bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What Is a Religion?
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: January 2024

The concept of religion resists clear definition and, especially, short definition. This essay characterizes religion by explaining criteria for being a religion—institutionally or in the life of an individual. Centering on God is what first comes to mind as characterizing religion, but forms of life that are non-theistic, such as some in Buddhism, may have much else in common with paradigms such as Christianity and can count as religions. This includes rituals and other culturally significant practices. Another important criterion is an ethic—a set of moral standards—and here we find a respect in which America’s Judeo-Christian culture has profound implications for the character of any kind of democracy that can make most Americans feel culturally at home.
The Civic Responsibilities of Citizens
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: January 2024

This essay stresses that government works through individuals who have roles within it. Healthcare institutions similarly act through their role-players, and ethics imposes responsibilities on individuals both as such and as organizational role-players. Government should protect individuals, and that requires appraising risks, which in turn requires a view of the good and the bad. Judges and legislators in particular must make such value judgments, and in the spirit of Do unto others they must avoid letting their religious convictions rule them in ways they would reject if imposed by religious convictions of others. This essay develops an ethics of democratic citizenship and proposes broad standards for ascertaining common ground on which all rational citizens can stand.
Beyond Deep Gladness
Authors: Thompson Deanna A.
Published: January 2024

What does it mean to foster a climate where all may flourish? This chapter argues that a necessary step is to nourish vocations that make more space for sadness in our individual and collective lives. Naming and lamenting injustices and losses increases one’s attentiveness and responsiveness to the needs of one’s neighbors. This chapter explores how colleges and universities can acknowledge and name deep sadness that stems from a variety of sufferings, including long-standing injustices. It offers resources from trauma literature to talk about the ways trauma makes itself known in the lives and bodies of those who’ve been traumatized and describes how practices of lament can help those who live with suffering and trauma make more space to live alongside the sadness. Lament also enables many of us to bear witness to the suffering, trauma, and deep sadness of others, working together toward the flourishing of all.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Authors: Smith Monica M.
Published: January 2024

For most universities, the common good is reflected in institutional purpose. Part of the college’s mission is to provide transformational experiences, especially experiences growing out of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) work. As a microcosm of society, colleges embody the challenges and solutions that can bring us closer to communal well-being. Thus, vocational exploration moves toward the common good when it seeks justice, as it reconciles offenses and long-standing and enduring social ills. This chapter identifies the challenges and barriers in providing these experiences for students. The chapter provides specific methods that DEIJ can provide to respond to these barriers to better foster a culture and approach that prepares students to hear a call to respond to justice. A college’s communal purpose, as articulated in its mission and structures, can help foster students’ awareness and abilities to contribute in ways that make the common good equitable and inclusive.
The University as the (Common) Good Place
Authors: Pampel Robert J.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the historical purposes and present realities of the college campus to assert its essential role in fostering vocational discernment and care for the common good. By drawing on student development theory and campus ecology models, it identifies the distinctive qualities of a campus that facilitate these goals. It describes and evaluates the broader responsibilities of the college campus to its surrounding community and to the wider world. Digital, transcendent spaces that foster students’ vocational growth and care for one another are also discussed. While recognizing how and where colleges fall short of these lofty goals, the chapter ultimately aims to reclaim the ideal of the campus as a “common good place” where students from various backgrounds share in collective intellectual pursuits, discern their vocations in community with one another, and build social networks across ideological and cultural divides.
Puruṣa
Authors: Robertson Matthew I.
Published: January 2024

Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India is a study of ancient Indic theories of personhood. It relies on an extensive historical and textual analysis to trace the development of Indic thinking about persons (puruṣas) from the earliest beginnings in Vedic India through the first centuries ce. Puruṣa discerns a sustained, paradigmatic understanding that persons are deeply confluent with the world. Personhood is worldhood. It argues for the centrality of this “worldly” thinking about personhood to Indic traditions, and identifies a host of techniques developed by traditions to expand a person to an ever-greater scope. Ritualized expansions of sovereigns to match the scope of their realm find complement in ascetic meditations on the intersubjective nature of perceptually delimited person-worlds, which in turn find complement in yogas of sensory restraint, the dietary regimens of Ayurvedic medicine, and the devotional theologies by which persons “share” and “eat” the expansive divinity of God. Whether in the guise of a king, an ascetic, a yogi, a buddha, or a patient in the care of an Ayurvedic physician, fully realized persons know themselves to be coterminous with the horizons of their world. Puruṣa is the story of ancient India’s continual quest for this realization. It challenges us to re-examine the goals of ancient Indian religions and yields new insights into the interrelated natures of religious persons and the worlds in which they live.
The Blissful Recursion of Personhood in the Upaniṣads
Authors: Robertson Matthew I.
Published: January 2024

