bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Decision Support Systems
Authors: Eom Sean B.
Published: February 2020

A decision support system is an interactive human–computer decision-making system that supports decision makers rather than replaces them, utilizing data and models. It solves unstructured and semi-structured problems with a focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency in decision processes. In the early 1970s, scholars in this field began to recognize the important roles that decision support systems (DSS) play in supporting managers in their semistructured or unstructured decision-making activities. Over the past five decades, DSS has made progress toward becoming a solid academic field. Nevertheless, since the mid-1990s, the inability of DSS to fully satisfy a wide range of information needs of practitioners provided an impetus for a new breed of DSS, business intelligence systems (BIS). The academic discipline of DSS has undergone numerous changes in technological environments including the adoption of data warehouses. Until the late 1990s, most textbooks referred to “decision support systems.” Nowadays, many of them have replaced “decision support systems” with “business intelligence.” While DSS/BIS began in academia and were quickly adopted in business, in recent years these tools have moved into government and the academic field of public administration. In addition, modern political campaigns, especially at the national level, are based on data analytics and the use of big data analytics. The first section of this article reviews the development of DSS as an academic discipline. The second section discusses BIS and their components (the data warehousing environment and the analytical environment). The final section introduces two emerging topics in DSS/BIS: big data analytics and cloud computing analytics. Before the era of big data, most data collected by business organizations could easily be managed by traditional relational database management systems with a serial processing system. Social networks, e-business networks, Internet of Things (IoT), and many other wireless sensor networks are generating huge volumes of data every day. The challenge of big data has demanded a new business intelligence infrastructure with new tools (Hadoop cluster, the data warehousing environment, and the business analytical environment).
Trial Courts in the United States
Authors: Boyd Christina L. , Rutkowski Adam G.
Published: February 2020

Trial court judges are often referred to as the workhorses of the judicial system. This is unsurprising given that millions of civil and criminal cases are filed and resolved in U.S. state and federal trial courts each year. Very few of these cases ever reach appellate courts, meaning that trial courts are often the first and only court with which people directly interact. At the same time, trial courts can make local and national policy, both in individual cases and in the aggregate. This important role of trial courts and their actors has not gone unnoticed by scholars across social science disciplines.

One can consider trial courts in a broad sense by tracking the historical developments that led to the trial courts in the United States. As caseloads have increased, trial courts—particularly those with specialized jurisdictions—have been created out of necessity. State trial courts feature variation in their judicial selection methods, including elections and appointments. At the federal level, increased polarization has led to contentious partisan confirmation battles for federal trial court judges.

Trials are a rare occurrence, with plea agreements and settlements being the most frequent methods of resolving cases. To understand trial court actor behavior, it is important to remember that state and federal trial courts sit at the bottom of their judicial hierarchies. The preferences of their hierarchical superiors, along with the presence of high trial court caseloads and the rarity of trials, rein in judges’ discretion and the potential effects of their personal characteristics and attitudes. Because of these judge constraints, actors such as prosecutors, defense attorneys, and juries play a significant role in trial court outcomes. As the literature reveals, the “repeat players” in trial courts hold significant advantages over less experienced litigants and attorneys that affect their likelihood of gaining favorable outcomes, among other things. Race and gender of these actors can have significant effects on behavior in certain types of cases.

There are many hurdles that remain for scholars seeking to study trial courts. For example, state trial courts, in particular, continue to be difficult to study empirically. This is due largely to a lack of data availability. Relatedly, scholars must continue to strive to find ways to study trial court outcomes and events that do not lead to published opinions—for example settlements, plea bargains, prosecutorial declinations, and many decided motions. Each of these involves important decisions and outcomes that affect parties and may be affected by judges and lawyers.
The Treaty of Paris
Authors: Dinan Desmond
Published: February 2020

On June 20, 1950, representatives of six countries (Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) met in Paris to launch what became the first intergovernmental conference in the history of European integration. The outcome, after a year of difficult negotiations, was an agreement to establish the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), signed in Paris on April 18, 1951. Based on the Schuman Declaration of May 1950, the Paris Treaty established a High Authority of a “supranational character,” with responsibility for managing a common market for two key industrial sectors. The Coal and Steel Community was a political as much as an economic undertaking. It institutionalized a new departure in relations between France and West Germany and helped cement a postwar peace settlement in Western Europe, within the broader framework of an emerging transatlantic system.
Auditing and Accountability
Authors: de Fine Licht Jenny
Published: February 2020

Auditing is frequently justified in terms of accountability. By virtue of their strong formal independence, supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are expected to scrutinize public spending and actions, thereby forcing authorities to explain themselves and take actions against malfunctions. In the end, auditing is supposed to contribute to an efficient and well-functioning public sector.

