bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Political Elite of Imerina and the Revolt of the Menalamba. The Creation of a Colonial Myth in Madagascar, 1895–18981Madagascar, 1895–1898
Authors: Ellis Stephen , Randrianja Solofo , Bayart Jean-François
Published: September 2022

This chapter provides a painstaking reconstruction of the revolt of the Menalamba in the two years following the French invasion of Madagascar in 1895, one of the most puzzling and fascinating of all resistance movements. The most mysterious aspect of the rising has always been the question of who, if anyone, was its leader. Using previously unopened archives, the chapter tells the story of the French suppression of the uprising and prosecution of its alleged organizers, a miscarriage of justice that portended a shift in French colonial policy, in the process picking up themes of rebellion and resistance, elite politics, rumor and conspiracy, spirit mediums and religion, and nationalist myth-busting.
Mbokodo
Authors: Ellis Stephen , Randrianja Solofo , Bayart Jean-François
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses evidence surrounding two episodes of serious repression in the ANC's military camps in exile, one in 1967–9, and one in 1981–4, in which rank and file members of the ANC's armed wing were subjected to harsh discipline, torture, and were, in some cases, killed. The first episode led, via the Morogoro Conference, to the South African Communist Party exerting an increased influence not just over the ANC's armed wing, but over the entire organization. This included the creation of an intelligence and security department run along East European lines, which promoted a single, ideologically-correct line, and which stifled debate and dissent. The chapter notes that ANC headquarters in Johannesburg continued to employ many of the officials of the Security Department who were found to have participated in abuses in Angola. Whether this will affect the character of a future ANC government, however, remains to be seen.
Liberia 1989–1994Liberia 1989–1994
Authors: Ellis Stephen , Randrianja Solofo , Bayart Jean-François
Published: September 2022

This chapter deals with the civil war which broke out in Liberia on 24 December 1989, when 100 or more fighters claiming allegiance to the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), led by Charles Taylor, advanced over the border from Côte d'Ivoire to attack the town of Butuo in Nimba County. The article examines how Liberia descended into conflict and why it took such a violent form. It surveys the political and military events that took place since the NPFL invasion, paying attention to the collapse of the government, the arrival of the ECOMOG intervention force in Monrovia in August 1990, the murder of President Doe by Prince Johnson's Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL), the role of ULIMO (United Liberation Movement for Democracy), an organization formed in 1991 by Liberians who had taken refuge in Sierra Leone, the emergence of warlords, the progress of negotiations and developments following the Cotonou Peace Accord of July 1993. It suggests that the causes of the war are not only political but may also be explained in religious or spiritual terms.
South Africa and the Decolonization of the Mind
Authors: Ellis Stephen , Randrianja Solofo , Bayart Jean-François
Published: September 2022

This chapter provides a description of some of the challenges facing South Africa in the early decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that Bishop Desmond Tutu's vision of a "Rainbow Nation" has largely failed to materialize. One of the reasons is that South Africa's problems are deeply rooted in its social, economic and political history, such that a mere transfer of political rule was never going to be sufficient to solve them. This fact directs our attention to some of the limitations of African nationalism and the extravagant hopes it aroused. The way forward requires a "decolonization of the minds" of both Africans and Europeans. Africans must, as have some other non-European peoples, take responsibility for their own history, including that of colonialism, neither seeking to revive a mythical African "authenticity," nor playing the role of perennial victims of Western machinations. At the same time, Europeans must rid themselves of the delusion that their continent has some special place in history, that development consists in shepherding other countries past already-achieved Western milestones, or that Africa has nothing from which Europeans themselves can learn.
Introduction
Authors: Smeets Max
Published: September 2022

This introductory chapter discusses the existing literature on cyber conflict, identifies the central questions of the book, and presents the core argument. This chapter notes that in trying to keep up with the fast pace of developments in cyber conflict, the scholarship has largely overlooked the most fundamental question: are states actually able to conduct operations in the first place. This chapter explains that, for many states, conduct cyber effect operations is much harder than often perceived to be. Each of the chapters in this book, summarized herein, examine different components of this argument, focusing first on the internal dynamics of cyber capability development and then on how external actors can influence this process.
Conducting Cyber Effect Operations
Authors: Smeets Max
Published: September 2022

This chapter defines cyber effect operations and discusses the use of data. The first part of this chapter explains that cyber effect operations are a set of interlinked activities that may or may not use certain "tools" to achieve a goal. Most cyber effect operations take place over multiple stages and cannot always be clearly delineated from espionage operations. The chapter distinguishes between three main forms of cyber effect operations: denial of service, data manipulation, and system manipulation. The second part of this chapter discusses the data paradox: there is both too much and too little information available about cyber operations.
The Role of Non-State Actors
Authors: Smeets Max
Published: September 2022