This chapter traces various theories of personhood contained in the early and middle period Upaniṣads. Personhood is here democratized, individualized, and framed according to a variety of themes that deploy in two successive phases. In the earlier phase, personhood is conceived by logics of light, food, prāṇa, dreaming, perception, and reproduction. Persons so conceived are spatially enigmatic—embodied yet universal, beyond dichotomies of inner and outer or self and other, coterminous with the sensible world. The latter phase introduces yoga as an organizing paradigm, according to which persons are beings seeking to master their perceptual engagement with the world in order to end their distraction, their disjunct with the world, and so become blissfully united with the cosmos in its recursive rhythms of expansion and contraction.
Theorizing Music Evolution
Authors: Piilonen Miriam
Published: January 2024

Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. What did Darwin and Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? The book argues for the significance of Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought. Historical evolutionists such as Darwin and Spencer developed and applied a concept of music that served as a boundary-drawing device, used to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. For Darwin, music served as a kind of proto-language common to humans and animals alike. Spencer viewed music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition. These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, while at the same time being mutually constitutive of one another. A groundbreaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, Theorizing Music Evolution turns to the idea of music evolution with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they recur in the present.
Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism
Authors: Piilonen Miriam
Published: January 2024

Chapter 5 turns to Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound (1880), one of the first examples of a post-Darwinian music theory, significantly as an instance of ideal theory in Charles Mills’s sense. Using music analysis, in the form of score studies, Gurney offers a kind of music formalism grounded in Darwinian evolution. Having developed Darwin’s ideas into an evolutionary account of musical pleasure, and having combined this with studies of form in the music of composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Gurney argues that “impressive” music (music with a powerful emotional affect) evokes an unanalyzable feeling that dimly recalls primal scenes of erotic courtship. This chapter critically examines Gurney’s Darwinism formalism from historical and music-analytical angles. The chapter concludes with a synthesis of current thinking about formalism in music studies in order to reflect on the ongoing implications of Gurney’s Darwinian music formalism.
What’s at Stake?
Authors: Nathan Marco J.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 1 introduces and summarizes the book. A first theme is the centrality of the concept of human nature to philosophical theory, scientific practice, and our sociopolitical agenda. A second theme is the popular sentiment seeking to replace traditional humanistic inquiries with empirical approaches. The first half of the book surveys scientific discoveries from the past five decades. Despite groundbreaking progress in the sciences, a firm grip on our nature still eludes us. The second half examines whether a robust notion of human nature is indeed required to pursue scientific and philosophical research. The answer is positive. Human nature constitutes the necessary backdrop for much discussion in both the humanities and the sciences, natural and social alike. My overarching goal is to reconcile these seemingly contrasting conclusions. Human nature is indeed an indispensable scientific construct. Nevertheless, it is a concept that science cannot explain.
Should We Be Concerned about Enhancing Our Nature?
Authors: Nathan Marco J.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 9 deals with the prospects and disquietment of artificially enhancing our human nature. Theoretical and technological advancements have progressed immensely, bestowing upon us powers unimaginable just a few years ago. These possibilities make people anxious. Are there reasons for concern? We can distinguish two families of reactions. On the one hand, bioliberals see no decisive moral or prudential considerations against the use of human enhancement technologies and their broad availability. On the other hand, bioconservatives worry about the prospects of modifying or transcending our nature by pharmaceutical, genetic, synthetic-biological, or other biotechnological means. The overarching fear is that enhancements may be “dehumanizing.” After surveying the debate, the chapter asks whether we can have a meaningful discussion of these positions without some substantive assumptions about human nature. The chapter suggests a negative answer. Both stances, at heart, presuppose a robust notion of human nature, albeit one that has eluded us thus far.
Environmental Ethics and Medical Reproduction
Authors: Richie Cristina
Published: January 2024