The presumed link between auditing and accountability is, however, not evident. Information generated through auditing is far from pure statements of facts about the operations and results of an actor or organization. Rather, they represent an intricate combination of the presumptions, expectations, and professional boundaries of auditees and auditors alike. Further, this information is not necessarily comprehensible and actionable, and even if it is actually used to pose critical questions or deliver sanctions, improved performance cannot be taken for granted. Concerning the possibilities for the public to use audit results for demanding accountability from their representatives, the picture is even more complex. It is far from obvious that the public actually receives the audit information and, if they do, that they are willing or capable of acting on it.

The last decades’ development of auditing from traditional record checking and verification of compliance to performance auditing has narrowed the boundaries between auditing and evaluation. This has made auditing more relevant for public administration performance and reform, but at the same time has made the process of accountability more complex. In some cases, it has even sparked a return to more traditional compliance-focused auditing.
Accountability and Blame Avoidance After Crises
Authors: Kuipers Sanneke , Brändström Annika
Published: February 2020

The post-crisis accountability process is a purification ritual that serves to channel public emotions and enables re-equilibration after a severe disturbance of the sociopolitical order. Crisis accountability literature can be reviewed in terms of forums, actors, and consequences. This setup allows a systematic discussion of how crises impact: the accountability process in influencing its setting (the forum); the strategies of accountees and their opponents (actors); and the resulting outcomes in terms of reputation damage, sanctions, and restoration (consequences). There is a clear distinction between formal and informal accountability forums, with the media being almost exclusively informal, and judicial forums, accident investigators, and political inquiries having formal authority over accountability assessments. Yet, through the presence of formal authorities in media reporting, and because media frames influence the work of formal authorities, the different forums intensively interact in accountability processes. Looking at accountability strategies reveals that the number of actors involved in blame games is likely rising because of increasingly networked crisis responses, and the role of actors has become more important and personal in the crisis aftermath and accountability process. The consequences and success of individual actors in influencing the accountability outcomes is shaped by both institutional settings and individual skills and strategies. A current political power position that exceeds prior mistakes is an effective shield, and denial is the least effective though most commonly used strategy. Accountability processes remain a balancing act between rebuttal and repair. Yet after major crisis, renewal is possible, and post-crisis accountability can play a crucial role therein.
Coercive Diplomacy as Crisis Management
Authors: Viggo Jakobsen Peter
Published: February 2020

In war-threatening crises, the contestants face a crucial dilemma: Should they yield to the opponent’s demands to avoid war or risk war to protect their interests? Coercive diplomacy is a holistic “stick-and-carrot” crisis management strategy devised to tackle this dilemma and enable policymakers to resolve crises by means of mutually acceptable compromises short of war. It is in focus here because it integrates the three principal strands of crisis management theory into a single strategy.

The first component is coercive. It involves threats to do harm (political, economic, or military) and action that would hurt the adversary in order to influence it to stop/undo its hostile activities. Hurting action may involve political, economic, and military measures, but actual use of force must be limited and serve signaling and influencing purposes only. Its purpose is to bring the opponent to the negotiating table, not to defeat it or render it incapable of continued resistance. The second component is conciliatory and accommodating. It involves the use of positive incentives for compliance with the coercer’s demands. Their purpose is to reduce the cost of compliance and thereby increase the prospects for finding a mutually acceptable solution to the crisis short of war. The third component is the use of assurances to convince the adversary that the coercer will keep three promises: (a) that it will stop hurting the adversary if it complies with the coercer’s demands, (b) that the promised compensation for compliance will be forthcoming, and finally, (c) that compliance will not result in new demands in the future.

This combination of coercion and accommodation situates coercive diplomacy in the middle of the crisis management continuum, which has winning at the one end and war avoidance at the other. It also sets coercive diplomacy apart from strategies relying solely on coercion, such as compellence and deterrence, or solely on accommodation and positive inducements, such as appeasement.