Chapter 9 discusses how non-state actors can transfer people, exploits, implants, infrastructure, and even organizational templates to states. The chapter explains that the incentives and opportunities for sales are much more complex than often realized. The exploit market is particularly prone to market failure. Finally, the chapter notes that the ultimate shortcut to developing a military cyber-force is to operate through non-state intermediaries, often referred to as "cyber proxies." Yet, the chapter notes that the benefits of operating through intermediaries are offset by the high risk of agency slacking, as the intermediary maintains several distinct information advantages over the state when conducting cyber operations.
Penality in the Underground
Authors: Dudai Ron
Published: September 2022

Secret informers are often the biggest threat faced by underground rebel groups, which must respond to this challenge in order to survive. Using the IRA as a case-study, Penality in the Underground offers a systematic, in-depth, analysis of this phenomenon, providing an empirical and theoretical account of the causes, forms, functions and effects of the underground response to informers. While superficial media images tend to depict only ruthless killings, the book argues—using the lens of ‘punishment and society’ and drawing on rich interviews with IRA members and on archival sources—that groups such as the IRA develop complex systems of punishment and social control in their pursuit of informers. The book demonstrates how such systems are not only a mechanical response to a security problem, but are also shaped by other goals, risks and imperatives, such as maintaining legitimacy, projecting a state-like image and supporting governance efforts. This work thus identifies and explains some remarkable features of the IRA’s pursuit of informers, such as the establishment of ‘courts-martial’, the granting of ‘amnesties’, the expansion of social control, the productive function of labelling ‘treason’ in asserting sovereignty and the long-term consequences of the issue during transition out of conflict. By exploring the penal logics, practices and discourses of armed rebel groups—engaged in direct struggle with the state agencies that normally carry out criminal justice—the book aims to expand the study of punishment and society and demonstrate its utility to the understanding of non-state actors.
Contested Governance
Authors: Dudai Ron
Published: September 2022

Transitions out of conflicts often lead to splits in the rebel camp, and the emergence of splinter, ‘spoiler’, groups who denounce the embrace of peaceful politics by their ‘parent’ group and seek to continue armed campaigns—such as the ‘dissident’ organisations that emerged in Northern Ireland. This chapter explores how the issue of informing remains essential to understanding the dynamics between the Republican movement, the dissidents, Nationalist communities and the state, and is pivotal in many areas of the transition, such as the contested legitimacy of reformed policing. The analysis shows how both the mainstream Republicans and the dissidents have drawn on, and adapted, the discourse, images and practices relating to informing and its punishment in an attempt to justify their current stances and denigrate their opponents. Dissidents, among others, attribute the end of the IRA’s armed struggle to the prevalence and machinations of informers; and try to appropriate the discourse of underground penality against informers in an attempt to buttress their legitimacy and discredit the Republican mainstream. On the other hand, mainstream Republican leaders sought to discredit the dissidents by claiming they are heavily infiltrated by informers, as a symptom of their incompetence and lack of support. In a remarkable development, former IRA leaders turned politicians have also labelled the continuing violence of dissidents as ‘treason’, and, in a dramatic shift, eventually called on the public to inform against the dissidents—breaking the sacred taboo against informing and signalling an extraordinary transformation of their relations with the state.
The Personalization of Politics in the European Union
Authors: Gattermann Katjana
Published: September 2022

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, although recent institutional and political developments suggest that such a trend is underway. The Personalization of Politics in the European Union sheds light onto this phenomenon by taking a comprehensive approach to understanding four key dimensions of personalization concerning institutions, media, politics, and citizens. In doing so, it relies on an innovative longitudinal and cross-country comparative research design and applies multiple methods. It argues that institutional personalization is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for media to increasingly report about individual politicians. It shows that media personalization fluctuates across country and over time, while Members of the European Parliament increasingly engage in personalized legislative and communicative behaviour. These developments are conditional upon domestic media and electoral systems and have limited effects on citizen attitudes and political awareness. The book concludes that, as additional political actors gain formal individual responsibilities, European Union politics also becomes more complex to disentangle. Ultimately, institutions provide more effective cues than individual politicians both for media to inform citizens about European Union politics and for the latter to acquire information that may help them understand and evaluate European Union politics. These findings have important implications for the future of personalized politics in the European Union.
An Integrated Theory of Personalization in European Union Politics
Authors: Gattermann Katjana
Published: September 2022