Medicalized reproduction (MR) is a phrase this book will use to summarize the intervention of technology into human reproduction, from pre-conception gamete retrieval, to in-vitro fertilization (IVF), to birthing suites. It is broader than assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and includes any form of human reproduction that relies on medical resources. MR is, very often, a lifestyle procedure that is given to meet a reproductive project. Its purpose is not necessarily to address, cure, or treat infertility but to provide options in reproduction for both infertile and fertile. MR is thus poised for environmental evaluation not only as a procedure which increases population and uses resources, but also as a healthcare offering with clinically unnecessary carbon expenditure, and a reproductive choice in a time of climate change. The book offers an applied ethics at the nexus of environmental ethics, medical ethics, and sexual ethics. The introduction situates the modern advent of MR within climate change ethics. Part I details the numerous natural resources used by medical reproduction in all its forms, emphasizing the aspects that are used by fertile people to demonstrate that it is a voluntary lifestyle choice. Part II offers policy suggestions for sustainable MR, with a particular sensitivity to the desires that some people have to be parents and the global claim for medical and climate justice. The conclusion recognizes the obligation for environmental sustainability in all areas of life, leaving the reader with a broader understanding of climate ethics.
Medical Reproduction and Gamete Retrieval
Authors: Richie Cristina
Published: January 2024

The early stages of MR, such as fertility drugs which support gamete retrieval, are significant. Given the purpose of gamete retrieval is further resource use through storage, medical reproduction prior to insemination indicates numerous ecological concerns. In biomedical ethics, the lack of clinical indication for MR use by fertile people highlights a disjuncture between the goals of medicine and actual MR use. The elective nature of MR as a procedure which does not treat or cure a disease demands a critical reassessment from the medical industry. MR as an elective mode of reproduction, which may be used by fertile people, renders it subjected to criticism from sexual and parental ethics, ranging from fairness to children who need to be adopted, impact on women who bear the brunt of medical interventions related to MR, and the additional human carbon footprint, which contributes to both population growth and resource consumption.
Why, Even in Highly Competitive Districts, Are Candidate Positions So Different?
Authors: Merrill III Samuel , Grofman Bernard , Brunell Thomas L.
Published: January 2024

Empirically, winning Congressional candidates of the two parties from ideologically comparable districts tend to be at least as ideologically divergent in competitive districts as in noncompetitive ones. A spatial model, accounting for party loyalty and the threat of abstention, implies that positions similar to those observed in Conclusion 3.1 constitute optimal strategies for office-seeking candidates. When a party wins more seats in Congress, the overall median moves in the expected direction (left for Democrats and right for Republicans), but the party median of the winning party typically moves in the opposite direction (rightward for Democrats and leftward for Republicans).
Discussion and Conclusions
Authors: Merrill III Samuel , Grofman Bernard , Brunell Thomas L.
Published: January 2024

Tight national party discipline of House candidates in both parties generates district elections that choose party delegations to Congress that are ideologically widely separated from one another, while each party delegation separately is ideologically narrowly distributed. Most of the growth in polarization in the House is due to one link in the feedback loop: the dramatic increase in the divergence between party platforms at the district level. Winning candidates of the two parties for seats in the House, especially in recent decades, tend to be at least as ideologically divergent from the median voter in their district in competitive districts as in noncompetitive ones. Polarization between the party bases, party loyalty, and the threat of voters’ abstention all tend to lead not to Downsian convergence but to divergence toward the medians of the respective party bases, incentivizing parties and their candidates to mobilize their base rather than appeal to centrists. In conclusion, polarization generates reinforcing and exacerbating forces, and thus, even without conscious intent of political actors, polarization generates more polarization.
The Science and Public Ethics of Neuro-Chimeric Animals and Human-Brain Organoids
Authors: Evans John H.
Published: January 2024

This chapter describes the public’s long fascination with human-animal chimeras and disembodied brains before turning to recent scientific developments. The human-animal neuro-chimeras that have been developed to date are mice and rats with some human brain components. Human brain organoids are five-millimeter pieces of a human brain grown from stem cells taken from an existing human’s body, and organoids from different parts of the brain have been connected in a dish to achieve more of the complexity of actual human brains. The chapter lays out the public’s role in deciding what technologies should be developed and describes the ethical concerns of bioethicists and scientists, which will be contrasted with the public’s views in later chapters.
The Public’s View of Human-Brain Organoids and Neuro-Chimeric Animals
Authors: Evans John H.
Published: January 2024

This chapter begins with a description of the methods used to evaluate the public’s attitudes. In order to determine what the public thinks, as distinct from what they will agree with when explicitly asked by the researcher, experimental design vignettes were used. The vignettes for the two technologies are described, and in-depth interviews reveal what the respondents were thinking when they answered particular survey questions. The general approval and disapproval of each technology are also described, revealing broad support for research on human brain organoids but split views regarding neuro-chimeric animals.
Rethinking Our Lives
Authors: Andrews Molly
Published: January 2024

