of the conversation. The book also gives a new account of the morality of listening, arguing that sometimes people who listen to derogatory speech may be culpable for doing so. Throughout, the book draws on a wealth of interdisciplinary evidence to support its claims and to explain why humor is an especially effective means of unjust discrimination.
Wings of the Gods
Authors: Gardella Peter (Petra) , Krute Laurence
Published: February 2024

Birds have always been gods and messengers of gods. More than symbols, birds gained divine status by guiding people to water and food, replanting forests after ice ages and fires, and settling into farming and urban life. Wings of the Gods explores the relations between birds and humans from an evolutionary perspective, starting with the roles of birds in creating the world. The narrative then moves through legends, rituals, costumes, wars, and spiritual disciplines to the current ecological crisis. Since the Industrial Revolution, birds have become the only wild animals that most people ever come to know. Wings of the Gods urges that humans listen to birds and watch the movements and populations of birds to find solutions to climate change, epidemics, pollution, and famine. Just as birds led our prehistoric ancestors out of Africa and across Siberia to populate the world, so birds can lead us away from heat death and mass extinction to an era of harmony with nature. Every religion recorded in history teaches reverence for birds. Now we need a new religion, a religion of nature that regards birds and other animals as equal citizens of earth. Saving even a fraction of the beauty and wonder that has inspired belief in God will depend on this new religious attitude. Fortunately, humans have been developing that new religion for centuries, and the last chapters of Wings of the Gods describe that development.
Birds and Religions
Authors: Gardella Peter (Petra) , Krute Laurence
Published: February 2024

Birds and humans have evolved together. All human religions revere birds, and birds have guided humans in migrations and given examples of rituals that humans have followed. Chapters of this book will move from the roles of birds in creating the world to rituals involving birds, then to interventions by birds in history, birds as spiritual teachers and companions to humans, and birds in crises of extinction and apocalypse. The final two chapters describe how thinkers and artists from the Romantic era to the present have developed a religion of nature inspired by birds. In this new religion, women have taken leadership, and new attitudes toward gender and nature are still emerging.
Birds in Romantic Arts, Sciences, and Religions
Authors: Gardella Peter (Petra) , Krute Laurence
Published: February 2024

With industry came intense mining and discoveries in geology and biology that revealed the roles of birds in evolution. Meanwhile a great naturalist and artist, John James Audubon, launched his epic attempt to document all bird species in the United States. Romantic writers and thinkers tried to share the spirit of birds. After Audubon died in 1851, his paintings and books inspired movements to conserve bird species, often led by women who were attending new colleges. Women led Audubon societies and campaigned against fashions in feathers that had nearly destroyed all ostriches and shore birds, even gulls. By 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act united great powers of the world to protect birds. Writers of the early twentieth century made Audubon the saint of a spiritual movement.
Epilogue: How the Cover of This Book, the Artist Who Painted It, and the Albatross He Painted Embody a Religion of Nature
Authors: Gardella Peter (Petra) , Krute Laurence
Published: February 2024

Arthur Singer’s cover painting of an albatross can be seen as a summary of the entire book. The artist was inspired by John James Audubon, who helped found the new religion of nature, and the albatross led Samuel Taylor Coleridge to teach reverence for nature in his poetry. Since World War II, humans have learned more about the extraordinary powers of albatrosses and may be moved to save their Pacific habitats and so the world.
Illicit Political Economy
Authors: Han Enze
Published: February 2024

This chapter looks at the illicit dimension of China’s regional economy in Southeast Asia. As a result of the recent globalization of Chinese capital, the movement of such criminal networks has accompanied capital flows abroad. The chapter looks at how the growth of the online casino economy has been deeply tied with Chinese capital looking for investment opportunities in Southeast Asia. Closely associated with these opportunities are the online scammers who specifically target ethnic Chinese communities across national boundaries. The chapter then tentatively discusses the relationship between the illicit economies and the existing Special Economic Zones in Southeast Asia, and how the lack of state regulation and capacity and rampant corruption have facilitated the growth of these illicit activities.
Conclusion
Authors: Han Enze
Published: February 2024