Coercive diplomacy is a hard-to-use, high-risk strategy with a low success rate—especially with respect to solving crises without any use of force. Success hinges on a favorable context, skillful diplomacy, and psychological factors beyond the coercer’s control. The many factors affecting its successful use and the holistic nature of the strategy involving coercion, positive inducements, and assurances have produced a rich but also fragmented and dichotomous literature, which has been marred by a number of theoretical, methodological, and definitional disputes. Since 2010, a new generation of scholars has taken promising steps to overcome some of these problems using sophisticated mixed-methods research designs. Significant progress can be made if scholars begin to use such designs to better understand how the interaction of coercion, positive inducements, and assurances affects the scope for resolving crises short of war.
Exercise Perceptions and Motivation of Children and Adolescents
Authors: Rosenkranz Richard
Published: February 2020

As technology advances and offers enjoyable sedentary alternatives to sport, active recreation, and transportation, there is a growing need to understand and harness the drivers of physical activity and exercise among children and adolescents. Determining how youth perceive their physical capabilities and their opportunities and what motivates them to be physically active can provide essential information for teachers, coaches, youth leaders, and program planners who are interested in promoting physical activity. Several well-established and also more recently developed behavioral theories offer numerous avenues to gaining a better understanding of the perceptions and motivation of youth with respect to physical activity and exercise behavior, including the social ecological model, social cognitive theory, self-determination theory, habit theory, dual-process theory, and nudge theory, among others.

Children and adolescents have individual characteristics that influence their perceptions, motivations, and behavior. They also exist within a multilayered ecological context that helps to shape those perceptions, motivations, and behavior. For youth to be sufficiently physically active and thereby help to reach their full potential, the environment must be conducive to consistent routines of physical activity. Such an environment can be designed to provide easily accessible and enjoyable opportunities for youth to fulfill their basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence to be physically active. There is potential for technology to contribute positively toward the design of conducive environments, and toward fostering motivation and enjoyment of exercise and physical activity among children and adolescents.
The Concept of Developmental Stage: Hall, Freud, and Piaget
Authors: Morss John R.
Published: February 2020

Influential theorists of pre-adult phases of the development of the individual person (infancy, childhood, and adolescence) have articulated myriad versions of stage theories, varying in specificity, rigidity, and many other parameters. Some stage theories are concerned with capacities defined somewhat narrowly and operationally defined by behavior. Elsewhere on the spectrum, some of the most influential stage theories have purported to indicate capacities or modes of considerable generality, by positing deep, structural changes either in intellectual capacity or in terms of some other aspect of human functioning treated as fundamental to the affective and the rational life. Jean Piaget’s stage theory of intellectual (cognitive) development is the paradigm of a theory of structural changes in the capacity for logical thought. Bluntly put, Piaget’s theory takes for granted the key characteristics of the thinking of the emotionally balanced, rational adult and attempts to define the necessary steps by which that state is to be attained from the time one starts life as a baby. Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages, especially as articulated by Karl Abraham, is the paradigm of a stage theory in which significant aspects of adult functioning are redefined, rather than taken for granted. The steps intervening from babyhood, as thereafter articulated, thereby take on an innovative character. In both cases the substantial internal consistency of the stage model, notwithstanding numerous empirical shortcomings, has generated a kind of validity. But even such qualified praise cannot now be offered to Stanley Hall’s stage theory of individual development, which seems with hindsight little more than a derivative popularization of the recapitulationary evolutionism of the latter part of the 19th century. From an historical perspective, Hall’s, Freud’s, and Piaget’s stage theories of development are all artefacts, products of the sociocultural and scientific environments of their times.
History of the Personality Disorders Narcissism and Psychopathic Personality
Authors: Lunbeck Elizabeth
Published: February 2020

Psychopathic personality (a term that has been largely supplanted in psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ nosologies by anti-social personality disorder) and narcissism are venerable, widely used, and fiercely contested categories of personality disorder. Psychopathic personality was originally delineated in the early years of the 20th century to encompass behavior that was, in experts’ estimation, decidedly not normal but that fit none of the other categories of mental disease. Critics of the diagnosis claimed it was but another label for individuals’ non-conformity with social norms, used to punish the poor and marginal. Narcissism has had an even more tumultuous history than psychopathy. Referring simultaneously to traits considered pathological (grandiosity, exploitativeness, manipulativeness) and to traits thought desirable (high self-esteem, capacity for leadership and authority), narcissism has been at the center of debates over national decline and the character of the modal American for the past half-century. Both categories have also sparked controversy along the trait/ state, dimensional/ categorical divide that flared in the run-up to the publication of the 5th edition of psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013. Thousands of papers have attempted to resolve the ambiguities surrounding both diagnoses, but these ambiguities have proven productive (of research and new knowledge) and are unlikely to be resolved soon.
Sources of the Self From the Renaissance to the 20th Century
Authors: Hofman Elwin
Published: February 2020