Chapter 2 provides an extensive review of the interdisciplinary literature concerning the personalization of politics. This review demonstrates that the phenomenon is prominently studied in national politics, although it is not universally detected in the various dimensions of personalization. However, the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in EU politics has thus far received little scholarly attention, which underlines the significance of this book’s contribution to the extant literature. The second part of the chapter therefore presents an integrated theoretical framework concerning the dynamics between institutional personalization, media personalization, personalization in the behaviour of politicians, and personalization in citizen attitudes in the EU.
Authority and the Federal Constitution
Authors: Tierney Stephen
Published: September 2022

This chapter addresses the federal constitution as a fundamentally distinctive form of polity. The federal constitution, through its recognition a priori of territorial pluralism as the essential characteristic of the polity, fundamentally challenges monist constitutionalism for the ways in which it both homogenises and weakens the notion of the people and elides this concept with ‘the nation’. The federal constitution is not, on its face, co-opted automatically to the service of an exclusive and singular national uniformity; its foundation on the basis of discrete, constitutionally salient territories and their governments challenges this very characterisation of the state. In short, federalism does not allow for the easy elision of the concepts of nation and people; it is founded in recognition of a plurality of territorial publics. The chapter explores how the concept of sovereignty has been a confusing and frustrating concept for federalism scholars. It argues that constitutional sovereignty, recharacterised as ‘constitutional constituent authority’, is in fact an essential register through which to understand federal legality: as pertinent to federalism as it is to any form of government for the modern state. The chapter unpacks the concept of constitutional sovereignty in federal context, exploring the highly specific iterative relationship between constitutional constituent authority and foundational constituent power in the lived federal constitution.
Federal Constitutional Design I: Recognition and Autonomous Government
Authors: Tierney Stephen
Published: September 2022

In this chapter and the next the focus is upon how the meta-purpose of federalism and the principles that flow axiomatically from it have taken life in the institutions of federal constitutions. It is argued that the federal contract is institutionally commodious and that there is no governmental template for federalism. At the heart of the federal idea is the need to balance the dynamic tension between pluralism and union. The chapter explores how this relationship plays out, and how a wide range of institutional approaches can be taken to the constitutional accommodation of the principles of recognition and autonomy.
Federal Constitutional Design II: Associational Government and Reciprocity
Authors: Tierney Stephen
Published: September 2022

This chapter addresses the principles of associational rule and reciprocity, the key characteristics of union within a federal constitution. It also explores how the broader orientation of federalism, as a balancing of the goals of pluralism and union, shows these two dimensions to be, far from antonyms, essential halves of one whole; and that these two principles together with those of recognition and autonomy interact symbiotically in support of the overall purpose of a federal constitution: the foundational recognition and accommodation of the state’s constituent territorial pluralism.
Federalism: A Constitutional Idea for our Time
Authors: Tierney Stephen
Published: September 2022

This chapter reviews the book, its main findings, and conclusions. The task of the book has been to retrieve and explain the nature of federal constitutionalism as a discrete but broad species of constitutional government; one that has developed through the dialectic of theory and practice but has done so by way of many and varied institutional manifestations. From the perspective of constitutional theory it is ultimately misconceived to search for a definitive institutional model of federal government. The constitutional idea of federalism must instead be pieced together from its refraction through various real-world instantiations over time and from place to place. Federalism is a discrete idea for government that flows immanently from the core legal-normative purpose that unifies all polities within the federal family of modern constitutionalism; a unifying purpose that I have called ‘the federal contract’. The chapter asserts that federalism is at root a constitutional idea, founded in a dynamic and flexible relationship between authority and democratic legitimacy; it is an idea of great potential for the societal complexity of today’s world. As a consequence, it should be freed from the institutional and ideational baggage that has so distorted its essence, and thereupon reclaimed, revitalised, and put to use as a vital constitutional resource in an age of territorial pluralism.
Coping with Unbearable Strain
Authors: McCann Leo
Published: September 2022