The concluding chapter provides a summary of the intricate landscape of China’s impact on mainland Southeast Asia. It reviews how China has become the primary and diversified partner for Southeast Asia across various fields. The relationship between China and Southeast Asian countries encompasses political, economic, and cultural dimensions, and the influence of China in the region has been profoundly experienced by regional governments and the populace. Additionally, the chapter reflects on the effects of COVID-19 and how the post-pandemic era might shape China’s ties with Southeast Asia. It further projects into the future of this critical geopolitical relationship, as both China and Southeast Asia navigate new challenges and opportunities on the global stage.
Soap Bones
Authors: Berg Anne
Published: February 2024

This chapter illustrates the connections between Nazi slave labor and wartime recycling by focusing on the role of soap production and allocation. Soap not only underpinned German sanitization fantasies, it also played a crucial role in the regime’s operations of ghettos and camps, where ideas about cleanliness, hygiene, and contamination were remapped onto the bodies of Jews, forced laborers, and Soviet POWs. While the Germans attempted to extract additional fats for soap production from the occupied lands, they simultaneously restricted soap allocations for Jews, forced laborers, concentration camp prisoners, and civilians in occupied territory, producing conditions of indescribable filth and overcrowding, which they mobilized as “evidence” for the “innate filthiness” of racial others. Inside ghettos and camps, designed as rubbished spaces where hygiene was an impossibility by design, SS ideas about racial pollution and mantras of total extraction came together in a destructive cycle of plunder, sanitization, and murder.
Conclusion
Authors: Berg Anne
Published: February 2024

Revisiting the main arguments of the book and offering a concise summary, the Conclusion grapples with the visual record of liberation. Recording their own shock and horror, the Allies photographed piles of corpses, mountains of shoes, and heaps of rags. But in the absence of gold mines and cotton plantations, the still and moving images of murder, plunder, and slave labor in the most industrialized country of Europe lacked the familiar frame that had contained such imagery in the context of colonial slaughter and orchestrated famine. They simply didn’t make sense; instead, they captured the absence of logic and came to enshrine the gravity of the Nazi crimes. However, the images of neatly sorted piles of rags, shoes, and human hair that soon served as a proxy for the victims themselves inadvertently captured the logic of the Nazi waste regime recorded in a landscape of piles.
The Impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System beyond Latin America
Authors: Engstrom Par
Published: February 2024

The Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) offers crucial insights into the past, present, and potential future of global human rights governance. From this analytical point of departure, this chapter aims to provide a corrective to the disparate gloomy assessments of the present state and possible future trajectories of international human rights. More specifically, the chapter highlights three areas of contributions of the IAHRS to the theory and practice of global human rights governance. First, by adopting a historical perspective on the institutional development of the IAHRS, we are reminded of the global and interconnected character of the evolution of the modern international human rights regime. Far from a straightforward narrative of international human rights as a result of Western imposition, the origins and early developments of the IAHRS demonstrate the central protagonism of the Global South in the emergence and consolidation of global human rights governance. Second, the IAHRS has played a central role in the normative construction and evolving interpretations of international human rights standards. Third, the IAHRS has made important contributions to the theory and practice of human rights governance as an exemplar of how international law and institutions can advance the realization of rights even in the absence of robust enforcement mechanisms and in often inhospitable political conditions. These distinct contributions of the IAHRS are often overlooked in discussions of the evolution and impact of international human rights. The result is often a distinct sense of distortion in the analysis of international human rights, whether past, present, or future.
The Inter-American Human Rights System’s Impact on the Protection of the Right to a Healthy Environment
Authors: Guanipa Henry Jiménez , Barraco María
Published: February 2024