The history of the self studies continuities and changes in ideas about and experiences of the individual mind through time, attending to questions of individuality, identity, stability, self-possession, and interiority. Traditionally, this subject has often been approached as an intellectual history, analyzing philosophers’ explicit writings about the self. Through the work of people such as René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, scholars have traced a growing sense of individuality and self-possession since the 16th century, and an increasing feeling of inner depth since the 18th century. The focus on intellectual sources of the self has been criticized, however, by scholars who stress the importance of practices and of social differences. They have broadened the scope of the field by looking at cultural sources, such as autobiographical writing, literature, art, rituals, and festivities. Still other historians have criticized the absence of power in many accounts of the history of the self and stress the institutional and political sources of the self, including religious institutions, schools, and legal systems. Throughout these different approaches, debates continue about whether a “modern self” can be traced, and when such a modern self can be situated. While many recent scholars stress the need to examine different cultures of the self at any given time in their own right, others argue that it remains important to trace grand shifts in this history.
Contextual Leadership and Culture in Education
Authors: Noman Mohammad , Gurr David
Published: February 2020

Context, culture, and leadership are features of educational organizations, yet the relationship between the three is poorly understood. Often leadership theories are propagated as though they will be applicable in all situations, yet research on successful school leaders has found that leadership is highly contextual in nature and that the success of educational leaders depends upon how leaders adapt their practices according to contextual factors. Contextual leadership transcends the rigid, and at times overlapping boundaries of existing educational leadership theories and models and brings the context to the center stage of the practices of educational leaders. Culture can be considered as one of the context factors, but it is a complicated factor with many dimensions. Successful educational leaders are the ones who master the art of creating a balance between multiple cultural contexts acting upon their institutions and, through their contextual practices, learn the art of successfully leading their institutions by creating an inclusive, multicultural environment. Successful school leaders are those who are culturally sensitive, but not context constrained.
Values-Based Leadership and the Quest for Inclusive Organizational Practices
Authors: Rintoul Heather , Normore Anthony H.
Published: February 2020

Values-based leadership is, at its core, decisional leadership. Traditionally, educational leadership has tended to fall into a range of rationality dealing with consequences and consensus. This “do things right” approach has come under intense scrutiny by decision makers searching for more ethically justifiable responses through a new vision of education and schooling, a “do the right thing” style of decision making. Decisions based in principle—that is, morals and ethics—are commonly deemed as being authentic, fulfilling, and more justifiable than decisions based on rationality and preference. Embedded in this new moral urgency lies an inherent tension in that “to do the right thing” routinely begs the question “the right thing for whom?” Differences have arisen in terms of what values-based leadership and inclusion means—whose values, who is included, how to address leadership for inclusive practices, thus rendering conceptualization and implementation of inclusive practice qualitatively different according to context. The achievement of all students must be viewed both as an economic and values-oriented imperative consistent with inclusive practices. The term, inclusion is socially constructed and can carry with it stigmatizing and exclusionary effects that ultimately result in perpetuating oppressive forces on already marginalized individuals.

Values-based leadership has an emphasis on school settings that are welcoming and affirming to all students, especially those most at risk for failure. Its underlying beliefs and assumptions guide practices and policies of inclusive practices and sound moral decisions. Moral decisions are made, not in isolation, but rather through a journey of interaction and association with others. Unfortunately, this interpersonal journey is often fraught with anxiety because everyone’s experience is sourced in a different worldview. Unravelling the intricacies of resolution possibilities has become increasingly complex because often there may be several equally appropriate responses to any dilemma; therefore, the decisional challenge becomes how to adjudicate between and among possibilities. Values-based leadership for inclusive practices concerns various marginalized groups including English-language learners, those who experience gender discrimination, those who are in the foster care system, and those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered. The broader conceptualization of inclusive schools adds to extant discourses about students with exceptional needs and provides effective strategies that school leaders operating from a social justice framework can implement to create more inclusive school environments for all students.
The Politics of Anti-Immigration Discourse and Opportunities for Educational Leadership
Authors: Clemens Randall , Cyprès Autumn Tooms
Published: February 2020