This chapter applies the framework of narrative imagination to an analysis of the psychological challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Narrative imagination brings into focus three key issues: temporal fluidity or “time traveling” in which the past, present, and future are intricately and repeatedly interwoven; the relationship between the real, the not-real, and the not-yet-real; and the complexity of constructing “the other.” The dynamic nature of the temporal includes a revisiting of the past, reimagination of present lives, and a recognition of new hoped for and feared futures. Different policy decisions and political implications are examined in terms of their status as real, not real, and not-yet-real. Finally, the pandemic revealed and exacerbated already blistering chasms of inequality—racial, socioeconomic, geopolitical—while at the same time troubling conventional discourses of “otherness.” The chapter concludes by identifying the post-pandemic task as one of (re)imagination: our once hoped for future depends on a rethinking of our past.
Introduction
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

This introduction provides an overview of the contents of this biography of the Indian anticolonial anarchist M. P. T. Acharya. Explaining its rationale and major arguments, the chapter situates the book within existing literature and intellectual histories of anticolonialism and anarchism, accounting for its fresh contributions to these fields. Laying out the theoretical and methodological approaches, the chapter reflects on the process of writing a biography and the search for archives. Throughout, the chapter raises several important research questions that are central to understanding the multifarious and complex nature of Acharya’s trajectory through the underbelly of global political events: nationalism, anticolonialism exile, war, revolution, communism, anarchism, pacifism, freedom, and independence. These issues preoccupy this intellectual biography of Acharya, which accounts for the complex and entangled histories of anticolonialism and anarchism through a detailed exploration of his actions, wanderings, thoughts, and connections with key actors of the time.
Anti-Communist Activities
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

In Chapter Eight, the book follows M. P. T. Acharya’s association with anti-Bolshevik dissidents and anarchists in Russia. Acharya worked as a journalist, writing critical articles about the Bolshevik regime for Indian papers, and started working for the American Relief Administration (ARA) alongside his comrade M. A. Faruqui as well as the Russian anarchist Abba Gordin. Indeed, it was in Russia that Acharya first turned to anarchism, having worked with Nicolai Ragdaev in Tashkent and attended Peter Kropotkin’s funeral in Moscow in February 1921, and developed a deep engagement with anti-statist politics that set him on a new path towards freedom. Acharya found love in Moscow, marrying the Russian artist Magda Nachman in 1922, but also found that his critical stance towards the Bolshevik regime was no longer tolerated, prompting the newly married couple to flee into exile. Ultimately, the chapter illuminates how the Bolshevik promises of self-determination for colonial peoples turned into brutal repression for dissidents like Acharya.
Ultra-Leftists and Outsiders
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines M. P. T. Acharya’s travels among Berlin’s ultra-leftists and extensive engagement with questions of gender and sexual relations in the French anarchist periodical L’En Dehors. While Acharya had joined the ranks of the anarchists, he also associated with anti-Bolshevik dissenters and council communists, mainly through his connection with Karl Korsch’s Kritischer Marxismus reading group, and he remained friends with revolutionaries he had met in Russia. In 1928, he published his key article ‘Les Trusts et la Démocratie’ in L’En Dehors, laying out the case for autonomous communes in India. As the chapter tackles these issues, it also offers a sustained reading of Acharya’s thoughts on sex and gender relations. In L’En Dehors, he wrote extensively about women’s freedom from the bonds of marriage and submission to men, he defended homosexuality, and the labor of sex workers. His thoughts open a window onto the entangled world of anarchism and free love, thoughts that extended to conversations across Europe and Asia.
Alleged Violations of Sovereign Rights and Maritime Spaces in the Caribbean Sea (Nicaragua v. Colombia)
Authors: Tanaka Yoshifumi
Published: January 2024

The Nicaragua v. Colombia judgment of 21 April 2022 is rich in its content, examining both jurisdictional and substantive issues of international law. In the Nicaragua v. Colombia case, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), for the first time, examined the question of whether the Court’s jurisdiction ratione temporis covers facts or events that allegedly occurred after the lapse of the title of jurisdiction. Furthermore, the Court made some important statements with regard to the customary law nature of relevant provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. In this regard, the Court declared that Nicaragua’s straight baselines are contrary to customary international law as reflected in Article 7(1) of the Convention. The Nicaragua v. Colombia judgment provides a crucial precedent on this matter. In light of its importance, this article examines key issues of the judgment, inter alia: (1) jurisdiction ratione temporis of the ICJ, (2) Colombia’s contested activities in Nicaragua’s maritime zones, (3) the legality of Colombia’s “integrated contiguous zone,” (4) the artisanal fishing rights of the inhabitants of the San Andrés Archipelago, in particular the Raizales, and (5) the legality of Nicaragua’s straight baselines.
Introductory Note
Authors: Gomula Joanna
Published: January 2024

