bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion
Authors: Kozhanov Nikolay
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines how Russia's leadership always looks at the Middle East through the lens of projecting power globally and confronting the West; its regional priorities play a secondary role. Russia is encountering a range of evolving problems in the Middle East, which Moscow does not have the capacity to address adequately. At least three trends pose a special risk to its influence in the region: 1) the gradual end of the "hot" phase of the war in Syria; 2) difficulties in balancing regional interests; and 3) growing disappointment across the Middle East over Russia's shortcomings in fulfilling the role of a global power in the region. In order to preserve its position in the Middle East, Russia will make important revisions to its regional diplomacy, aiming to safeguard its achievements rather than seek out new gains.
Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference
Authors: Tuana Nancy
Published: January 2023

Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference offers a powerful intervention to the field of climate justice scholarship by addressing a neglected aspect of the field of climate justice, namely systemic racisms. Building on the work of Black feminist theorists, the work develops an ecointersectional approach designed to reveal the depth and complexities of racial climates overlooked even in the environmental justice literature. The book’s conception of ecological indifference underscores the disposition of seeing the environment as a resource for human consumption and enjoyment, a resource that is usable, fungible, disposable, and without intrinsic worth or standing. The many examples in the book offer new insights demonstrating that systemic racisms emerge out of and give rise to environmental degradation; that is, they are often mutually constitutive. The ecointersectional analyses provided throughout the book reveal that ecological indifference and climate injustice are two sides of the same coin. Three distinctive but interrelated domains in which the intersections between systemic racisms and ecological indifference are manifest are identified: (1) differential distribution of harms/benefits due to systemic racisms, (2) racist institutions and practices fueling or causing environmental degradation, and (3) the basic social structures that generate environmental degradation being the same ones that generate systemic oppression of certain groups of people. One of the aims of Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference is to underscore that any effort to protect the environment must also be a fight against systemic racisms and other forms of systemic inequity.
How Health Care Can Be Cost-Effective and Fair
Authors: Hausman Daniel M.
Published: January 2023

Health care should be both fair and cost-effective—that is, the health care budget should be used to improve health, well-being, and freedom as much as possible. Although concerns about fair distribution place limits on the use of cost-effectiveness information, this book argues that applications of cost-effectiveness information to guide the allocation of health care resources are not generally unfair. In particular, it responds to criticisms that cost-effectiveness fails to provide individuals whose treatment is less cost-effective with a fair chance of treatment, that it fails to prioritize severity sufficiently, and that it unfairly allows the treatment of minor illnesses to take precedence over the treatment of serious illnesses. However, allocation of health care by cost-effectiveness is unfair when the treatments of disadvantaged individuals are less cost-effective because of those very disadvantages. Although this book defends the use of cost-effectiveness from normative criticisms, it points out serious practical limitations.
Introduction
Authors: Hausman Daniel M.
Published: January 2023

Health care has two central objectives: to enhance individual flourishing and to protect and enhance individual freedom or choice. Health care can expand choice by increasing opportunity; by loosening constraints; and by enhancing, protecting, or restoring abilities to make choices and to carry out what one has chosen to do. The libertarian and the utilitarian both want greater efficiency in health care—one to expand freedom, the other to enhance well-being. In pursuing these objectives, health care must be fair as well as efficient. It is not obvious how this can be managed, and it may be argued that efficiency and fairness are diametrically opposed. This book does not deny that these considerations may conflict, but it argues that the pursuit of efficiency in the form of cost-effectiveness is not in itself unfair.
Algeria
Authors: Willis Michael J.
Published: January 2023

When mass protests erupted in Algeria in 2019, on a scale unseen anywhere in the region since the Arab Spring, the outside world was taken by surprise. Algeria had been largely unaffected by the turmoil that engulfed its neighbours in 2011, and it was widely assumed that the population was too traumatized and cowed by the country's bloody civil war to take to the streets demanding change. Michael J. Willis offers an explanation of this unexpected development known as the Hirak Movement, examining the political and social changes that have occurred in Algeria since the "dark decade" of the 1990s. He examines how the bitter civil conflict was brought to an end, and how a fresh political order was established following the 1999 election of a new leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Initially underwritten by revenue from Algeria's substantial hydrocarbons resources, this new order came to be undermined by falling oil prices, an ailing president, and a population determined to have its voice heard by an increasingly corrupt, out-of-touch and opaque national leadership. Exactly twenty years passed before Bouteflika's presidency was brought to an end by the Hirak protests--this book is an authoritative account of them.
Politics and Society
Authors: Willis Michael J.
Published: January 2023