This chapter delves into the most unpleasant and troubling elements of paramedic work, from the stark realities of operational overload, the uneasy realities of ‘coping mechanisms’ and to the prevalence of ill health, mental trauma, and even suicide among the paramedic community. It explores the enormous pressures placed on those working in the service, where paramedics risk having their wellbeing—in the words of one interviewee—‘slowly scratched away’. It documents how ambulance workers and employers try to handle the impact of distressing calls through formal and informal means. Alongside the gallows humour that famously operates in such ‘extreme’ settings, serious emergencies also provide opportunities for learning and debriefing, and they occupy a high position in the informal status hierarchy of paramedic work. However unpleasant they are, I show that very serious and challenging calls are part of the essence of emergency work, and that competent and ‘professional’ paramedics have to find appropriate ways to deal with them. The chapter moves on to explore the limits of coping mechanisms, drawing on academic concepts such as burnout, PTSD, and moral injury, but also the folk concepts emergent from paramedic street culture used to describe emotional labour, such as ‘five-year job’, ‘the bucket’, and the ‘grief mop’. Finally, it also describes endemic problems associated with ambulance service managerial and employment cultures. These represent yet another form of stress for paramedics, who often feel undervalued and neglected and sometimes live in fear of accusations of wrongdoing, complaints, and inspections.
Control Freaks
Authors: Stahlke Samantha , Mirza-Babaei Pejman
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores how players communicate their intentions to a game through its input. Different means of input are explored, including direct interaction with a physical controller, or navigating a virtual interface. Design principles, such as consistency, logically mapping controls to their function, and constraining player action where necessary, are applied to define what makes a control scheme successful. The specific challenges of various control paradigms, such as the difference between first- and third-person games, are also explored. This chapter also includes some advice on designing input schemes for multiple platforms and employing creativity in control design to surprise players without violating their expectations or comfort.
The Audience is Listening
Authors: Stahlke Samantha , Mirza-Babaei Pejman
Published: September 2022

Alongside the meteoric rise of eSports has come the dominance of platforms like Twitch and YouTube, serving up content centred around people playing games. Popular streamers—and the games they play—have risen to fame by broadcasting their gameplay for audiences of millions. For game designers, this shift poses some key questions: What makes a game “watchable”? What gives a game longevity with content creators? And can designers involve a game’s audience in the action while they watch? This chapter discusses all of these questions, analyzing what makes a game successful streaming material and how games can adapt their designs to consider interacting with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of audience members during play.
Making the Thing
Authors: Stahlke Samantha , Mirza-Babaei Pejman
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the game production process, with a focus on ideation, prototyping, and iterative design. It aims to provide readers with a starting point for putting the ideas of previous chapters into practise, without depending on any particular tools or budget requirements. Various brainstorming strategies are discussed as a primer on design thinking, before moving on to examine the entire development process at a high level. The chapter espouses an iterative, agile approach to game creation. Several techniques supporting iterative and user-centric design are explained, including user stories and personas, competitive evaluation, and rapid prototyping.
The Puzzle of Accommodation
Authors: Marušić Berislav
Published: September 2022

This chapter articulates the puzzle of accommodation through the examples of grief and anger. In the context of grief, the puzzle is that grief can reasonably diminish, even though the reasons for grief remain unchanged. The puzzle in general is that as we accommodate ourselves to loss and injustice, emotions can change in ways that do not respond to a change in our reasons for them but that such changes can, nonetheless, be reasonable. In concluding, the chapter outlines possible responses to the puzzle and offers a preview of the main conclusion of the book—that the puzzle of accommodation eludes a solution.
In Defense of the Puzzle
Authors: Marušić Berislav
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers six attempts to solve the puzzle of accommodation but argues that all of them fail. The most challenging is the Hardline Response, according to which accommodation to loss and injustice is unreasonable. The chapter contends that the Hardline Response fails to do justice to the moral psychology of the emotions. The other five responses seek to understand accommodation as rational by conceiving of the reasons for emotion as time-sensitive. These responses include the appeal to the waning shock over loss or injustice, the analogy between accommodation and partiality, the view that grief and anger are processes which unfold over time, and the view that they constitute psychological work which we complete over time. These attempts fail because they leave us with double vision: We cannot, at once, apprehend the objects of our emotions and the psychological facts about the emotions that would account for their time-sensitivity.
Embodied Reason
Authors: Marušić Berislav
Published: September 2022

The chapter provides a principled explanation for why the puzzle of accommodation eludes a solution. Although accommodation is reasonable, we cannot identify reasons in light of which this would be so. The explanation for this is to be found in a form of pragmatic encroachment about the reasons for emotion: Empirical features of the emotions, such as their functional role, bear on when emotions are reasonably experienced, even though these features do not constitute reasons for or against the emotions. There remains, therefore, a lack of reconciliation between the emotions as modes of apprehending the world and our understanding of the emotions as forms of our embodiment.
Income Distributions
Authors: Kakwani Nanak , Son Hyun H.
Published: September 2022