The year 2021 was the first year in which no WTO Appellate Body report was issued. Although in this year seven panel reports were issued, notices of appeal were filed in five of these disputes, thus blocking their timely finalization. Only one panel report was adopted. The parties to the seventh dispute in which a panel report was circulated agreed to appellate review in accordance with the multi-party interim appeal arbitration arrangement pursuant to Article 25 Dispute Settlement Understanding (award issued in 2022). There was a mutually agreed solution notified with respect to another dispute. By 31 December 2021, there were twenty-three disputes pending in which a panel report had been circulated and a notice of appeal filed.
Introductory Note
Authors: Lenaerts Koen
Published: January 2024

This introductory note looks back at the main highlights of events occurring at the Court of Justice of the European Union. The year 2021 was marked by continued efforts to adapt to the successive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. The implementation of efficient crisis plans meant that the Court could return to pre-COVID levels of uninterrupted activity. The Court continued to set the pace rendering judgments notably in the fields of the rule of law, the environment, personal data protection, social protection, and state aid. This introductory note provides an overview of the most important judgments in each of these fields.
Introductory Note
Authors: Seatzu Francesco
Published: January 2024

The year 2021 was for the international administrative courts and tribunals largely characterised by the following four elements: the UN Dispute Tribunal (UNDT)’s delivery of the judgment in the case Banaj v. Secretary-General of the United Nations, reviewing the lawfulness of a decision of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to temporarily reassign the applicant; the decision in the case Gharagozloo Pakkala v. Secretary-General of the United Nations, where the UNDT approached the issue concerning the revision of a decision imposing administrative sanctions on the applicant; the decision in the case Paul Ories v. Secretary-General of the United Nations, where the UNDT held that there is no UN staff rule mandating a right to reassignment on medical grounds; and the decision in the case G. (Nos. 7) and V. (No. 8) v. EPO, where the ILOAT focused on the unlawful limitations of the right to strike of IOs staff.
Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism
Authors: Engelhardt Jeff
Published: January 2024

This book examines the intersection of systemic oppression and philosophical methodology. Focusing on philosophical theories of mind and language, it makes the case that they tend to be systematically inaccurate because they abstract away from systemic oppression when they model society, but the phenomena they aim to describe, explain, and predict are in fact systematically influenced by oppression. In short, philosophers of mind/language have tended to think that oppression is either nonexistent or non-systemic, and this has rendered their theories systematically inaccurate. Moreover, it’s plausible that philosophers have tended to be ignorant of systemic oppression as a consequence of how oppression has influenced educational systems, legal systems, dominant ideology, and our language. In order to develop empirically adequate theories of mind and language, then, philosophers need to learn about and take into account systemic oppression and its effects. In addition to arguing for this general methodological point, the book illustrates it and shows the way forward, showing that two influential versions of content externalism are systematically inaccurate because they fail to recognize how oppression influences their explananda and explanantia. The book then introduces modifications that correct the systematic inaccuracies, thus demonstrating how to remedy inaccurate theories and the methodology that led to them. The book concludes with a consideration of how the arguments, conclusions, and modified theories presented in the book bear on philosophical discussions of epistemic injustice and conceptual engineering.
De-idealizing social externalism
Authors: Engelhardt Jeff
Published: January 2024

This chapter motivates and develops a de-idealization of social externalism. As developed by Tyler Burge, social externalism takes it that a term’s meaning and extension are determined by “dialectics” in which a language community determines how best to articulate a term’s appropriate applications (its extension) and its appropriate explication (its conventional meaning). Burge assumes that these dialectics won’t be influenced by social power; this chapter argues that they are systematically influenced by oppression. The chapter makes the case that oppression systematically influences which speakers defer to which others and which articulations are dismissed or taken seriously. Because Burge’s theory ignores the systematic influences of oppression, it is systematically inaccurate in its accounts of meanings, extensions, and the processes that determine them. The chapter outlines a de-idealized version of the theory that appeals to scholarship on oppression to correct for the relevant inaccuracies.
The Battlefront between the Youth Majority and Elite Minority
Authors: Thafer Dania
Published: January 2024