The progressive marginalization and alienation of the ordinary population from engagement in formal politics was a notable feature of the Bouteflika presidency. However, the large size of the protest movement that emerged in 2019 demonstrated that the population was far from disengaged and uninterested in politics more generally. Survey data and ethnographies reveal identifiable features of political attitudes among the Algerian population that help explain this. Younger Algerians in particular are alienated from elections and political parties, but see value in smaller scale, more locally based forms of activism to bring about change. Youth are less fatalistic about their ability to change things than older Algerians. The civil conflict of the 1990s has had a complex legacy, reducing support for Islamist movements but encouraging individual religious piety. Ideological divisions within society, notably those relating to identity, have greatly reduced with a greater apparent tolerance of diversity of lifestyles. Education, class, family, religion, and traditional and new social media all have varying influences on both Algerian men and women, with the latter playing an increased role in politics and society.
The Return Of Geopolitics
Authors: Auer Stefan
Published: January 2023

The focus of this chapter is on EU–Russia relations, particularly against the background of the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. These relations have been shaped by the tension between the EU’s ambition to become a major global player and the reality of its limited power. Europe's challenges are illuminated through some of Carl Schmitt’s basic concepts, such as geopolitics. In response to an increasingly revanchist and, in many ways, "Schmittian" Russia, the European Union would do well to draw its own lessons from Schmitt's critique of liberalism. Like its reluctant hegemon, Germany, Europe too was partly paralyzed by its own reticence to think in terms of geopolitics and power. While the EU was meant to become more than the sum of its member states, in some important areas it is less than its individual members might have been. The chapter concludes by advocating a more muscular liberalism that can stand up to Putin's Russia.
Conclusion
Authors: Auer Stefan
Published: January 2023

This chapter revisits the questions that animate the book: What is the appropriate size of a political community? If a supranational state is undesirable, can Europeans reclaim more control at the national level? Can the European Union prove itself an effective global actor, able to stand up for its interests vis-à-vis China, Russia, and the United States? The exceptional challenges that Europe faced at the beginning of 2020s, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, led to erratic responses that proved suboptimal: the politics of the emergency alternated with the technocratic rule of rules, undermining democracy in the process. The chapter questions the assumption popular within EU studies that crises are ultimately conducive to European unity. It concludes by urging Europe's political elites to stop chasing Arcadia--the promised land of a post-national, or supranational democracy--in order to regain popular support.
Pandemic India
Authors: Arnold David
Published: January 2023

Covid-19 has given renewed and urgent attention to the idea of a pandemic as a devastating and recurrent global phenomenon. Today the term is freely and widely used--but, in reality, it has a long and contested history, centering in particular on South Asia. Pandemic India is an innovative and wide-ranging enquiry into the emergence of the pandemic idea and the changing meaning of pandemics, exploring the pivotal role played by--or assigned to--India over the past 200 years. Using the perspectives of the social historian and the historian of medicine, and a diversity of historical and contemporary sources, it explains how and why past pandemics were so closely identified with South Asia; the factors behind the exceptional destructiveness of pandemics in India; the responses of society and the state during and since the colonial era; and how such collective catastrophes have informed politics, changed lives, and been either memorialized or forgotten. Taking a "long history" view of India's recent coronavirus pandemic, the book offers comparisons and connections with three earlier pandemics—cholera, bubonic plague, and influenza. The author assesses the distinctive characteristics and legacies of each of these deadly episodes, the changing nature of public engagement with disease, and the evolution of public health measures and containment strategies. This is a historian's reflection on time as seen through the pandemic prism, and on the ways the past is used--or misused--to serve the needs and interests of the present.
Introduction
Authors: Arnold David
Published: January 2023

Departing from the deadly impact of the recent Covid-19 pandemic on India, in which as many as four million people may have died, this chapter argues for the need to re-investigate and unsettle the region's long and complex pandemic history. It proposes to do so by addressing the idea of a pandemic as a historical construct and not merely an epidemiological phenomenon, as a relatively recent concept bound up with ideas of shifting or entangled temporalities, and the centrality of empire in the imaging of pandemic disease. The chapter identifies pandemic history with the revisionist project of decolonizing history, the reappraisal of empire and its postcolonial legacies, and the quest for new historical voices; but also with histories of violence and with the question of who either denies responsibility or seeks practically or polemically to establish "ownership" over a pandemic.
What is a Pandemic?
Authors: Arnold David
Published: January 2023

