bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How Production Networks Adapted to Civil War in Liberia
Authors: McDougal Topher L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that firms in Liberia during the civil wars increasingly came to rely upon highly dispersed networks of traders to source from, and distribute to, rural hinterlands. Industrial manufacturing firms in Liberia shed important light on the structure of production networks in violent conflict. They serve as important nodes in the value-adding process that supply and distribution networks hook into, and their managers therefore have unique opportunities to observe the ways these networks adapt to, and traverse, the shifting combat frontier. In the broader context of this book, this case study then provides qualitative evidence for the claim that rural–urban trade networks in Liberia begin to exhibit exaggerated radial patterns, characterized increasingly by important urban hubs and limited importance of second-tier cities.
Trade Network Splintering and Ethnic Homogenization in Liberia and Sierra Leone
Authors: McDougal Topher L.
Published: May 2017

In violent conflict, civilians in both urban and rural areas, depend to some extent on the function of trade networks for their welfare. This chapter then seeks to understand the ways in which trade network morphologies shift during a conflict. Analyzing unique survey data via GIS and statistical models, this chapter scrutinizes the dispersal of production networks via a multiplication of petty traders during civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. First, it argues that violent events tended to splinter production networks. Second, it argues that violent events also tended to have a localizing effect on the composition of traders, making them more homogenous with respect to the populations they serve. It implies that cities become hubs of activity for numerous overlapping, but ultimately separate, radial ethnic networks serving rural areas.
Interstitial Economies
Authors: McDougal Topher L.
Published: May 2017

The first conclusion chapter draws out the implications of Chapter 7 more fully, putting them in comparative perspective with the lessons drawn from the West African cases. In particular, it draws an explicit link between transportation networks (the “hardware” of rural–urban trade) and the social systems that inform trade relations (the “software”). This chapter argues that ranked-society trade networks may be better able to exploit redundant transportation networks, since there is no taboo against long-distance trade amongst second-tier cities. By contrast, the radial trade networks that formed in the unranked society of West Africa seem to exacerbate monopsonistic and monopolistic relationships between rural and urban areas, since interethnic trade becomes more risky. It concludes with implications for managing coercive violence, as well as the effects of the rural–urban divide on state identity.
Building Trust in Public Institutions
Authors: Horne Cynthia M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the conditions under which lustration and truth commissions affected trust in targeted public institutions, such as the judiciary, the parliament, the police, and political parties, or composites of institutions, such as oversight institutions or elected institutions. I find strong and consistent relationships between lustration and political trust, except for the most highly politicized public institutions. More extensive and compulsory programs were associated with the largest trust-building effects. Truth commissions were not associated with political trust-building. This chapter also demonstrates that delayed reforms were more effective than reforms initiated right after the transition for most of the institutions, except for highly politicized institutions. This runs contrary to assumptions about the necessity of starting reforms immediately after the transition or not at all. The chapter presents the paired cases of Bulgaria and Romania and illustrates the possibilities for public disclosure programs to effect lustration-like reforms.
Collaboration, Complicity, and Historical Memory
Authors: Horne Cynthia M.
Published: May 2017