Chapter 7 focuses on the battlefront for institutional economic reform between the elite minority and the youth majority. The business elite have pushed for a paradigm of state-society relations that has, ironically, led to the Gulf nations’ youth exercising their perceived political rights by protesting inequality, as witnessed during the Arab Spring. As a rule, the Gulf states were reluctant to substantively change their political structures in response to these youth-led movements. Instead, Gulf leadership focused on innovation-led economic development targeting their youthful human capital. However, if the systematic design in some Gulf states perpetuating the power of the top echelons of the business elite is not holistically addressed through political reforms, innovation-led economic reforms will remain elusive and creative insecurity will overshadow progress. The case studies demonstrate varied responses to private sector economic reforms based on the degree of business elite dominance, a pivotal variable that influences the fate of creative security.
No Country for the Young
Authors: Badi Emadeddin
Published: January 2024

Analyzing contemporary Libya through the prism of its youngest demographic makes it possible to discern the wider social and political transformations within its polity. This chapter builds on literatures pertaining to agency, social mobilization, war economies, and the legacies of wartime violence and mobilization. It details how Libyan youth are increasingly penetrating militarized spaces since the 2011 revolution. This dynamic is the result of a confluence of socio-political, economic, and security factors; more broadly, it is both reflective of a decline in the agency of post-revolutionary shabab (young men) and borne out of their attempt to reclaim it. The chapter assesses how declining agency has affected post-revolutionary generations of Libya’s youth, notably their political positioning, their prospects for empowerment and employment, and overall livelihood.
Women’s Changing Roles in Times of Conflict
Authors: Ibrahim Rima
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the evolving role of women in Libya following the 2011 uprising, which initially brought about increased liberation for women in public spaces. However, over the subsequent decade, women’s freedoms and roles faced growing restrictions due to societal responses to chronic insecurity. These responses included social control mechanisms and the imposition of boundaries between men and women in public spaces by armed groups, driven by moral and religious considerations, as well as by attempts to gain popularity and legitimacy. The chapter examines gender relations and regime policies before the revolution, highlighting a clash between women’s public presence and persisting gender stereotypes. It then explores the impact of violence, conflict, social control mechanisms, and conservative norms on the transformation of women’s roles, including with regard to restrictions on political participation, mobility, employment, education, and recreation. Despite restrictions, women actively participate in public spaces and take on expanded responsibilities in private spheres due to the fragile economic situation. The chapter also draws on personal observations to understand women’s experiences, focusing on urban society.
The War for Benghazi Violence, Paramilitarism and Social Rupturing, 2014–18
Authors: Wehrey Frederic
Published: January 2024

The war for Benghazi from 2014 to 2018 had a transformative effect on security, politics, and society across Libya and within the city itself. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this chapter offers a narrative history of the war that focuses on how violence transformed the landscape of social relations and security institutions in Benghazi. Often framed as a counter-terrorism operation launched by Khalifa Haftar to rid the eastern city of jihadists, the war was in fact an intensely personal, micro-level struggle between and within neighborhoods, imbued with inter- and intra-tribal, social- and even class-based cleavages, which were often deliberately stoked and harnessed by conflict actors, mostly on Haftar’s side. Emphasis is placed on the perpetrators of this social violence--in the form of forced displacement, attacks on homes and businesses, abductions, and extrajudicial killings--especially by neighborhood paramilitary forces known as the “support forces,” who played a crucial and underappreciated role in Haftar’s military victory. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the roles of these armed groups today, in both Benghazi society and in the security structure of Haftar’s rule.
The Link Between Old and New
Authors: Byala Sara
Published: January 2024

Chapter Four examines instances where Coca-Cola protected its license to operate--including how it navigated the Arab boycott and centered itself in the Egypt–Israel peace deal--by creating mutually beneficial agreements, particularly important as Africans began to win their independence. This chapter shows the company’s focus on creating win-win situations by investigating both large- and small-scale agreements. These include a six-figure citrus deal and such ubiquitous activities as Coke-sponsored beauty pageants, parades, school contests, giveaways, and more. In sum, the chapter troubles the notion that the company profits more than it gives, suggesting that the capitalized--that is, people who participate in capitalist systems--are themselves agents capable of bending the will of a company.
Believe in Africa
Authors: Byala Sara
Published: January 2024