While epidemics have been extensively defined and discussed, the idea of what constitutes a pandemic has remained elusive and subjective. Progressing from a consideration of four commonly held pandemic propositions and the function of pandemics as metaphor and myth, the chapter employs the term pandemicity to encompass the historical and epidemiological characteristics of pandemics and to distinguish them from epidemics. It examines the genealogy of the pandemic idea, the historical stages by which the concept emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, in relation to Western narratives of "world disease", increasing globalization, and the observational opportunities empire created. Pandemics were predicated on the threat of universality, but also on persistent notions of a divided world, in which deadly contagions were thought far more likely to inhabit, and migrate from, some regions of the world than others, India being one of the foremost of these pandemic homelands. European reactions to the Spanish Flu of 1918–19 in South Asia are cited to illustrate this discriminatory logic.
War Fever
Authors: Arnold David
Published: January 2023

The influenza pandemic of 1918–19 (the "Spanish Flu") had an exceptionally devastating impact on India with as many as 12 to 20 million deaths, most falling in the closing months of 1918. The chapter considers why India suffered such extreme mortality, primary factors being India's involvement in World War I and the way the intense drive for Indian recruits impacted on agricultural productivity, the already disease-weakened population, and the conjunction of the pandemic with famine conditions and soaring commodity prices. By contrast with the early plague years, the state's response was muted, partly due to the speed and scale of the pandemic and an overstretched medical service. Unlike in the late 1890s, therefore, there was little overt resistance to state public health measures. Instead, Indians turned to their own philanthropy and self-reliance, thereby creating fresh opportunities for non-Western medicine.
Conclusion
Authors: Arnold David
Published: January 2023

In making an overall assessment of India's pandemic experience from cholera in the nineteenth century to Covid-19 in the twenty-first, the Conclusion restates the recent and contested nature of the pandemic idea and the centrality of India, or perceptions of India, within it. It stresses the importance of regarding pandemics in the light of human experience and diverse subjectivities and not solely in terms of mortality statistics and state policy. Empire looms large in this story--as science, sanitation, and trauma, as violence and coercion, indifference, and neglect; but, without providing clear lessons for the future, the legacies of past pandemics have a significant (not always positive) bearing on postcolonial health policy and the ongoing politicization of health and disease. Pandemics are momentous, life-shattering events, but their capacity to radically transform society, politics, and our way of thinking, also needs to be questioned.
Revolution and its Aftermath
Authors: Monshipouri Mahmood
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the Iranian Islamic Revolution and its aftermath in light of the ongoing power struggle between and among hard-liners, reformists, and moderates. I argue that the dynamic interplay of domestic power struggles and foreign influence in the region has shaped Iran's foreign policy. Both regional actors and patrons--most predominantly the United States--have shaped the region's security landscape. Aside from larger structural causes of insecurity, it should be noted that the disregard for human security concerns has given rise to the issues of sectarianism, identity politics, and political rivalries on the regional level.
Reform and the Human Rights Campaign
Authors: Monshipouri Mahmood
Published: January 2023

This chapter looks the ongoing debate over the tension between security and human rights and the way in which it affects government policies. I explain the state of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran with a particular focus on social change in the post-revolutionary era. In the ensuing sections, I examine women's rights, student unrest, the Green Movement protests, the status of religious minorities, and the recent protests that erupted in small cities, rural areas, and remote villages before spreading to other parts of the country. The country's human rights conditions have also worsened as protests have broken out and the regime has responded in a heavy-handed way.
Iran’s Foreign Policy
Authors: Monshipouri Mahmood
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates the evolution of Iran's foreign policy in the post-Khomeini era by explaining recent developments in the Persian Gulf region in an attempt to understand the shifting security paradigms in the Persian Gulf, the downsizing of US military presence in the region, the cold war between Riyadh and Tehran, and finally the Abraham Accords and their implications. A closer look at these developments illustrates the expansion of Iran's influence as well as its limits. On balance, however, a geopolitical and pragmatic agenda--not ideological, cultural, or historical factors--have influenced Iran's foreign policy decisions.
The Iran Nuclear Program
Authors: Monshipouri Mahmood
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides a nuanced understanding of the history, dynamics, and broader implications of the US–Iran relationship in this context, underscoring the importance of the role that diplomacy played in producing the 2015 nuclear deal. The Trump administration pushed, however unsuccessfully, for tearing up the agreement, opening the door to the unconstrained resumption of Iran's nuclear program and set in motion uncertain escalatory pressures in an already volatile Middle East. Trump's move indicated a relinquishment of US leadership on the international scene.
Conclusion
Authors: Monshipouri Mahmood
Published: January 2023