The widespread complicity evident in the post-communist cases complicates approaches to transitional justice because it lays some of the blame on society. Lustration procedures use information in secret police files to shed light on the past. Those files contain information documenting how neighbors, friends, co-workers, and even relatives might have informed on you. There is a potential for such revelations about the scope of the interpersonal and institutional betrayals to undermine social trust and civil society. This chapter explores the problems associated with complicity and transitional justice measures by examining the cases of Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria. The cases highlight how historical memory is affected by negative revelations about the past. These cases illustrate how rising nostalgia can collide with truth telling, forcing the reconsideration and sometimes revision of historical memory.
Lustration, Public Disclosures, and Social Trust
Authors: Horne Cynthia M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the conditions under which lustration and truth commissions affected social trust, separately considering trust in social institutions and interpersonal trust. This chapter shows that measures to improve social trust might have unintended, negative consequences. More compulsory lustration programs were associated with less trust in unions and the church at both the individual and aggregate levels. There is some evidence to support the contentions of critics that lustration might adversely affect social institutions via blowback from truth telling and public disclosures about previous regime complicity. With respect to interpersonal trust, while late file access procedures and personal disclosures could affect interpersonal trust in the future, the lustration of public office holders has not undermined interpersonal trust as feared. The findings from this chapter reconfirmed the theoretical argument specified in Chapter 1 regarding the expected differential impact of lustration measures on particularized and generalized social trust.
Transitional Justice in Support of Democratization
Authors: Horne Cynthia M.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 7 examines the conditions under which transitional justice affected democratic consolidation, a strong civil society, and low levels of corruption in the post-communist sphere. Lustration measures were robustly associated with democracy, with compulsory programs involving a punitive dimension having more noticeable effects than programs relying on symbolic shaming mechanisms. Wide and compulsory programs were similarly associated with more robust civil societies. However, there was evidence of a weak but negative relationship between truth commissions and democracy and civil society. Moreover, despite the framing of lustration as a corruption corrective, there was no apparent direct relationship. There were, however, indirect relationships between lustration measures and lower levels of corruption, highlighting the possible conditional effects of lustration. Finally, the chapter illustrated that there was a relatively long period of time after the transition within which to pass beneficial transitional justice measures, with declining efficacy several decades after the transition.
Present Imperfect
Authors: van der Vlies Andrew
Published: May 2017

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the ‘new’ nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa’s literature, it understands ‘disappointment’ both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers’ treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture—including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers—some known to international Anglophone readers (J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb), some slightly less wellknown (including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach), others from a new generation (Songeziwe Mahlangu, Masande Ntshanga). It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as ‘South African’ in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.
On Being Stuck
Authors: van der Vlies Andrew
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers J.M. Coetzee’s complex (and partly fictionalized) autobiographical project, Scenes from Provincial Life, comprised of Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009), in which Coetzee dramatizes an-other self’s desire for the posture of the anti-political by staging a form of disaffection that refuses metropolitan expectation at the same time that it models itself on metropolitan explorations of the desire for artistic autonomy. Through close reading of the works, and reference across Coetzee’s oeuvre to his interest in the possibility of an Erasmian nonposition, the chapter canvasses theories of boredom, addresses questions of genre, and considers demands placed on writers in what Coetzee has called, with varying degrees of irony, the ‘provinces of history’. To this end, it considers the usefulness of reading alongside the Scenes an illuminating and hitherto unremarked intertext, Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.
Stasis Anxiety
Authors: van der Vlies Andrew
Published: May 2017

Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) theorisations of anxiety, discerns recursive investments in past experiences of hope (invoking Jennifer Wenzel’s work to consider the afterlives of anti-colonial prophecy), assesses the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of the ancient Greek understanding of stasis as civil war, and asks how these works’ elaboration of stasis might be understood in relation to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the eclipsing of the individual subject of political rights by the neoliberal subject whose very life is framed by its potential to be understood as capital.
The International Policy Arena
Authors: Unwin Tim
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on ‘multi-stakeholderism’ in the international ICT4D arena, and particularly on discussions around Internet governance. It begins by exploring the differing roles of governments, the private sector, and civil society in general, noting that the poor are almost always absent from discussions that concern them. The evolution of so-called multi-stakeholder dialogue with respect to ICTs and telecommunications is then examined in the context of the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 and 2005, and then in the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. The various institutional multi-stakeholder structures adopted by the ITU, ICANN, and the IGF are discussed to highlight the differing interests of governments, the private sector, and civil society.
Partnerships in ICT4D
Authors: Unwin Tim
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the evolution of the idea of partnerships in ICT4D initiatives. It begins with an overview of the emergence of partnerships in the context of the neoliberal shift in the balance of influence between states and the private sector, and the interests underlying the idea of public–private partnerships (PPPs). It suggests that many such PPPs fail because they do not sufficiently involve civil society, and indeed that civil society is often specifically excluded. Nevertheless, multi-sector partnerships remain a valuable means of implementing ICT initiatives for the poorest and most marginalized, and the chapter therefore concludes by exploring models and success factors for their implementation.
Saving the Scientific Phenomena
Authors: Chakravartty Anjan
Published: May 2017