Chapter Six explores three Coca-Cola endeavors meant to woo the hearts and minds of Africans at the dawn of the new millennium, centered around sport, marketing, and music as seen in countries across the continent. This chapter explores Coca-Cola’s long entanglement in sport, paying particular attention to its work with soccer and, in particular, unearthing the story of how Copa Coca-Cola came about. The chapter then explores Coca-Cola’s upbeat messaging around the new millennium as seen in advertisements, activations, promotions, and more. Finally, it explores how Coca-Cola has interacted with music, paying particular attention to its Coke Studio television show. In sum, the chapter shows how Coca-Cola has bent to the will of its consumers, all while spreading its reach and becoming local.
The Phases of Development
Authors: Kellerman Barbara
Published: January 2024

Bad leadership develops into worse leadership in four phases. These phases are invariable and always occur in the same sequence. Moreover, each is worse than the one that preceded it. The point is that bad leadership is not static—it changes over time into something more deficient or even dreadful than it was before. The four phases are: Phase I, Onward and Upward; Phase II, Followers Join In; Phase III, Leaders Start In; and Phase IV, Bad to Worse. The use of phases to indicate change serves several purposes, including simplifying a process that otherwise is exceedingly complex, and clustering phenomena that otherwise seem randomly distributed. The chapter draws on the extreme example of Nazi Germany, specifically of Adolf Hitler and the German people in the 1930s and early 1940s, to illustrate the four phases, which will be amplified and exemplified in the four cases that follow.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey
Authors: Kellerman Barbara
Published: January 2024

Recep Tayyip Erdogan was prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014. Since then, he has been president. During his two decades as leader of Turkey he evolved, in the predictable four phases, from democratic leader to autocratic one. From the vantage point of a liberal democrat, he transitioned from bad to worse. The chapter traces how this happened—how Erdogan was able to capitalize on the deficits of recent Turkish history, on the cleavages in his country, and on the unflagging loyalty of a large segment of the Turkish people to accumulate power not only to his party and to his government but to himself. All his political life, Erdogan lusted for power, Moreover, like all leaders who lust, even after he secured power he did what he could to obtain even more—whatever the implications for his followers.
Phase I: Onward and Upward
Authors: Kellerman Barbara
Published: January 2024

During the first phase of leadership from bad to worse, leaders paint a picture of a future boundlessly better than the past. It is a near-utopian vision of promises fulfilled and dreams realized. Good leaders avoid promising the spectacularly splendid. They steer clear of implying that they alone can save us from ourselves. Bad leaders, in contrast, present themselves as heroes, saviors, capable of greatness and even transcendence. They promise their followers a future that is a dreamscape in which every need will be met and every dream will come true. This chapter explores the implications of outsized ambitions, of visions that defy reality and imply not only superiority but grandiosity. It also provides a list of early warning signs, indicators warning of bad leadership begging to be intercepted early on. Martin Winterkorn, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Elizabeth Holmes, and Xi Jinping were leaders who reached for the moon and the stars.
The Audiovisual Turn
Authors: Kim Jihoon
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses several Korean documentary films since the 2010s that portray place and landscape related to Korea’s social reality or a personal or collective memory of its past, classifying their common trope as the “audiovisual turn.” The trope refers to the uses of poetic and aesthetic techniques to highlight the visual and auditory qualities of the images that mediate the landscape or place. This chapter argues that the films’ experiments with these techniques mark formal and epistemological breaks with the expository and participatory modes of the traditional Korean activist documentary, as they create an array of Deleuzian time-images in which a social place or natural landscape is reconfigured as the cinematic space liberated from a linear time and layered with the imbrication of the present and the past. The images, then, signal, the shift of understanding natural or built environments from hyŏnjang (spot) to “memoryscape”—a term that is used in memory studies as a synonym for the spaces and locales significant to people’s mnemonic relationship to the past. For this reason, the images are also read as updating the activist documentary’s commitment to politics and history, as they renew the viewer’s sensory and affective awareness of the place and landscape and thereby render them as ruins.
The Digital Turn
Authors: Kim Jihoon
Published: January 2024