This chapter concludes by noting that ending a longstanding and turbulent history of US–Iranian relations since the 1979 revolution requires that Washington and Tehran recognize that it is in their long-term interests to marginalize skeptics by marching forward on the restoration of the nuclear deal. Lack of direct diplomatic communications for the most part of the past four decades has trapped Iran and the United States between past and present, presenting a major barrier to dismantling the wall of distrust between the two countries. Engagement and weakening the impression of Iran as a securitized threat is the way forward.
Introduction
Authors: Vogel Christoph N.
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces the book and presents its main topics, its central theoretical premises as well as its argument and structure. The chapter begins with wide angle on twenty-first-century activism and the perception of contemporary civil wars. It revisits global theorization and policymaking on so-called resource wars and introduces the evolution of "conflict minerals" as a paradigm case in which violence, ethics and capitalism have led to unprecedented policy change, yet without addressing core drivers of violence and war.
Peace, Ethics and Congo
Authors: Vogel Christoph N.
Published: January 2023

This chapter posits a set of problems about how global supply chain capitalism, conflict resolution, and ethical "capital" intersect with postcolonial peripheries. These are often marked by friction, and violence--but also "strategies of extraversion", such as when local elites join foreign interveners in the larger gambit of extracting rent. This links back to the "conflict minerals" narrative that has entrenched an image of eastern Congo's mining sector as void, empty of regulation. The chapter connects the specific story of "conflict minerals" with the broader interplay of transnationalism and postcolonial statehood to the wider world. It also problematizes prevailing--often flat and binary-- readings of international development and peacebuilding that clash with the reality of conflict areas that is ambiguous and volatile. But it is, in essence, characterized by highly pragmatic and extraordinarily rational actors and decisions, defying the alleged murkiness and messiness of far-flung conflict zones. It closes by framing an argument for the redefinition of rationality, reconquering the very term from utilitarian economics and econometric research thus calling for radical political change in how we think about policies geared at transparency, ethical consumption, and peacebuilding in and beyond eastern Congo.
The Park Chung-hee Era 1961–79
Authors: Pacheco Pardo Ramon
Published: January 2023

Park Chung-hee took power with a coup d'etat in 1961. The coup had the support of a majority of South Koreans, plus the US, given the poverty that still afflicted the country. Park laid the foundations for a period of high economic growth, known as the 'Miracle on the Han River'. Over a period of almost two decades, the Park government and the big conglomerates or chaebol central to the South Korean economy led the country, as it moved away from an agrarian economy towards incipient industrialization. This laid the foundations for the emergence of a middle class for the first time in (South) Korean history. At the same time, the Park government became increasingly authoritarian and repressive, eventually launching a full-blown dictatorship during the Yushin Constitution years from 1972. Ultimately, domestic tensions resulted in Park's assassination in 1979.
The Terrorist Image
Authors: Winter Charlie
Published: January 2023

The summer of 2014—when the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq's second city; captured vast swathes of eastern Syria; and declared itself a latter-day Caliphate—marked a turning point in the history of photography, one that pushed its already contested relationship with reality to its very limits. Uniquely obsessed with narrative, image management and branding, the Islamic State used cameras as weapons in its formative years as a Caliphate. The tens of thousands of propaganda photographs captured during this time were used to denote policy, to navigate through defeat and, perhaps most importantly, to construct an impossible reality: a totalising image-world of Salafi-Jihadist symbols and myths. Based on a deep examination of the 20,000 photographs Charlie Winter collected from the Islamic State's covert networks online in 2017, this book explores the process by which the Caliphate shook the foundations of modern war photography. Focusing on the period in which it was at its strongest, Winter identifies the implicit value systems that underpinned the Caliphate's ideological appeal, and evaluates its uniquely malign contribution to the history of the photographic image. The Terrorist Image travels to the heart of what made the Islamic State tick during its prime, providing unique insights into its global appeal and mobilisation successes.
Disentangling the Islamic State Brand
Authors: Winter Charlie
Published: January 2023

This chapter analyzes the 5,441 photo-reports the Islamic State published between December 2015 and September 2017, familiarizing readers with key topographical features of the corpus. First, there is a structural overview, in which its breadth and scope are set out. Next, its geographic characteristics are analyzed, with trends in the national and subnational provenance identified. The chapter then explores the corpus's thematic networks, identifying the concepts of jihād and khilāfah as the two central paradigms that underpin it. This last section is the most extensive part of the discussion; through it, readers will become well acquainted with the basic thematic constitution of these images, a necessary contextual step to take before moving on to the semiotic portion of the investigation.
The Semiotics of Propaganda
Authors: Winter Charlie
Published: January 2023

Whereas, in the previous chapter, thematic networks analysis is used to describe the parameters of the corpus as a whole, the use of semiotic methods in Chapters Five to Ten narrows the focus, exploring why the corpus contains what it does. Drawing on the literature on communication and imagery, this chapter explains exactly what form those semiotic methods take.
The Soldier
Authors: Winter Charlie
Published: January 2023