This chapter analyzes inter-American standards concerning the environment, as well as their evolution through the innovative jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System and domestic courts. First, the chapter describes instruments, jurisprudence, standards, and dialogues related to the right to a healthy environment, as developed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Next, the chapter argues that this acquis has a direct impact on the region demonstrated by pivotal decisions of domestic courts as well as public policies that recognize human rights related to the protection of the environment. Finally, the chapter concludes that there is an emerging ius commune on environmental human rights that serves as a baseline for environmental protection and that should be expanded and strengthened in the near future.
The Rights of the Child According to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
Authors: Beloff Mary
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses how the rights of the child have been interpreted within inter-American case law with special focus on the way in which the Inter-American Court has focused on ACHR Article 19 (special protection measures) and on the principle of the best interest of the child. Given the singular impact that the Convention on the Rights of the Child has had on Latin American countries, the chapter examines the development of the international corpus juris on the protection of the rights of the child according to decisions, advisory opinions, and provisional measures adopted by the Inter-American Court. The chapter comprehensively analyzes the progress made by the Court with regard to the rights of children, while also highlighting the limits and possibilities for further advances in the Inter-American Human Rights System.
The Standards of the Inter-American Human Rights System regarding Migration and Its Impact on the Region’s States
Authors: Salmón Elizabeth , Blouin Cécile
Published: February 2024

The protection and guarantee of the rights of migrants is one of the most important challenges currently facing the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS). In addition to the complex dynamics of migration and the increase of restrictive migration policies in Latin America, it is important to understand the transformative impacts of the IAHRS jurisprudence on the States. This chapter analyzes the progress made by the IAHRS in terms of protection and guarantees of migrants’ rights, and the magnitude of the impacts of these standards in the region. To this effect, the chapter first differentiates three specific stages in the construction of IAHRS migration standards. Following that analysis, the chapter examines the migration and asylum normative frameworks in Latin America and the role of Courts to protect and guarantee the rights of migrants within the IAHRS standards. The chapter suggests that there are some pending issues for the IAHRS in order to protect the rights of migrants from a broad understanding of migration. Regarding transformative impacts, most States in the region have adopted increasingly protective internal normative frameworks, and IAHRS standards have influenced the judicial and constitutional work of the States of the region. In some cases, national courts and national normative frameworks have set standards that go beyond those established by the IAHRS. However, significant challenges remain concerning the transformative impacts linked to the gap between the regulation and its implementation and the still incipient role of national courts in defending the rights of migrants in the region.
Strategies of the Due Process of Law Foundation for the Promotion of New Standards and Expansion of the Impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System
Authors: Salazar Katya , Cerqueira Daniel
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses some strategies carried out by the Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF) to expand the impact of the decisions of the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS). Based on DPLF’s own experience, one of a regional civil society organization user of the noncontentious faculties of the IAHRS, this chapter provides examples of its joint initiatives with local and national organizations to promote and obtain a greater impact of the IAHRS standards. The chapter explains how DPLF has incorporated the demands of its counterpart civil society organizations in the development of new narratives and in its advocacy work with the IACHR, with special emphasis on two issues: corruption and human rights, and the extraterritorial responsibility of the home countries of corporations involved in human rights violations.
Working Together
Authors: Hebl Mikki , King Eden
Published: February 2024

The racial and gender reckonings exemplified by the #BLM, #StopAsianHate, and #MeToo movements shine light on biases that affect every part of life, including the workplace. An unspoken truth underlying the terrible events that fuel these movements—the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, acts of xenophobia against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the sexual violence perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein—is that people are being harassed, stereotyped, demeaned, and victimized in the context of work. Police officers and movie producers are perpetrators of terrible actions while they are working. What is happening in the American workplace to allow these events to unfold? And, of critical importance, what can leaders do to make lasting change? In this critical moment in the United States’ history, organizational leaders have the opportunity and obligation to build strategy and practice in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This book will help all leaders rise to the challenge by describing state-of-the-art science and practice. Expert scholars and professionals blend descriptions of case studies with large-scale robust evidence to help leaders recognize the imperative of diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations; identify their own personal barriers and those of their organizations; and specify strategies for achieving positive and persistent change by working together.
Are There Downsides to Diversity?
Authors: Hebl Mikki , King Eden
Published: February 2024