To a great extent, the recent renaissance in the metaphysics of science has been spurred by an interest in the nature of causal powers (dispositions, capacities, tendencies, etc.). In particular, a number of authors have made realism about powers a cornerstone of their interpretations of scientific knowledge (for example, in developing accounts of scientific realism, inter alia). Against the backdrop of an admiration for the explanatory power of powers in this domain, this paper strikes a cautionary note. Is the existence of irreducible powers a commitment that is entailed by taking scientific practice seriously? I consider two approaches to this question: the first concerning the putative requirement of dispositional properties in the context of scientific explanation; the second concerning the putative requirement of these properties in the context of scientific abstraction. Neither, I contend, entails an ontological commitment to powers. This negative, interim conclusion suggests that inferences to the existence of causal powers in scientific contexts are ultimately independent of the science adduced; rather; they are a function of substantive philosophical commitments regarding time-honored disputes between realists and empiricists more generally, about issues such as how trade-offs between ontological commitment and explanatory capacity are properly made. In the philosophical domain, however, the realist has an advantage. For realism about powers better accords with an arguably scientistic consideration of the identities of scientific properties. Thus, interim conclusion notwithstanding, it would seem that powers can do something important for the philosopher of science after all.
Mutual Manifestation and Martin’s Two Triangles
Authors: Anjum Rani Lill , Mumford Stephen
Published: May 2017

When and how do powers manifest themselves? There are two models. The orthodox view has powers standing in need of stimuli, which once received issue in responses. This model portrays powers as passive. The stimuli are powerful, but the powers are disempowered, turning the order of explanation on its head. The second model is more promising: C. B. Martin’s notion of mutual manifestation partnering. Powers exercise when they meet their reciprocal partners and produce something jointly that they could not have produced alone. In his chapter on causation, Martin offers an analogy to explain mutual manifestation: it is like two triangular cards coming together to form a square. The triangles do not cause the square; they become the square. We argue that although mutual manifestation is the right model, Martin’s analogy of the two triangles is misleading. If we look at natural processes in which powers exercise and manifest themselves, we see that three revisions are needed to the analogy. First, the triangles need not become the square immediately. It can take time for a process to unfold. Second, powers compose often in a non-linear fashion. This would mean that the area of the square need not be the sum of the areas of the two triangles. Third, component powers needn’t be found in their resultant powers. This would be like the two triangles sometimes forming a circle rather than a square. Martin’s analogy depicted mereological composition rather than the natural processes issuing from powers and, contrary to his claim, causation is indeed the notion we should be thinking of.
Real Modalities
Authors: Heil John
Published: May 2017

Sometimes we take ourselves to be saying some-thing about what really is possible (even if not actual), what is not possible, what is inevitable, what would or would not happen were certain conditions to obtain; we take ourselves to be saying something about how matters stand modally. When this is our aim, what features of the universe are responsible for the truth or falsity of what we say? I shall offer reasons for thinking that an ontology of interrelated powers or dispositionalities provides the resources requisite for an accounting of real modalities, truth makers for important modal truths. Consideration of these reasons will, in addition, disclose surprising connections between dispositionality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, causation and causal laws as these are commonly understood in philosophy.
Conflicts of Desire
Authors: Ashwell Lauren
Published: May 2017

In standard presentations of functionalism in the philosophy of mind, it is generally assumed that our mental states determine our behavioral dispositions as a holistic unit. Thus, although our mental states may them-selves conflict, the behavioral dispositions we have in virtue of these mental states do not. On the other hand, the everyday experience of desiring is often that of competing wants pushing and pulling us in different directions. Our ordinary conception of desiring involves thinking of desires as forces that battle against each other, that cause us to feel torn, and that may overpower each other. Such desire conflicts, I will argue, give us reason to think that the behavioral dispositions we have in virtue of having these desires can themselves conflict—the conflict that we experience when we have conflicting desires is mirrored in the conflicting ways that we are disposed to behave. In this paper I develop a metaphysics for the mind that better respects this sort of conflict, and which requires treating dispositional properties as fundamental properties out of which a mind is constructed.
Power for the Mental as Such
Authors: Robb David
Published: May 2017

An adequate solution to the problem of mental causation should deliver not just the efficacy of mental properties, but the efficacy of mental properties as such, of mentality in its own right. But this appears to block an identity solution from the outset. Any property that’s both mental and physical, the argument goes, has a dual nature, and this just reintroduces the problem of mental causation, now framed in terms of these two natures. But a powers ontology promises to save the identity theory, at least from this problem. Such an ontology identifies a mental property’s mental and physical “natures” with just the property itself. A mental property is, at once, both wholly mental and wholly physical, so that to causally engage the physical nature of a mental property is to engage its mental nature as well.
The Democratic Enactment of Representation
Authors: Lacey Joseph
Published: May 2017