This chapter is the first of three semiotic explorations of the Islamic State's war-related photo-propaganda. Focusing on how the group used photography to idealize soldiers in its rank-and-file as warriors, victors, sentinels, devotees, and martyrs, the discussion sets out the visual parameters of its warrior archetype, demonstrating how it articulated and, in the context of its supporters at least, sought to internalize a predetermined set of ideals about what it was to fight as part of its jihād.
The Enemy
Authors: Winter Charlie
Published: January 2023

As Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate, the soldiers and army of the Islamic State took center stage in its image-world. However, they did not exist in a vacuum. Instead, the idea of them was constantly juxtaposed with that of the enemy, a generic grouping with which they, as exemplars of its Sunni Muslim in-group, had an almost perfectly dissymmetric relationship. This chapter explores the especially restrictive visual code that was employed in this context, one that cast the "enemy"—regardless of race, religion or political persuasion—as a primeval opponent of the Islamic State's favored demographic. Whether Iraqi, Syrian, Russian, American, Sunni, Shi’ite, Christian or secular, they would be portrayed as craven beings bent on genocide and in need of thorough extermination.
The State
Authors: Winter Charlie
Published: January 2023

This chapter is the first of three thematically orientated semiotic explorations of the Islamic State's civilian-life-related photo-propaganda. Focusing on how it used photography to idealise its forays into governance—a practice which, as outlined in Chapter Three, was characterized by six organising themes: law and order, municipal services, outreach, social welfare, education, and healthcare—it sets out the visual parameters of its vision for jihadist statehood.
The Victim
Authors: Winter Charlie
Published: January 2023

The Islamic State framed quotidian existence in its caliphate as paradisaical, characterized by abundance, piety, and beauty. This movement, the pictorial line went, had ushered in a new golden age of Islam, one that had returned the faith and its people to their former glory. However, notwithstanding this overwhelmingly positive message, the Islamic State was always careful to point out that it was not all good news: just as the Muslim community faced out-group threats during its first golden age at the time of the Prophet Muḥammad, so too did this new Islamic utopia face attacks from without. Instead of hiding this reality, the impact of enemy incursions was documented in detail, often with gruesome results. This chapter explores why that made sense to this movement, as well as what impact that had on its overall strategic offering.
Introduction
Authors: Al-Arian Abdullah
Published: January 2023

Far and away the most popular sport in the world, football has a special place in Middle Eastern societies, and for Middle Eastern states. With Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, this region has been cast into the global footballing spotlight, raising issues of geopolitical competition, consumer culture, and social justice. The establishment of football as a national sport offers significant insight into the region's historical experiences with colonialism and struggles for independence, as well as the sport's vital role in local and regional politics today--whether at the forefront of popular mobilisations, or as an instrument of authoritarian control. Football has also served as an arena of contestation in the formation of national identity, the struggle for gender equality, and the development of the media landscape.
The Trivialization of Women’s Football in Turkey
Authors: Nuhrat Yağmur
Published: January 2023

Football is considered mainly a men's sport and pastime in Turkey, much like around the world, resulting in unequal treatment towards female practitioners. Women are othered through football, one manifestation of which is the trivialization of sport when played by women. This chapter addresses the trivialization of women's football in Turkey on multiple levels, from mundane procedures on match days to larger scale labor exploitation tied to lack of professionalization. I demonstrate that the multiple hierarchies within which Turkey's female footballers are situated make this a field of insecurity and precarity for them, limiting their resources for mobilization or resistance. The chapter is based on four months of qualitative fieldwork, mostly in Istanbul, with a total of 38 participants including footballers, coaches, club and federation administrators, sponsors, media representatives, and academics.
Homeland
Authors: Griffin Thomas Ross
Published: January 2023

In the increasingly globalized world of twenty-first-century sports, what had long been considered rigid markers of identity were called into question by Qatar's victory in the 2019 Asian Cup. This chapter examines the performances of national identity by these Qatar players in the light of banal and social nationalism, and argues that each performative iteration forms a praxis that contributes to the construction of what Norbert Elias calls "the national habitus," or national character of the nation. The research emphasizes the importance of contribution as a means of manipulating the player's perceived identity and argues that the politics of exclusion often found in Gulf societies are challenged by performances of nationalism online and in public spaces. The study concludes by arguing that the performances of national identity by the players are very public contributions which integrate them further into Qatari society and allow them to move from "thinner" to "thicker" forms of citizenship.
Refugees and Football in the Global and Middle East Contexts
Authors: Spaaij Ramón
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the nexus between football and forced displacement in the global and Middle East context. It examines the meaning of sport and football for refugees in the global context, and positions forced displacement and refugee resettlement within the global “football for development” movement. I critically examine the instrumentalization of sport for development purposes. The dearth of academic research on refugees and football in the Middle East and some of the challenges and shortcomings of existing international research are highlighted. Drawing on empirical data from sport/football programs that work with refugees, I reflect on how the identified global trends and issues apply to the Middle East context, with a particular focus on program objectives, the types of actors involved, and the extent to which football is deployed as a means for progressing development objectives. I conclude by formulating some directions for future research on football and refugees in the Middle East.
Betrayal
Authors: Hussain Adeel
Published: January 2023