A balanced conversation does not just include talking about the realistic, financial, and moral motivations to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). It also includes the potential challenges that emerge in relation to diversity. This chapter presents six potential downsides that are commonly studied and that are reflected in MBA students’ descriptions of their lived experiences: (a) Diversity often removes people from their comfort zones; (b) diversity can lead to mistrust, miscommunication, and conflict issues; (c) diversity initiatives may lead people to believe that they are being told how to think and act, which can give rise to a range of unfavorable reactions; (d) targets may also react negatively or suffer, even when the diversity initiatives are often intended to help them; (e) diversity is often left in the hands of one unprepared individual or of workers in human resources functions; and (f) creating and sustaining DEI is hard work.
What Can Allies Do?
Authors: Hebl Mikki , King Eden
Published: February 2024

In the workplace, employees who hold power or status have the opportunity to maximize diversity, inclusion, and equity for their diverse co-workers. Such employees may be allies to LGBTQ co-workers and/or allies to any number of other marginalized co-workers. In this chapter, an evidence-based framework for thinking about allyship is introduced and situated in the context of MBA students’ experiences. The chapter describes the ally initiatives and behaviors shown to be particularly helpful in reducing discrimination and supporting people from minoritized backgrounds at work: educate oneself and become aware, fight conformity, act, assume psychological standing and use it, and stand up in the absence of targets.
The Unknown God
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This book is the first documentary study of Thelema, a 20th-century new religious movement in the magical family, founded by the occultist and prophet of a new age of personal freedom, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). The history of the Thelema movement is recounted through the biography of its leader, Wilfred Talbot Smith (1885–1957), who was an early convert to Crowley’s revealed religion, a unique brand of apocalyptic esotericism. Smith established Crowley’s occult orders, primarily the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), in British Columbia and in California. Crowley provided the concepts; Smith and his associates made them take flesh, applying Crowley’s doctrine of “Do what thou wilt” and the sex magic teachings of the OTO, cementing them as an essential part of the esoteric religious underground of the 20th century. This study provides a contextual overview of the elements of Crowley’s novel bricolage, which includes Freemasonry, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Neo-Gnosticism, and other related forms of Western Esotericism, demonstrating the considerable overlap between apparently disparate ideologies, groups, and participants. The book reconstructs Smith’s social network, which included Cal Tech rocket scientist Jack Parsons, the Rosicrucian leader H. Spencer Lewis, the Hollywood film star John Carradine, and gay liberationist Harry Hay.
British Columbia Lodge No. 1
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses the North American inauguration in 1915 of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), an esoteric order with an outward-facing appearance and structure of an esoteric masonic rite and secret inner teaching on sexual magic. The order was started by Charles Stansfeld Jones and Smith in Vancouver, British Columbia. The masonic origins of the OTO are traced through the career of its founder, Theodor Reuss, along with the order’s relationship to contemporary movements in Theosophy and Rosicrucianism in which Reuss was active. The structure of OTO under Reuss was a composite adapted from 19th-century masonic rites, leading to the revelation of sexual magic as its central secret. The acceptance of OTO is circumscribed by questions of regularity of origin of its masonic authority. Crowley adopts the OTO as a form of esoteric “outer work” suitable for groups and capable of raising funds.
In the Red Room of Rose Croix
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses how issues of the “Sex Questions” thwarted harmony among the Vancouver members of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Wilfred Talbot Smith begins to practice sexual magic. Aleister Crowley’s “Gnostic Catholic Mass” begins to circulate among the OTO. Its origins and the Neo-Gnosticism of the Gnostic Catholic Church of the OTO are explored. The previously unchartered relationship between Crowley and George Winslow Plummer (1876–1944), along with Plummer’s Rosicrucian school, order, and church are explored as the source for Crowley’s episcopal standing. Crowley rekindles his arguments against the post-Blavatsky leaders in Theosophy and their support of Krishnamurti as the “World Teacher,” which role Crowley claimed for himself as the prophet of Thelema. The massive disruption occasioned by Jones’s “Great Initiation” in December 1917 sets the stage for Jones’s ultimate liberation from Crowley’s mentorship.