Pareto observed a certain regularity in the distribution of incomes in various countries and over time. Multiple theories have been advanced to explain income distribution among individuals and households based on these regularities. Many authors explained the generation of income distributions with the help of stochastic processes. This chapter provides a short but exhaustive review of the stochastic income generation models proposed in the literature. The chapter concludes that none of the distribution functions offered by this literature fits well with the observed income distributions. Although many prominent scholars developed stochastic income generation models, the literature has not found much practical application in development economics.
Concentration Curves
Authors: Kakwani Nanak , Son Hyun H.
Published: September 2022

Relationships among the distributions of various economic variables are at the core of the economic analysis. This chapter provides a detailed discussion of concentration curves and related theorems, and it reveals how the concentration curves can help us understand the relationships among economic variables. The elasticity of one variable with respect to another is crucial in analyzing relationships among various economic phenomena. However, many economic applications require aggregate elasticity for the whole population. This chapter has developed a new concept of aggregate elasticity based on concentration indices. Concentration indices can be readily estimated from household surveys, providing a practical method of estimating aggregate elasticity.
Scientific Justification as the Basis of Scientific Testimony
Authors: Gerken Mikkel
Published: September 2022

Chapter 3 provides a characterization of scientific testimony that differentiates it from other types of testimony. According to this characterization, scientific testimony is testimony that is properly based on scientific justification. Further specification of this characterization is provided by way of a discussion of some of the central properties of scientific justification. These include its being gradable, its being discursive, and the senses in which it is and is not epistemically superior to non-scientific justification. Likewise, the chapter contains a discussion of what being properly based on scientific justification amounts to. Apart from helping to clarify the nature of scientific testimony, these arguments help to specify why intra-scientific testimony contributes to the epistemic force of collaborative science. Likewise, they help to specify why public scientific testimony may serve as a central epistemic authority in society.
Public Scientific Testimony I
Authors: Gerken Mikkel
Published: September 2022

Chapter 5 concerns scientific expert testimony—i.e., testimony from scientific experts to laypersons. It surveys empirical research on social and psychological challenges for the public’s uptake of public scientific testimony. On this basis, it articulates a novel norm for scientific expert testifiers: Justification Expert Testimony (JET). According to JET, scientific expert testifiers should, whenever feasible, include appropriate aspects of the nature and strength of the relevant scientific justification, or lack thereof, in their testimony. JET is deployed in motivating a guideline concerning scientific expert trespassing testimony, which occurs when a scientific expert testifies on matters in a domain of epistemic expertise other than her own. According to this Expert Trespassing Guideline, a scientific expert who provides expert trespassing testimony should, in some contexts, qualify her testimony to indicate that it does not amount to expert testimony. So, Chapter 5 exemplifies the gradual movement from foundational research to applied research.
Non-nominative arguments, active impersonals, and control in Latin
Authors: Cennamo Michela , Fabrizio Claudia
Published: September 2022

The continuum of control plays a crucial role in the marking of transitivity in Latin, witnessed also by the alternation between the personal and impersonal encoding of eventualities. The present study investigates argument marking with some ‘impersonal’ verbs. These patterns reflect the crystallisation of a seemingly widespread construction in the early stages of the language, probably of Indo-European inheritance, the use of the third-person singular active with an accusative/oblique argument to denote the spontaneous manifestation of an eventuality and the lack of control of the A/S argument, a pattern competing with the passive form for some verbs in this domain. These impersonal constructions in Latin point to the existence of a dependent-marked, agentive-coding subsystem, similar to analogous constructions in languages with semantic alignment. This evidence suggests that Latin is a language with a syntactically based (nominative–accusative) and (dependent-marked) semantically based subsystems of alignment, sensitive to the notion of control.
The Darker Side of Fortune
Authors: Degenhardt Jane Hwang
Published: September 2022

The Afterword considers how the ethics of fortune cultivated by the London theatre were also a veil for an ideology of opportunism that helped to lay the groundwork for neoliberal global capitalism. It draws particular attention to the ways that fortune functioned as a racializing and Eurocentric discourse—stemming from the implicit whiteness of Fortuna herself, whose ostensibly blind and indiscriminate judgment belies a racial bias. Drawing together loose strands about the racializing effects of fortune that run throughout the chapters, the Afterword shows how the virtuous gains that were enabled by the new orientation to fortune that developed in the sixteenth century were built on the backs of Shylock, Morocco, and the many unnamed and unrepresented others whose labor, suffering, and exploitation goes unseen on the stage. It also speculates upon other possible models for conceiving of fortune’s application in the world as a path-breaking force of opportunity.
Correlation and Constitutional Rights
Authors: Donohue Laura K.
Published: September 2022