Words have power: power to unite, to inspire, to divide, to harm. Politicians have long used persuasive language and rhetoric to mobilize constituents and to influence policy discussions. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican Party nominee Donald Trump, capitalizing on his reputation for blunt and brash comments, created a political brand based on unedited statements and sweeping promises. He vowed to “Make America Great Again.” It stirred, galvanized, and emboldened supporters. For many, however, the candidate’s divisive discourse invoked legacies of marginalization and exclusion. Across educational settings, Trump’s language reverberated. Campaign promises left many unsure about the future of immigrants in the United States. After the election, anti-immigrant discourse continued and hate crimes spiked. The events required educational leaders to respond to support and empower immigrant students. They highlighted the need for leaders to create communities that maintain democratic ideals and ensure inclusivity and belonging for all stakeholders.
Peer Effects in Education
Authors: Pratschke Jonathan , Abbiati Giovanni
Published: February 2020

In the social sciences, the term “peer effects” has been widely used to describe the various ways in which individual behaviors and attitudes can be influenced by friends, acquaintances, and the wider social environment. Due to the crucial role of social interactions within the school context, the role of peers in shaping academic outcomes has been under scrutiny for decades. Following seminal work by Manski, we distinguish between three different components of peer influence: endogenous (where the behavior of an individual varies in accordance with the behavior of the peer group), exogenous (where the behavior of an individual varies with the characteristics of the members of the peer group), and correlated (where the behavior of individuals is shaped by shared environmental or institutional factors). By estimating a simultaneous autoregressive model, we assess the relative strength of these three forms of peer influence in relation to secondary school exam results in a large sample of Italian school-leavers. One limitation is that we are only able to observe peer influence within the classroom, while another is that the study is confined to a specific moment in time, which comes quite late in young people’s educational trajectories. The results confirm that peer processes play an important role in the reproduction of social inequalities, against the backdrop of institutional criteria for the selection of students into schools and classes. These factors therefore demand the sustained attention of educational administrators and policymakers.
Ships and Shipwrecks in the Pre-Modern Indian Ocean
Authors: Manguin Pierre-Yves
Published: February 2020

The Indian Ocean and its adjoining seas, from the Middle East and East Africa to Southeast Asia, have been witness to the nautical ventures of most, if not all, major sea powers of world history. Progress in nautical archaeology in the past few decades has brought about a much better understanding of shipbuilding traditions of the Indian Ocean, until then limited to textual and ethnographic sources. Only a few shipwreck sites and terrestrial sites with ship remains have been studied so far along the shores of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, or the Indian Ocean proper. Many more were found in recent excavations in the Southeast Asian seas, which were built along Southeast Asian or Indian Ocean shipbuilding traditions.

Two main technical traditions can now be clearly identified for pre-modern times: the Arabo-Indian sewn-plank ships of the western Indian Ocean, which survived into our times, and the Southeast Asian vessels that evolved from a distinctive sewn-plank technology to fully doweled assemblages, as could still be observed in Indonesian vessels of the late 20th century.

The still limited number of shipwrecks brought to light in the Indian Ocean as well as the considerable imbalance in archaeological research between the Indian Ocean proper and the Southeast Asian seas have hindered the advancement of the discipline. Considerable difficulties and interpretation problems have moreover been generated by biased commercial excavations and subsequent incomplete excavation records, not to speak of the ethical problems raised in the process. Such deficiencies still prevent solid conclusions being drawn on the development of regional shipbuilding traditions, and on the historical role of the ships and people who sailed along the essential Indian Ocean maritime networks.
Periyar E. V. Ramasamy
Authors: Venkatachalapathy A. R.
Published: February 2020

E. V. Ramasamy “Naicker” (1879–1973), better known as “Periyar” (literally “the big man”; figuratively “the revered one”), is an iconic figure in the history of Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu all governments of the state since 1967 have been formed by two parties—Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK)—both of which split from Periyar’s Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) and claim his legacy.

Periyar is primarily known as a social reformer, anti-caste crusader, champion of non-Brahmin political and social interests, advocate of women’s rights, and atheist and rationalist. At an all-India level his reputation is that of an “anti-national” who demanded secession from the Indian Union, an atheist who rejected god, religion, and rituals. In 1990, in the context of the Indian government’s move to introduce reservation (affirmative action) for backward castes in education and employment, and the upper-caste protest against it, Periyar’s role in empowering backward castes has received attention. Further, with the renewed rise of Hindu fundamentalism from the 1990s, Periyar’s critique of religion, especially Hinduism, has been recognized politically and intellectually. The dominance of intermediary castes in south India, and Dalit political and cultural assertion since the 1990s, has triggered a re-evaluation of Periyar’s ideas on caste and their impact on the empowerment of backward castes.