Psychomagia
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses Charles Stansfeld Jones and his “Psychomagian Society” (PMS), a novel group created by Jones to teach “Psychomagia,” a bricolage of Coueism and Thelema with details borrowed from the United Lodge of Theosophy (ULT). The income potential of the PMS adds to the growing rift between Jones and Aleister Crowley over the former’s accepting money for occult teaching and not remitting the sales proceeds of the latter’s books. Contributing to the growing split between Crowley and Jones is the latter’s published revelation of a new path of initiation, reversing the Tree of Life. Concurrently Jones claims to have surpassed Crowley in initiatic status. Smith finally abandons the UB. The death of Theodor Reuss in 1923 is revealed, leading Jones and Heinrich Tränker to declare Crowley the head of Ordo Templi Orientis in 1925.
Rosicrucian Amity
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter details how organized opposition to Cecil Frederick Russell and his Choronzon Club by Aleister Crowley and Wilfred Talbot Smith led to defections to the Ordo Templi Orientis. Smith attracts aspirants and starts initiating in OTO again. Publicity about Smith and the OTO opens communication with the various rival Rosicrucian orders in the United States and their leaders or proxies, with the main opponents H. Spencer Lewis (Ancient Mystic Order Rosae Crucis, AMORC) and R. Swinburne Clymer (Fraternitas Rosae Crucis), with Crowley and the OTO as the cudgel between them; the respective histories and relations to Crowley are discussed at length. Crowley tries to woo Lewis and then threatens to sue Lewis to take control of AMORC, claiming it as a subsection of OTO. Smith’s OTO activities in Hollywood halt after further attacks by Max Schneider endorsed by Crowley’s correspondence.
Due Process, Free Expression, and the Administrative State
Authors: Redish Martin H.
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on due process purely in a constitutional setting—specifically, the so-called “First Amendment due process” context. This focus is narrowed even further by being confined to issues of First Amendment due process in the context of administrative adjudication and regulation—issues that most often arise in the context of commercial speech. The chapter argues that administrative adjudicators, by their very nature, have too many associative prejudices to be deemed the truly neutral and independent adjudicators demanded by adversary democratic due process. These due process issues become more serious in the context of fragile rights of free expression, where the danger of suppression and chilling effect on the speakers is a very real possibility. The chapter urges the imposition of strict limits on the power of inherently interested administrative adjudicators.
From Theory to Practice
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter is a reflection on the challenge of adapting national vaccination plans to the real-world difficulties of vaccinating the population in the United States. It examines where and why the country faltered on vaccination and suggests what needs to be done to avoid such shortcomings in the future.
The Invisible Mental Health Burdens of a Pandemic
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped mental health in both the short term and the long term. The chapter suggests the importance of ensuring that support structures are in place to address the pandemic’s long-term effect on mental health in the decades to come.
Pandemic and Prisons
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines the intersection of the pandemic with the challenge of mass incarceration. It discusses how mass incarceration made the United States more vulnerable to contagion and how the burden of incarceration is not evenly felt, disproportionately harming communities of color. The chapter suggests that a core lesson of COVID-19 is that preventing future poor health during pandemics means mitigating the challenge of mass incarceration.
The Caring Infrastructure
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses how the already strained system for home- and community-based care in the United States faced challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lack of investment in caregiving as a public good meant that when the pandemic struck, the caring infrastructure was not prepared. The chapter suggests the importance of supporting this essential work.