Skepticism among American scholars about the value of analytic legal positivism derives in part from the pervasiveness of private law in analytic jurisprudence. Wesley Hohfeld’s influential framework proves little different: although he claims that the jural relations apply to constitutional entitlements, he relies on private law for their exposition. Matthew Kramer’s scholarship clarifies and develops Hohfeld’s schema and draws greater attention to its application in the public realm. This chapter advances the discussion by examining the application of the Hohfeld-Kramer framing to constitutional law, demonstrating weaknesses in assuming that the private law model can be sustained without more careful exposition. Such entitlements are held in res publica, with the result that the entitlement-holder also bears a duty of non-infringement. It identifies a new category of “dignities,” which act as a shield for claim-rights and highlights the nature of “purported rights,” where the state, holding the power of enforcement, structurally lacks the impetus to prosecute (its own) constitutional breach.
Rights, Positivism, and the Vice of Self-PufferyWhy Kramer’s Interest Theory is Nearly Right
Authors: Cruft Rowan
Published: September 2022

Kramer’s Interest Theory of rights is inconsistent with the spirit of his legal positivism, this chapter argues, but seems nonetheless nearly correct as a necessary condition on morally justified rights: it is hard to come up with morally justified rights that fail to satisfy his theory. This chapter explains why: morally justified rights that fail to fit Kramer’s theory license right-holders to engage in a morally vicious form of self-puffery, and there are rarely good reasons to create rights licensing this vice.
Kramer’s Theory of Legal Positivism
Authors: Chiassoni Pierluigi
Published: September 2022

As a tribute to Matthew Kramer’s jurisprudence, the essay purports to provide an account and a critical examination of his theory of legal positivism. The theory, it claims, appears to be flawed insofar as it combines incompatible items. On the one hand, it endorses the separation thesis in its epistemological variety, together with Hart’s idea of a general and descriptive jurisprudence. On the other hand, it makes (what it regards as genuinely) theoretical claims about the limits of the law, robust incorporationism, and the proper notion of an existing legal system. It will be argued that such ‘theoretical’ claims lay in fact outside of the province of a general and descriptive jurisprudence, being rather the expressions of a rationalist censorial view about the law.
Kramer’s Razor and the Freedom of Expression
Authors: Kutz Christopher
Published: September 2022

Matthew Kramer argues that we can define the bounds of free speech with a sharp and absolute distinction between communication-dependent and communication-independent restrictions. On Kramer’s view, government may never legitimately target speech where the wrong it seeks to prevent essentially depends on communication as its means. By contrast, it can punish speech that helps to effect a wrong that could be committed by non-communicative means. I argue, in response, that it is a mistake to think that such a distinction can avoid the hard, political work of weighing costs and benefits and making more contextualized decisions. If we want simultaneously both to forbid solicitation of criminal acts, and to protect radical advocacy that marches up to the line of sedition, we must leave a grey area, one responsive to the relative dangers of speech and its repression. Philosophy can clarify the conditions of our quandary but it cannot resolve them.
Democratic Linkage and the Party Decline Debate
Authors: Kumlin Staffan , Goerres Achim
Published: September 2022

The democratic linkage model sees political parties presenting distinct policy platforms, addressing which societal problems deserve attention as well as proposing policy solutions. Citizens use this information to develop ‘informed’ perceptions of party differences and policy preferences. This allows them to vote for the party offering the best match. After the election, governing parties let the policy ‘mandates’ they asked for in the campaign translate into actual policy. An implication of the linkage model is that campaigns in general, and political parties in particular, have increasingly put reform pressures on the agenda as these have grown more severe and consequential. Moreover, parties have told citizens which policy solutions are meant to ease growing challenges. Equally importantly, the problem/solution packages offered by parties are distinct, thus allowing meaningful democratic choice also in the face of outstanding challenges. Citizens, finally, have the ability to use the information they receive to form perceptions about reform pressures and—crucially under the linkage model—adjust policy preferences. This chapter builds on a debate over whether parties have lost their ability to provide democratic linkage. We note dramatically different views on the extent of such ‘party decline’. Against this background, the book analyses how ‘systematically salient’ welfare state issues and pressures are; the extent and nature of party differences communicated to citizens concerning reform pressures and policy solutions; and how exposure to such information affects citizens.
Democratic Leadership and the Changing Study of Changing Welfare States
Authors: Kumlin Staffan , Goerres Achim
Published: September 2022