This chapter maps out three forms of twenty-first-century Korean digital nonfiction film, “postdocumentary diversion,” “virtual reality (VR) documentary,” and “subjunctive documentary,” that attest to the expansion of Korean documentary cinema’s ways of expression. The chapter argues that a significant contribution of the three forms of digital documentary is widening the horizon of documentary practices and thereby multiplying their production of reality and truth in ways that are irreducible to the traditional activist mode and its emphasis on hyŏnjang (on-the-spot) realism. The films of “postdocumentary diversion” unearth or playfully satirize the profound ideological dimensions of the postauthoritarian Korean society with their rigorous employment of digital visual effects to manipulate existing media images or create animated sequences. VR documentaries augment the performative documentary’s emphasis on the subjective and embodied aspects of truth with their capacities to allow the viewer to be immersed in their simulated reality, to have an empathic relationship with its social actors, and to question the boundaries between truth and fiction. And finally, subjunctive documentaries, which involve computer-generated imagery and digital nonlinear editing to scientifically reconstruct reality beyond the camera’s record, aim to investigate and unveil truths of the Yongsan Massacre and the Sewol Ferry Disaster that have had profound impacts on contemporary Korean society.
The Quality of Thought
Authors: Pitt David
Published: January 2024

This book develops and defends the thesis that thinking is a kind of experience, characterized by a sui generis phenomenology, and draws out the implications of this thesis for dominant views in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and metaphysics. The view defended is radically internalist and intensionalist, and goes against received doctrines in philosophy of mind (externalism) and language (extensionalism). The book offers arguments for the thesis, refutations of classic externalism (Putnam and Burge), arguments that standard motivations for direct reference theories of names, indexicals and demonstratives are not inevitable, and alternative accounts of their (and their conceptual equivalents’) semantics. It also addresses outstanding challenges to the phenomenal intentionalist view of thought content, including the existence of unconscious thought, the elusiveness of conceptual phenomenology, the matching content problem, phenomenal compositionality, and the determination of conceptual reference.
On Newton On Time
Authors: Gryb Sean , Thébault Karim P. Y.
Published: January 2024

According to Newton, time is ‘absolute, true, and mathematical’. There is a good basis to interpret ‘true’ here as involving a sense of universality or being defined globally throughout space. The assertion of a true time can be taken to be predicated upon the assumption that the ordering or chronordinal structure of time is dynamically absolute in the sense of not varying between universes that instantiate different sets of dynamical motions, and invariant in the sense of being not varying between universes that differ solely in virtue of the situation in time of the same set of dynamical motions. In Newtonian time, chronordinal structure is fixed structure. The posit of a ‘mathematical’ time can in turn be taken to indicate that there is a single time parameter with uniform metric structure: a chronometric structure of time. This temporal structure can then be assumed to be dynamically absolute but not invariant.
On Leibniz On Time
Authors: Gryb Sean , Thébault Karim P. Y.
Published: January 2024

The basic desiderata of a Leibnizian account of time are that chronometric and chronordinal structure will be determinate, invariant, and dynamically relative. This is because his metaphysics does not allow for the possibility for two universes to differ solely in virtue of the situation ‘in time’ of the same set of dynamical motions or two universes that involve the same sets of dynamical motions should involve the realization of distinct temporal structures. The Leibnizian metaphysics of time runs into two immediate problems, however. First, what determines the order of succession needed to fix the chronordinal, and second, what determines the duration measure needed to fix the ‘quantity of time’ between successive actual phenomenal states as needed for a functional system of mechanics.
Reparameterization Invariant Dynamics
Authors: Gryb Sean , Thébault Karim P. Y.
Published: January 2024

For the subset of Jacobi theories where the metric is conformally flat there is always a dynamically privileged ephemeris time parameter that can be defined along a classical curve in terms of the fixed total energy of the system. There are available two importantly different interpretations of the modal status of the total energy constant. Under the first, total energy is interpreted as a constant of nature. The value of the total energy is thus the same for all dynamically possible models with the same token of the constitutive structure. Total energy is therefore a contingently fixed structure of the theory. Under the second, total energy is interpreted as a constant of motion. The value of the total energy is then a free function of the initial data and thus can vary between dynamically possible models with the same token of the constitutive structure.
Resistance and Diplomacy in Occupied Europe
Authors: Piffer Tommaso
Published: January 2024

After the Soviet pact with Hitler in August 1939, the international communist movement had to adapt to the new course of Soviet foreign policy, scrapping common fronts with the other antifascist forces and focusing the firepower of its propaganda against the Western democracies. When the war finally broke out in September, the European communist parties did nothing to oppose the German invasion of their countries. In the meantime, it was the British who tried to light the fire of rebellion against the Germans in occupied Europe. In a desperate military position, Britain was in search of allies against Nazi Germany, and hoped that aggressive resistance movements would weaken German military capabilities on the continent. In 1940, after the fall of France, they created a new secret organization to stimulate subversion and guerrilla groups on the continent: the Special Operations Executive (SOE).