The National Character
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses how the culture and politics of different countries led to distinct approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter uses the examples of China, South Korea, and the United States to illustrate how national character can inform how countries address health crises.
Mismanaging Messages
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the inconsistencies of federal messaging during the pandemic and how this created challenges for vaccine uptake. This messaging was complicated by the emergence of boosters and the difficulty of integrating advice on the timing and function of these shots with prior advice about vaccination. This undermined the credibility and effectiveness of federal messaging.
What’s Most Important?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines how confusion about the difference between vaccine efficacy and effectiveness influenced the COVID-19 moment. Efficacy is the capacity of a vaccine to prevent illness; effectiveness is its capacity to reduce clinical consequences. Mistaking one for the other can create challenges for the conversation about vaccination, as occurred during the pandemic.
The Long Shadow of Medical Racism
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses how racism has shaped the history of medicine in the United States. Racial inequities in health care have long existed. During the pandemic, these inequities informed a justifiable lack of trust in the medical system among communities of color, which created problems for COVID-19 treatment and vaccination among these populations.
Leaving the World Behind
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines how global vaccination gaps reflect global health gaps and the forces that shape these inequities. The chapter suggests that the COVID-19 moment provided lessons for engagement with the drivers of global health gaps, with the reminder that a healthy world is one where all are healthy, not just a few.
Will We Stop Being Afraid?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses the fear that was collectively experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenge of learning to mitigate that fear in the face of the continued presence of COVID-19. Although the threat of the virus is not what it once was, the disease remains, as does the fear. Learning to live with this fear is central to people’s ability to move forward in a post-pandemic era.
Can We Forget?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses COVID-19 in the context of memory. It asks, What will be the lasting recollection of this period? What aspects of the pandemic will be talked about years from now and what might be kept silent or repressed? At this turning point moment, how such questions are answered will have much significance for how people move forward together.
False Confidence
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses how earlier encounters with infectious diseases, such as swine flu and SARS, which did not result in a global pandemic, perhaps left those in the medical profession with a sense of overconfidence in their capacity to handle such diseases. This confidence arguably did not serve them well in the lead-up to COVID-19 and may have contributed to some of the vulnerabilities at that time.
The New Us?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses how pandemics such as COVID-19 and, before it, the 1918 flu pandemic can create opportunities to reimagine a collective approach to health, even while acknowledging that although systems can be changed, human nature cannot—with all that entails for the choices people make about health. Engagement with health can be radically remade, but this does not require trying in vain to remake the essential characteristics of human beings.
Can We Be Led?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter questions which aspects of the COVID-19 response will be kept as permanent features of normal life and which will be discarded as no longer necessary. It suggests that thinking about this might be guided by two principles: (1) the importance of balancing safety in the face of disease risk with the need to live full lives, which will always entail some measure of risk; and (2) the need to continue protecting the populations most at risk of severe disease.
Is It Over Yet?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the counting of COVID-19 cases that featured prominently in the media through much of the pandemic. The chapter questions whether the prominence of case counts may have given an impression of risk that did not always accurately reflect the reality of the moment.
Russian Security in the Pacific Region
Authors: Ziegler Charles E.
Published: February 2024