Democratic leadership requires politicians who sometimes dare publicly to argue that big challenges necessitate unpopular policies. This democratic vision also places demands on citizens who, at least in principle and on occasion, are willing and able to listen to such messages. Older welfare state scholarship, however, assigned a limited role to public communication and democratic leadership. Policymakers were found to engage in ‘blame avoidance’ while citizens have been seen as unable to let go of the status quo. A more recent body of work suggests that leaders and citizens may communicate to a greater and more consequential extent than older theories imply. A number of communication-oriented concepts such as ‘ideational leadership’ have gained currency. The extent, nature, and consequences of this imagined leadership, however, are currently unclear but the book’s empirics address these issues in multiple ways. A particular point made in recent work is that welfare state politics is no longer a unidimensional struggle over destructive retrenchment. Scholars have documented an ideational shift towards a ‘social investment’ and ‘activation’ oriented welfare state. As a result, the menu of policy responses becomes less exclusively destructive—and unpopular—than older theories implied. This generates further questions analysed in the book. Perhaps the social investment turn has permeated public debate to the extent that it masks more unpopular policy in public settings? If so, the social investment/activation paradigm may function as a vehicle for blame avoidance and an obstacle for democratic leadership.
What Makes People Worry about the Welfare State?
Authors: Kumlin Staffan , Goerres Achim
Published: September 2022

This chapter develops the notion of reform pressure framing and studies its effects on perceptions of the financial viability of the welfare state. Pressure framing refers to different ways of emphasizing and presenting information about pressures that challenge welfare state sustainability. The chapter presents a comparative survey experiment fielded in Germany, Norway, and Sweden with respondents randomly provided with varying information types veiled inside a survey question about reform pressures. This experiment allows us to compare the impact of different reform pressures (including population ageing, low employment rates, EU and non-western immigration, and international economic crisis). Moreover, the comparative component gives a handle on country variation, such as whether effects are different in economically exceptional Norway. Finally, the chapter draws on a number of studies showing the importance of how deserving welfare recipients are. The concept of deservingness helps us to specify with greater precision a plausible ‘normative’ component of successful ideational leadership narratives.
How Nature Matters
Authors: James Simon P.
Published: September 2022

How Nature Matters presents an original theory of nature’s value based on part–whole relations. In so doing, it solves the difficult problem of how we should conceptualize nature’s cultural values. The standard practice of framing them in terms of the provision of cultural ecosystem services is shown to be inadequate. When natural things have cultural value, they typically do not have it as service providers—that is, as means to valuable ends. They have it as parts of valuable and meaningful wholes—as parts of traditions, narratives, and cultural identities. These conclusions are developed and defended through twelve case studies, concerning, amongst other things, the contentious practice of dugong hunting and the religious significance of the site where the Buddha is said to have become enlightened. The author also analyses some cutting-edge policy-related topics, such as the debate surrounding the concept of relational value, and takes a stand on various foundational issues in environmental philosophy, including the question of whether anything on earth qualifies as natural.
Instrumentality and Causation
Authors: James Simon P.
Published: September 2022

It is typically assumed that if some natural entity has value for us, then it must be of instrumental value to certain humans on account of its causal relations to them. This means–end model provides a good account of many cases in which natural entities have value for humans. For instance, when a tree supplies Siobhan with shade from the fierce midday sun, then it is of instrumental value for her on account of its causal relations to her. More generally, when nature provides us with supporting, provisioning, or regulating ecosystem services, the means–end model gives a good account of the value the relevant service-providers have for us. The connections between the ecosystem services approach and nature conservation are explored in Mayotte, the first of the book’s case studies.
The Meanings of Things
Authors: James Simon P.
Published: September 2022

Nature is shot through with meaning. The sweeping dunes of a desert can symbolize God’s ontological simplicity and lofty indifference. Buddleia, the ‘butterfly bush’, can serve as a wonderfully non-indigenous emblem of wildness for post-Brexit Britain. The bamboo’s hollow core can allude to what Buddhists regard as the essenceless nature of all things. In this sense of ‘meaning’, all manner of natural entities, from hedgerows to the changing of the seasons, can be said to have meaning. Meaning typically depends on context. A word has whatever meaning it has in the context of the sentence in which it occurs; a musical phrase acquires its meaning from its place in a particular musical piece; a particular sacred grove owes its meaning to some wider constellation of religious beliefs and practices—and so forth. In short: when x has meaning, it typically has meaning in relation to some whole, y. This chapter includes the book’s fourth case study, The Mahabodhi tree.
Why Nature?
Authors: James Simon P.
Published: September 2022