The second chapter traces how the provincial debate between Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Lekh Ram, two men largely absent from scholarly reconstructions in South Asian history, spiraled into national importance. By excavating the history of the Indian educator and politician Swami Shraddhanand, this chapter maps how the conceptual terms of the Lekh Ram–Mirza Ghulam Ahmad debate, prefigured much of Hindu-Muslim antagonism to come. Shraddhanand's large-scale efforts to convert Muslims to Hinduism, a continuation of Lekh Ram's early shuddhi efforts, and the print war with blasphemous content, turned him into a target for Indian Muslims.
Redemption
Authors: Hussain Adeel
Published: January 2023

The sixth chapter takes the legal case of Asia Bibi's alleged blasphemy, a case that produced global headlines, as a narrative background to explore the murder of the Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, who had criticized Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The chapter tracks Asia Bibi's legal trial, the arguments presented therein, and the eventual death sentence she received. It then goes on to examine the trade-offs involved for the Supreme Court of Pakistan to overturn the death penalty prescribed by the lower courts. This chapter then sheds light on the dynamic intellectual genealogy of Mumtaz Qadri, the man who had shot Salman Taseer. It traces the similarities and divergences between his ascent to martyrdom with those of Ilm Din and Abdul Rashid, whom Qadri claimed as his spiritual role models.
Transitional Bodies, Party Politics, and Anti-Democratic Potential in Tunisia
Authors: Klaus Enrique
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the High Independent Authority for Audiovisual Communication (known as the HAICA), a transitional body in charge of regulating the Tunisian audiovisual sector. The study offers a critical analysis of audiovisual regulation in post-revolutionary Tunisia, and pinpoints the less than democratic dimension associated with this transitional body. The legitimacy of the HAICA rests on its independence and neutrality, which were largely undermined by business and political interests shaping and defining the media sector. From the outset, the objective was not so much to nurture a regulatory body that could help align the media system during the country's transition with democratic norms than to serve business and political interests. The inability to preserve the autonomy of the media field from political interference resulted in what Hallin and Mancini call a polarized pluralistic political-media system. The dynamics have implications not only on the country's evolving media sector but on the prospects of democratic governance and, in fact, on the future of Tunisia's democratic transition as a whole.
The Violence of Endurance
Authors: Miller Alyssa
Published: January 2023

Tunisia's 2011 "Dignity Revolution" was an uprising of precarious youth. Members of a surplus population hailing from the marginalized interior regions, they wagered their lives in the hopes of securing full economic citizenship in the future, which had been denied to them through structural unemployment and systematic underdevelopment. Yet, due to the failure of successive transitional governments to imagine an inclusive strategy of national development, these marginal youth have yet to see any material dividend from their revolution, either in terms of job creation or regional development. In a time of renewed austerity following the advent of revolution, precarious youth must draw on multiple, grueling strategies of endurance to keep their heads above water as they struggle to obtain secure employment. Focusing on the governorate of Kasserine in the wake of the 2016 uprising as a paradigmatic example, this chapter describes the peripatetic trajectories of youth through informal labor, hyper-exploitation, and protest.
Introduction
Authors: Goodenough Ursula
Published: January 2023

Religions have anchored human cultures throughout history and in all parts of the world, grounding moral/ethical understandings that are essential for social coherence. Religions encourage the adoption of moral edicts by linking them to spiritual experiences, such as reverence, awe, gratitude, compassion, and humility, in the context of their cosmologies and rituals. Our global environmental and societal concerns now call for a planetary ethic, but a shared global religious orientation is lacking. The author suggests that our science-based understandings of nature—“Everybody’s Story”—offer deep resources for the cultivation of such spiritual experiences, and hence the grounding of a global ethic, a sensibility that is called a religious naturalist orientation.
How This Book Is Put Together
Authors: Goodenough Ursula
Published: January 2023

The book is organized into 13 chapters. Each chapter offers an accessible science-based narrative of Nature followed by a spiritual reflection in a religious naturalist voice. An explanation is offered for the use of anthropomorphic language. Readers lacking familiarity with scientific concepts are urged to not be concerned about remembering the accounts and to focus instead on experiencing them.
Origins of Life
Authors: Goodenough Ursula
Published: January 2023