Russia’s claim to great power status in the Pacific has historically rested on military power, largely land based. The Asia Pacific is no longer the threatening environment of the previous century; Russia has developed a close strategic partnership with Asia’s rising power to counter the United States. The Sino-Russian partnership is of immense value to Moscow, allowing the Kremlin to focus on security threats from Europe without the traditional concern of potential conflicts simultaneously from the East and West. Putin’s dominance in foreign policy has prioritized a personal relationship with Xi Jinping and downplayed potential long-term conflicts between the two countries. Russia and China act together to balance American power in the Pacific and globally, although Moscow follows a hedging strategy with key regional actors to realize its economic interests and to avoid becoming too dependent on Beijing. Russia’s security perspective and military doctrine derive from a distinct spatial context, and from specific threats and opportunities that have shaped Moscow’s approach to the region for more than a century.
Conclusion
Authors: Ziegler Charles E.
Published: February 2024

This chapter summarizes the major historical patterns in Russia’s foreign policy toward the Asia Pacific over the past century and a quarter: a continental perspective derived from the country’s vast geographic expanse; a bifurcated perspective on Russia’s civilizational identity between Europe and Asia; highly centralized and authoritarian forms of governance; weak economic capabilities relative to peer states; and a tendency to rely exclusively on military power and diplomacy rather than economic influence or soft power. These repeated patterns over time and across regimes suggest that structural geopolitical factors are of primary importance in understanding Russia’s Pacific policy, as realism would suggest. But realist approaches are incomplete. Certain Russian domestic institutions and cultural values have persisted over decades, and these institutions and values play a fundamental, if secondary, role in shaping foreign policy. Agency, in the form of powerful rulers, is important but tertiary. The analytical eclectic approach, utilizing both realist and constructivist approaches to Russian foreign policy from a historical perspective, accounts for both structural and domestic factors, providing insights into patterns of stability and change.
Does Socialism Violate Rights?
Authors: Sehon Scott R.
Published: February 2024

It is sometimes claimed that socialism violates political rights like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, but arguments for this are found wanting. Others claim that socialism violates property rights or, more broadly, economic rights, though it is not immediately clear how such rights would be characterized. The chapter considers two possible arguments for a strong system of economic rights. The first argument stems from the libertarian idea of self-ownership or the related nonaggression principle. The second argument, defended by John Tomasi, claims that we must have a strong system of economic rights in order to preserve the right of people to be self-governing citizens. The chapter argues that both of these justifications fail.
Collective Control: The Democracy Argument
Authors: Sehon Scott R.
Published: February 2024

This chapter claims that several lines of reasoning suggest that greater collective ownership and control of the economy lead to greater well-being. First, there is the empirical correlation between greater collective control and greater happiness in the Scandinavian countries. Second, one can argue that moving in a more socialist direction increases the sense of community, and that this increases well-being. Third, one can argue that democracy is as good a way as we have for maximizing well-being; since democratic socialism expands democracy further into the realm of major economic decisions, this can be expected to increase well-being. Capitalists will dispute these claims, and their most important objection is considered in Part IV.
Krishna's Mahabharatas
Authors: Pillai Sohini Sarah
Published: February 2024

Recognized as the longest poem ever composed, the ancient Sanskrit Mahābhārata epic tells the tale of the five Pandava princes and the cataclysmic battle they wage with their one hundred cousins known as the Kauravas. This story of the Pandavas and the Kauravas is one of the most popular and widely-told narratives in South Asia (let alone the world). Between 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and several other regional South Asian languages. Krishna’s Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. This book argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia turned this epic about an apocalyptic, bloody war into works of ardent bhakti (devotion) focused on the beloved Hindu deity Krishna. While Krishna’s Mahabharatas examines more than forty retellings in eleven different regional languages that were composed over a period of nine hundred years, it focuses on two particular Mahabharatas: Villiputturar’s fifteenth-century Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Chauhan’s seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahābhārat. Through close comparative readings, this book reveals the similar ways in which poets from opposite ends of the Indian sub-continent transform the story of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata into devotional narratives centered on Krishna. At the same time, it also shows how these Mahabharatas are each unique pieces of religious literature anchored in bhakti cultures that speak to different local audiences in premodern South Asia.
Market Fundamentalism
Authors: Powers Madison
Published: February 2024