The renewed political interest in Periyar’s ideas and a longstanding academic interest in the history of the non-Brahmin movement have come together in recent times. This has resulted in the proliferation of new compilations, editions, and reprints of Periyar’s writings. Analytical studies of his life and politics is a growing field. Though undertheorized by scholars, Periyar’s ideas on caste, religion, women’s rights, and language provide a window into understanding and conceptualizing non-mainstream ideological trends in modern Asian history.
Religion, Caste, and Displacement: The Matua Community
Authors: Lorea Carola Erika
Published: February 2020

The struggle against untouchability, the religious history of Bengal, and the study of postcolonial displacement in South Asia can hardly be considered without paying attention to a roughly two-hundred-year-old low-caste religious and social movement called Matua.

The Matua community counts at present fifty million followers, according to its leaders. It is scattered across a large area and connected through a trans-local network of preachers, pilgrims, institutions, print, and religious commodities. Most Matua followers are found in West Bengal; in southern Bangladesh, where the movement emerged in the 19th century; and in provinces where refugees from East Bengal have resettled since the 1950s, especially Assam; Tripura; the Andaman Islands; Uttarakhand; and the Dandakaranya area at the border of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. Building upon an older Vaishnava devotional stream, the religious community initiated by Harichand Thakur (1812–1878) and consolidated by his son Guruchand Thakur (1847–1937) developed hand in hand with the Namashudra movement for the social upliftment of the lower castes. Rebelling against social marginalization and untouchability, and promising salvation through ecstatic singing and dancing, the Matua community triggered a massive mobilization in rural East Bengal. Partition and displacement have disrupted the unity of the Matua movement, now scattered on both sides of the hastily drawn Indo-Bangladesh border. The institutional side of the Matua community emerged as a powerful political subject, deeply entangled with refugee politics, borderland issues, and Hindu nationalism. In the 21st century, the Matua community represents a key element in electoral politics and a crucial factor for understanding the relation between religion, displacement, and caste, within and beyond Bengal.
Histories of Transportation and Mobility in Africa
Authors: Hart Jennifer
Published: February 2020

The history of transportation is part of a much broader history of mobility on the African continent. Transport history highlights the technologies, infrastructures, and networks that facilitated the circulation and exchange of people, goods, and ideas within local communities, across regions, and within systems of long-distance and global trade. While scholars have often associated transportation with the mechanized technologies of the industrial age, the history of mobility and transportation in Africa embraces a much broader definition of technology, encompassing animal, human, and mechanical transportation dating back to at least the 1st century ce. These long technological and transport histories informed the ways in which Africans shaped the industrial transport cultures and practices of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Technologies and infrastructures made mobility possible, but the values and practices of African communities made mobility meaningful, connecting individuals and communities in networks of cultural and economic exchange at local, regional, continental, and global scales. For some, mobility and transportation provided crucial economic opportunities as wage laborers and entrepreneurs. For others, mobility was defined by conditions of servitude. For most, however, mobility and transportation was much more personal, connected to daily habits of work, travel, and trade. As they moved, Africans articulated new understandings of work, created economies of value, and defined individual and collective identities—actions that gave technology and infrastructure meaning as part of a broader mobility-system. This mobility-system—or rather the multiple mobility-systems—that developed and transformed throughout the history of the continent connected global trading systems and local agricultural practice, railroads and carrier paths, motor vehicles and markets.
Economic Development in Spain, 1815–2017
Authors: Prados de la Escosura Leandro , Sánchez-Alonso Blanca
Published: February 2020

In assessments of modern-day Spain’s economic progress and living standards, inadequate natural resources, inefficient institutions, lack of education and entrepreneurship, and foreign dependency are frequently blamed on poor performance up to the mid-20th century, but no persuasive arguments were provided to explain why such adverse circumstances reversed, giving way to the fast transformation that started in the 1950s. Hence, it is necessary to first inquire how much economic progress has been achieved in Spain and what impact it had on living standards and income distribution since the end of the Peninsular War to the present day, and second to provide an interpretation.