In the chapter’s Narrative, the concept of a planetary matrix and the basic principles of chemistry are first presented. There follows a model for the origins of life, taking the form of a hypothetical entity called the autogen, within the planetary matrix, a model offered in the context of emergent properties and emergent dynamics. This is followed by consideration of the basal molecular components—DNA, RNA, and protein—of present-day lifeforms. All organisms are emergent selves with aims, goals, and purpose. In the chapter’s Reflections, selves are considered not only to strive to be fit and hence to flourish, but also to fit in within the ecosystem where they find themselves. Also considered is the perspective known as animism that considers geological entities to alive.
The Evolution of Biodiversity
Authors: Goodenough Ursula
Published: January 2023

The chapter’s Narrative considers how the three supergroups of modern organisms—Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes—arose from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) and diversified to generate the millions of kinds of present-day creatures and countless predecessors that have gone extinct. Eukaryotes originated as a fusion between a bacterium and archeon, creating a lineage with a mitochondrion; later, an endosymbiotic cyanobacterium was converted to a chloroplast to found the green eukaryotic lineage of algae and land plants. Key features of each supergroup are explored: The chapter’s Reflections consider how the outpouring of biological diversity calls us to deep abiding humility within the Earthly whole.
Multicellularity and Death
Authors: Goodenough Ursula
Published: January 2023

The chapter’s Narrative considers how single-celled organisms have no obligate death built into their life cycles—they divide in two—whereas multicellular organisms produce a mortal soma and an immortal germ line that produces the next generation. This arrangement allows the soma to adopt highly specialized traits, including animal brains and behaviors. The chapter’s Reflections consider how the death of loved ones and untimely or senseless deaths bring us deep sorrow, and anticipation of our own death can bring fear and, in many, a belief that an immortal soul will persist. The perspective is offered that it was the invention of death, of the germ/soma dichotomy, that makes possible the existence of our brains and hence our experiential modalities.
Motivation Processes and Outcomes
Authors: Schunk Dale H.
Published: January 2023

Motivation refers to the internal processes that energize, direct, and sustain human actions. These processes include a person’s thoughts and emotions, especially their goals and evaluations of goal progress, perceived capabilities (self-efficacy), values, expectations about outcomes of actions, interests, perceived causes of outcomes (attributions), and comparisons of themselves with others (social comparisons). These processes are affected by one’s behaviors and environmental influences. Motivational outcomes include choice of activity, effort, persistence, and achievement. All motivational processes are important, but for motivation to energize and direct actions requires that we have a goal and evaluate our progress toward that goal.
Motivation Is the Interaction Between Dispositions and Context
Authors: Stipek Deborah
Published: January 2023

Motivation is the interaction that occurs between personal dispositions and environmental context. Motivation can be assessed by observing behaviors, emotional expressions, and cognitions. People often view motivation as a quality of individuals, but motivation also depends on the context. The dispositions that underlie motivation include the person’s beliefs, values, and interests. The contexts that affect motivation include expectations and demands, social interactions, opportunities to learn, and how much a person’s autonomy is supported as they work. Together, dispositions and contexts explain motivation: context provides an opportunity to be motivated, but disposition is necessary to capitalize on that opportunity.
Motivation Is the State of Wanting Something . . . But Do We Want the Right Things?
Authors: Sheldon Kennon M.
Published: January 2023

Motivation is the state of wanting something. But there are two basic ways to want something: non-consciously and consciously. Non-conscious (“implicit”) motivations are nonverbal and push us toward experiences and incentives without our awareness. Conscious (“explicit”) motivations can be expressed verbally and are the specific goals we think we are trying to achieve. Unfortunately, the conscious self may be clueless about what is really going on under the surface, and thus people may spend years pursuing “non-concordant” goals that are not really wanted. One needs to learn how to recognize this condition and how to open oneself up to deeper yearnings and potentials. Recognizing these deeper motives is a first step. The second step is to find the courage to take action to reorganize one’s life. Doing so is one of the best ways to find happiness.
Wanting to Feel Effective in Our Goal Pursuits for Both Outcomes and Process
Authors: Tory Higgins E. , Nakkawita Emily
Published: January 2023

This essay explains that to be motivated is to have preferences that direct how we think, feel, and behave. These motivational preferences come from three sources. For value, people want to feel successful in attaining desired outcomes even though outcomes aren’t everything. For truth, people also want to feel effective in how they pursue these outcomes—in doing what is real and doing what is right. For control, people want to make things happen. Using Plato’s allegory of the Charioteer, the authors discuss how value, truth, and control motives work together in an integrated manner during goal pursuit, although truth plays a special role in the partnership.
Can We Really Say that Motivational Processes Are Universal Across Cultures and Contexts?
Authors: Green Briana P. , Gray DeLeon L. , Hope Elan C. , Matthews Jamaal S.
Published: January 2023