The first section of this chapter illustrates how state intervention in market economies for the sake of social welfare goals or the protection of economic and social rights faces fierce opposition from an intellectually influential, politically entrenched ideal often referred to as market fundamentalism. Although specific rationales differ, the core belief is that robust protection of market liberties should be the fundamental principle of social organization. The second section critiques three market fundamentalist rationales: market liberties are foundational for all other liberties, market liberties are necessary for self-defense against the moral and intellectual deficiencies of states, and competitive markets are not only efficient, but also best promote freedom, individual welfare improvements, economic fairness, and social stability. The third section argues against the market fundamentalists’ overarching conception of freedom, defined strictly in terms of non-interference or the absence of coercive interference with an individual’s choices and actions.
Control over the Future
Authors: Powers Madison
Published: February 2024

This chapter argues that the root of our ecological predicament is not simply that the affluent consume too much, but that they control too much. Decisions about the basis of modern life and the fate of the planet carry too much risk or too much uncertainty to be left to a free market free-for-all, where the rule of the economically stronger routinely prevails. For example, concentrated wealth has an outsized effect on public investment and tax policy, channeling resources toward some economic beneficiaries and clustering ecological burdens elsewhere. An ecologically oriented human rights agenda, by contrast, can redistribute power, redefine state responsibility for securing human rights, and remove key social investment decisions from the discretion of private entities. The chapter concludes with an assessment of impediments to and limitations of a human rights approach, but it explains why there is no readily available alternative, given the time remaining for action.
The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Punishment Prerogative
Authors: Ziegler Mary
Published: February 2024

The criminalization of abortion figured centrally in the Court’s decision to dismantle abortion rights in Dobbs. Justice Alito’s majority opinion told a story about how American law had long disapproved of abortion, if not prohibited it altogether. Alito’s fixation on crime is revealing. Regardless of one’s beliefs about the history of criminalization before Roe, criminal penalties have become central, both to the fate of abortion rights and to the regulation of reproduction after Dobbs. This chapter traces the history of how and why the anti-abortion movement came to embrace punishment as a priority, and it argues that this punitive focus has been profoundly destructive while doing little to prevent abortions. Increasingly harsh penalties—together with shifting definitions of “abortion”—have stopped doctors, universities, and others from providing crucial emergency medical treatment or even contraceptive access. These are the stories that make real the constitutional arguments at issue in forced childbearing.
Reproductive Technologies and Embryo Destruction after Dobbs
Authors: Cohen Glenn
Published: February 2024

Upon the release of the Dobbs decision, the public and legal academic conversation quickly shifted to implications for other rights closely connected to substantive due process. Justice Alito’s opinion attempts to argue that abortion’s involvement of “potential life” is what distinguishes abortion from other substantive due process rights. This chapter argues that reproductive technologies, specifically those that involve embryo destruction, are directly implicated by Alito’s language. The Dobbs decision erects a barrier to a federal constitutional right to engage in reproductive technologies involving embryo destruction, raises the possibility that states that prohibit abortion could restrict embryo destruction (though data on public opinion suggests few will), and creates normative questions about embryo destruction that turn on particular theories of embryonic/fetal personhood. The chapter concludes that some who believe abortion should be restricted should also oppose embryo destruction, and that some who oppose abortion restrictions should not oppose restrictions on embryo destruction.
Experts and Citizens
Authors: Nichols Tom
Published: February 2024

What is expertise? Why is it important? The chapter traces the evolution of the concept and the nature of the current crisis around expert knowledge. The chapter defines experts and expertise, explains how experts are educated and trained, how they are credentialed, and how they maintain the boundaries of their profession. The chapter includes examples of expertise as illustrations.
How Conversation Became Exhausting
Authors: Nichols Tom
Published: February 2024

This chapter explains obstacles to communication and critical thinking and how they relate to the growing distrust of experts. The chapter explores the problem of lacking “metacognition,” and the many problems, such as confirmation bias, conspiracy theorizing, and superstition, and partisan tribalism that undermine rational exchanges.