Research published in the 2010s supports the view that income per person has improved remarkably, driven by increases in labor productivity, which derived, in turn, from a more intense and efficient use of physical and human capital per worker. Exposure to international competition represented a decisive element behind growth performance. From an European perspective, Spain underperformed until 1950. Thereafter, Spain’s economy managed to catch up with more advanced countries until 2007. Although the distribution of the fruits of growth did not follow a linear trend, but a Kuznetsian inverted U pattern, higher levels of income per capita are matched by lower inequality, suggesting that Spaniards’ material wellbeing improved substantially during the modern era.
International Trade Since 1914
Authors: Foreman-Peck James
Published: February 2020

Long-distance international trade for hundreds of years stemmed primarily from differences in climate. Generally free-trade policy and reduced transport cost superimposed another pattern by 1914; one of greater international specialization based upon land and labor abundance or scarcity. The broadly open trading world of the beginning of 1914 broke down first under the impact of war and then of the Great Depression. By 1945 the United States had emerged as the most powerful nation, committed to establishing a world order that would not make the mistakes of the preceding decades. The promotion of more liberalized trade among the wealthier nations, over the following decades hugely expanded the volume of trade. Trade in manufactures—based on skill endowments and preference diversity—came to dominate that in primary product. Services strongly increased in importance, especially with the rise of e-commerce. Oil displaced coal as the world’s principal fuel, redistributing income to those countries with substantial oil deposits. The greatest threat to the continuing expansion of world incomes and trade came from the Great Recession of 2008–2009, but the World Trade Organization regime discouraged the mutually destructive trade wars of the earlier period. However, the WTO was less successful 10 years later in restraining the damaging United States–China trade conflict.
Traditional Medicine and Indigenous Health in Indigenous Hands
Authors: Bodeker Gerard , Kariippanon Kishan
Published: February 2020

An estimated 370 million Indigenous people reside in 90 countries and make up 5% of the global population. Three hundred million Indigenous people live in extremely disadvantaged rural locations. Indigenous people have suffered from historic injustices due to colonization and the dispossession of their lands, territories, and resources, thus preventing them from exercising their right to development according to their own needs and interests. Across the board, Indigenous people have poorer health outcomes when compared to their non-Indigenous fellow citizens.

Cancer, respiratory disease, endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic disorders, primarily diabetes, affect Indigenous people disproportionately. Newborns of Indigenous women are more than twice as likely to be of low birth weight as those born to non-Indigenous women. Indigenous rates of suicide are the highest in the world.

For public health to be effective, a social determinants approach, along with health interventions, is insufficient to create lasting health impact. Partnerships with Indigenous organizations, Indigenous researchers, and the professionalization of health workers is essential. Integration of traditional medicine and traditional health practitioners can enable the Western biomedical model to work in partnership with Indigenous knowledge systems and become more locally relevant and accountable.

The Indigenous health workforce is increasingly using evidence-based, innovative approaches to address the shortage of health professionals as they move toward universal health coverage. Internet, mobile, and communication technologies are enhancing the mobilization of Indigenous health efforts and the support for health workers in rural locations. Presented are country examples of integrated medicine and Indigenous partnerships that effectively implement health interventions.
Solar-Wind Structure
Authors: Owens Mathew J.
Published: February 2020

The hot solar atmosphere continually expands out into space to form the solar wind, which drags with it the Sun’s magnetic field. This creates a cavity in the interstellar medium, extending far past the outer planets, within which the solar magnetic-field dominates. While the physical mechanisms by which the solar atmosphere is heated are still debated, the resulting solar wind can be readily understood in terms of the pressure difference between the hot, dense solar atmosphere and the cold, tenuous interstellar medium. This results in an accelerating solar-wind profile which becomes supersonic long before it reaches Earth orbit. The large-scale structure of the magnetic field carried by the solar wind is that of an Archimedean spiral, owing to the radial solar-wind flow away from the Sun and the rotation of the magnetic footpoints with the solar surface. Within this relatively simple picture, however, is a range of substructure, on all observable time and spatial scales. Solar-wind flows are largely bimodal in character. “Fast” wind comes from open magnetic-field regions, which have a single connection to the solar surface. “Slow” wind, on the other hand, appears to come from the vicinity of closed magnetic field regions, which have both ends connected to the Sun. Interaction of fast and slow wind leads to patterns of solar-wind compression and expansion which sweep past Earth. Within this relatively stable structure of flows, huge episodic eruptions of solar material further perturb conditions. At the smaller scales, turbulent eddies create unpredictable variations in solar-wind conditions. These solar-wind structures are of great interest as they give rise to space weather that can adversely affect space- and ground-based technologies, as well as pose a threat to humans in space.
Historiography of Brazil in the 19th Century
Authors: Nicodemo Thiago Lima , Cristovão dos Santos Pedro Afonso , Faria Pereira Mateus Henrique de
Published: February 2020