The arguments developed in chapters 1 to 7 might be used to support the conclusion that not just some natural entities but also some non-natural ones have constitutive value for people on account of the meanings they bear. What is more, even when a certain natural entity has constitutive value, it is a further question whether it has that value precisely because it is (or is taken to be) natural. To assess whether any entities have constitutive value precisely because they are (or are taken to be) natural, one must specify what one means by ‘natural’. In the present context, that word may be taken to mean something like largely unshaped by human intentional actions. That concept of naturalness has not made sense to all people in all times. Still, the fact remains that many people in modern Western societies do distinguish between what is natural and what is human in this way. For some of them, moreover, natural entities are of constitutive value precisely because they seem to be natural. One such case is presented in Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. If Harrison is correct, then wild nature has constitutive value for us precisely because it evokes a radically non-human—and, in this sense, natural—realm.
Introduction
Authors: Zellentin Holger M.
Published: September 2022

The Introduction summarizes this study’s broad scope in the most succinct way and on its own terms; the most relevant existing scholarship—to which this study is deeply indebted—will only be discussed in the volume’s main text. After a few opening considerations on the value and limits of the notion of “gentiles,” from the Bible to the Qur’an, the four-partite Introduction will first point to the value of the study of “Law as Literature,” the methodological approach pursued in much of the volume. It will then condense the arguments of this volume into “Ten Propositions on Gentile Law,” and present a historical overview of the legal prerogatives of key texts, “From the Bible to the Qur’an,” to be considered in this study. Finally, a brief “Chapter Overview” will restate the content of this volume once more in a linear way. The partial overlaps between the summary and the overview may be justified in as far as this volume is geared towards readers from a broad variety of backgrounds—I beg those intimately familiar with parts of the material to indulge the redundancy that may add clarity to those coming from other fields.
Becoming One or Many
Authors: Joyce Rosemary A. , Sheptak Russell N.
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers colonial encounters in the vicinity of the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and argues that ‘cultural contact’ lacks the sophistication required to grasp the tone of inequality that flows through contexts of imposition. Drawing upon De Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’ as a means to occupy and navigate landscapes not under one’s control, the experience of colonial survival is approached as a shared project in which identities fluctuate, particularly in contexts of sexual reproduction. Emphasis on local and traceable ancestry as opposed to identity formation through migrant arrival is noted to be manifest in the materiality of everyday practice.
The Biographies of Resistant Material Culture in Occupied Landscapes
Authors: Carr Gilly
Published: September 2022

This chapter is on resistance to contact encounters via repositioning of symbolic content on the Channel Islands throughout World War II. During 1940–5, the islands’ locals were subject to occupation by German military forces and were also brought into contact with foreign labourers. An interchange of material signifiers ensued under acts of subjugation, resistance, and defiance. A most potent symbol was the ‘V’ sign, reproduced in various material forms and registered in competing readings as a prism of multi-sensory communication. The author argues that these present a cautionary note to identifications of material hybridity, and instead illustrate direct appropriation of a sign in unique material items that, ultimately, were few in a context of mass production and limited to a short and closed timespan of manufacture. Moreover, understanding of the significance of such objects emerges only within a broader assemblage of relatability.
Social media sharing of low-quality news sources by political elites
Authors: Lasser Jana , Aroyehun Segun Taofeek , Simchon Almog , Carrella Fabio , Garcia David , Lewandowsky Stephan
Published: September 2022

Increased sharing of untrustworthy information on social media platforms is one of the main challenges of our modern information society. Because information disseminated by political elites is known to shape citizen and media discourse, it is particularly important to examine the quality of information shared by politicians. Here, we show that from 2016 onward, members of the Republican Party in the US Congress have been increasingly sharing links to untrustworthy sources. The proportion of untrustworthy information posted by Republicans versus Democrats is diverging at an accelerating rate, and this divergence has worsened since President Biden was elected. This divergence between parties seems to be unique to the United States as it cannot be observed in other western democracies such as Germany and the United Kingdom, where left–right disparities are smaller and have remained largely constant.
Keep It Simple: A Field Experiment on Information Sharing among Strangers
Authors: Batista Cátia , Fafchamps Marcel , Vicente Pedro C
Published: September 2022

SMS information campaigns are increasingly used for policy. A field experiment is conducted to study information sharing through mobile phone messages. Subjects are rural households in Mozambique who have access to mobile money. In the baseline intervention, subjects receive an SMS containing simple instructions on how to redeem a voucher for mobile money. They can share this non-rival information with other exogenously assigned subjects unknown to them. Few participants redeem the voucher. They nonetheless share it with others and many share information about the voucher they do not use themselves. The voucher is shared more when no information is provided on the receiver. When partial information is provided, no evidence is found of more sharing with subjects who have similar characteristics. Treatments are introduced to increase the cost of sending a message, shame those who do not send the voucher to others, or allow subjects to appropriate the value of the voucher. All these treatments decrease information sharing. To encourage information diffusion among strangers, the best is to “keep it simple.”