Universal perspectives risk minimizing key differences in context and culture because they assume that motivational processes operate similarly across learning environments. In this essay, the authors challenge the notion of motivation as universal by discussing, first, how educators should embrace, recognize, recommend, and enact context-specific motivational strategies; second, how motivation constructs are defined and understood across different cultural groups and contextual settings; and, third, how each individual’s knowledge and evaluation of their social roles provide critical information about motivation processes. There is much to be gained when educators and researchers contextualize learning and achievement to respect how learning environments support motivation.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Motivation
Authors: Ntoumanis Nikos
Published: January 2023

People are constantly bombarded by books, blogs, videos, and other self-help resources produced by “motivational gurus” that promise to teach consumers how to increase their motivation to achieve daily and long-term goals. The assumption is that the more motivated people are, the better the outcomes. In many cases this is true, but is higher motivation always desirable? No, because it is important to look not only at the amount of motivation one has, but also at the quality of that motivation. Using a self-determination theory perspective, three different types of quality motivation can be differentiated. Some motivations foster positive behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. However, other motivations are indifferent to a person’s personal development and well-being. And still other motivations actively undermine one’s potential.
Less Is Sometimes More
Authors: Vansteenkiste Maarten , Soenens Bart
Published: January 2023

Motivation plays a key role in individuals’ persistence, well-being, and performance. A common assumption is that everyone fares better when strongly motivated. Yet, as the authors of this essay point out, this is not always true. Although a lack of motivation is problematic, more motivation is not necessarily better. According to self-determination theory, autonomous motivation (“wantivation”) represents ideal motivation with a clear-cut pattern of desirable effects, while controlled motivation (“mustivation”) represents a mixed bag, yielding both desirable and undesirable outcomes. Extensive research now allows motivational researchers to safely conclude that “not all types of motivation are created equal.” Although a lack of motivation is problematic, for motivation to carry durable positive effects, it is strongly desirable that individuals display high wantivation instead of high mustivation.
Good Versus Bad Motivation? Avoiding the Lure of False Dichotomies
Authors: Alexander Patricia A.
Published: January 2023

Within the social sciences, there is a tendency to treat complex differences among constructs, including motivation constructs, as if they were true dichotomies. They are not. Indeed, a false dichotomy is implied by the question of whether there is such a thing as “good” or “bad” motivation. The only answer that can be proffered to this question is “it depends.” It depends on how “good” or “bad” is being interpreted, by whom, and for what reason. It also depends on the context in which this judgment is being rendered and on the consequences that accompany that judgment. A good or bad designation would thus appear to be a matter of perspective. Treating complex motivation variables and constructs in such overly simplistic, dichotomous ways can potentially do more harm than good.
Extrinsic Rewards Undermine Motivation in the Classroom . . . Sometimes
Authors: Anderman Eric M.
Published: January 2023

Teachers commonly give students rewards. The teacher’s assumption is that rewards reliably motivate greater effort and behavior. But is this always the case? Rewards do increase extrinsic motivation, but they often decrease intrinsic motivation. When the teacher gives the student a reward for doing an interesting activity, that reward can decrease the students’ interest (intrinsic motivation) for that task. This phenomenon is known as the overjustification effect. Overjustification raises the question of whether it is a good idea or not for teachers to give students rewards. If not used thoughtfully and carefully, rewards can actually diminish, rather than enhance, motivation.
Extrinsic Incentives/Rewards
Authors: Grolnick Wendy S.
Published: January 2023

Parents, teachers, coaches, physicians, and others often try to motivate others to act. Rewards, punishments, and other contingencies can get people to behave in particular ways, but that motivated action is often short-lived because these strategies do not facilitate individuals acting from their own interests or sense of value and goals. In contrast, setting up a motivationally facilitative environment means creating conditions in which individuals can satisfy their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Teachers, parents, and others in authority can learn to provide autonomy support, structure, and involvement to help people satisfy these needs. Numerous interventions show how this may be done effectively and productively.
Interest and Its Relation to Rewards, Reward Expectations, and Incentives
Authors: Hidi Suzanne E. , Ann Renninger K.
Published: January 2023

The role of rewards in human functioning is one of the most contentious issues in educational and social psychology. Hundreds of studies and numerous meta-analyses showed that extrinsic rewards undermine individuals’ learning and performance and thus are detrimental to intrinsic motivation. However, these early studies did not have access to neuroscientific data on brain functioning. In the past decade, findings emerged to demonstrate similar brain activation for extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. This new neuroscientific-informed landscape suggests new conclusions. This essay shows how extrinsic rewards do not necessarily have negative effects on memory and performance, and they may even be essential for triggering interest and the search for new information.