Brazilian historiography in the 19th century stands for a variety of practices and ways of doing history. In the beginning of the century, the writing of history assumed a specific color after the arrival of the Portuguese Court in 1808, who were escaping the invasion of Portugal by Napoleonic troops. After political independence from Portugal (1822), this writing had to deal with the questions that occupied the minds of its authors, people mostly close to or part of the political elite of the country. Forging a nationality through history, dealing with the tensions between local affiliations and the nation-state, placing indigenous and African peoples in the historical narrative, combining an exemplary history with future-oriented thinking, and using history for international relations issues (such as boundaries disputes) were among the motivations and preoccupations involved in that work. Underlying it all, the myriad ways of writing history in the 19th century had to do with the ways the authors circulated among a world of public archives in the making, personal archives available through certain connections, booksellers, publishers, oral informants, and a changing community of readers and critics that were conforming and disputing rules of acceptability as to what could be considered a work of history. Thinking about the Brazilian historiography of the 1800s as a way of combining practices of archiving, reading, copying, writing, and evaluating can help us understand the remarkable variety of histories and historiographical works written in the period.
Non-Governmental Organizations and Natural Hazard Governance in Africa
Authors: Smucker Thomas , Solomon Maingi , Wisner Benjamin
Published: February 2020

A growing number of civil society actors across the African continent are in the forefront of disaster risk reduction (DRR) engagements that span service delivery, humanitarian response, community mobilization, capacity building, and policy advocacy. Their roles include valorization of local knowledge and harnessing pressure for transformative change. All of this contributes to natural hazard governance. In contrast to early post-colonial dominance by central governments, natural hazard governance across the continent has gradually been dispersed downward to local institutions and outward to civil society. A series of factors has shaped African civil society and its engagement with DRR-related activities since the 2000s, including heavy debt burdens, neoliberal market reforms, the formation of substantial national NGO sectors out of diverse social movements, and the growth of international humanitarian networks with substantial African presence. Although country- and region-specific political dynamics have created different pathways for civil society engagement with DRR, macro forces have produced strong overarching similarities in state–civil society interaction, particularly with regard to the shrinking of the state and a movement toward technical approaches in DRR. Common pressures of debt, violent conflict, megaproject investment, corruption, and the “natural resource curse” have inflected state–non-state relations because some civil society organizations in all regions have had to become advocates of “another development” and critics of business-as-usual. Within such limitations, practitioners have much to learn from best practices of a diverse set of organizations that span the continent.
Excluded Uses: Indigenous Rights to Water
Authors: Cosens Barbara
Published: February 2020

Indigenous rights to water follow diverse trajectories across the globe. In Asia and Africa even the concept of indigeneity is questioned and peoples with ancient histories connected to place are defined by ethnicity as opposed to sovereign or place-based rights, although many seek to change that. In South America indigenous voices are rising. In the parts of the globe colonized by European settlement, the definition of these rights has been in a continual state of transition as social norms evolve and indigenous capacity to assert rights grow. From the point of European contact, these rights have been contested. They have evolved primarily through judicial rulings by the highest court in the relevant nation-state. For those nation-states that do address whether indigenous rights to land and water exist, the approach has ranged from the 18th- and 19th-century doctrines of terra nullius (the land (and resources) belonged to no one) to a recognized right of “use and occupancy” that could be usurped under the doctrine of “discovery” by the conquering power. In the 20th and 21st centuries the evolution of the recognition of indigenous rights remains uneven, reflecting the values, judicial doctrine, and degree to which the contested water resource is already developed in the relevant nation-state. Thus, indigenous rights to water range from the recognition of cultural and spiritual rights that would have been in existence at the time of European contact, to inclusion of subsistence rights, rights sufficient for economic development, rights for homeland purposes, and rights as guardian for a water resource. At the forefront in this process of recognition is the right of indigenous peoples as sovereign to control, allocate, develop and protect their own water resources. This aspirational goal is reflected in the effort to create a common global understanding of the rights of indigenous peoples through declaration and definition of the right of self-determination articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.