This chapter aims to understand the role of political representation in a theory of democratic legitimacy. Drawing on contemporary theories of political representation, the chapter attempts to determine what makes acts of political representation democratically legitimate, while identifying the possible ways in which democracy can go wrong through certain kinds of representative practices. This account of legitimate democratic representation suggests that numerous aspects of a well-functioning democracy can lead to more than just the resolution of social conflict, specifically by contributing to the formation of a common democratic identity among members of the political community. By the end of this chapter, a central contention of this project will become clear, namely that the institutionalization of democratic legitimacy will produce powerful centripetal effects on the political community.
Belgium Versus the Lingua Franca Thesis
Authors: Lacey Joseph
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that despite its ability to sustain itself as a political system for almost 200 years, Belgium gives substantial empirical support to the lingua franca thesis. The existence of different public spheres within this political system has played a major role in preventing the satisfactory enactment of democratic representation at the national level, inducing centrifugal forces that have gradually led to the partial disintegration of the state. The federalization of Belgium along linguistic lines in 1993 can, in essence, be seen as the crescendo of a long process whereby the supposedly natural logic of the lingua franca thesis has gradually set in. If we take Belgium as our only case, the prospects for a well-functioning and sustainable multilingual democracy are not especially encouraging.
Switzerland Versus the Lingua Franca Thesis
Authors: Lacey Joseph
Published: May 2017

The goal of this chapter is to understand how Switzerland has managed to turn a linguistic make-up that is centrifugally explosive in theory into one that is relatively benign in practice. On the one hand, it is argued that numerous historical particularities and political decisions have served to curtail the centrifugal forces that are presumed to be typical of political systems constituted by linguistically demarcated public spheres. On the other hand, Switzerland serves to corroborate a core hypothesis of this project, namely that the institutionalization of democratic legitimacy will produce powerful centripetal effects on the political community. In sum, a host of factors help to explain why Switzerland does not fall apart, but it is its quality of democracy that is largely responsible for keeping it together.
Conclusion to Part III
Authors: Lacey Joseph
Published: May 2017

Chapters 5 and 6 point towards the general conclusion that the logic undergirding the LFT cannot be ultimately defeated, but merely contained indefinitely. In this conclusion to Part III, I attempt to draw out explicitly the main comparative lessons from my analysis of Belgium and Switzerland, highlighting the primary factors that explain why the LFT took hold in one case but not the other. We can distinguish between factors related to the political community and those more closely linked to the regime. Of course, to the extent that a regime and political community are co-dependent and continue to impact one another in their mutual evolution, it is impossible to make a razor-sharp distinction between factors related to one rather than the other. Bearing this in mind, however, we may group things together in this way for analytic purposes....
The Argument in Summary
Authors: Lacey Joseph
Published: May 2017

This book was motivated by the purported problems of democratic or input legitimacy facing the EU—a discussion primarily confined to academia and the elite spheres of EU political life, at least until the euro-crisis when Europe’s democratic credentials became a much more public concern. The project dealt with one of the greatest challenges to the achievement of democratic legitimacy in this political constellation, namely the existence of distinctive public spheres. According to the ...
The Ethics of the Anselmian Being II (Respect)
Authors: Murphy Mark C.
Published: May 2017

Prior formulations of the problem of evil, for example, by J. L. Mackie, William Rowe, and Paul Draper, assume that God must have requiring reasons to prevent evils to creatures, and use that assumption as the basis for claiming that the existence (or types, or amount, or distribution) of evils in this world is either incompatible with or gives strong prima facie evidence against the existence of God. But given that God’s reasons with respect to preventing evils are justifying, not requiring, reasons, no such arguments can get off the ground. This account, which is based on a first-order theory of divine ethics, differs from skeptical theism, which is based on moral epistemology. This difference makes the account developed here immune from the most serious criticisms that have made trouble for skeptical theism.
Worship-Worthiness and Allegiance-Worthiness
Authors: Murphy Mark C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides an account of how God could be contingently worthy of our allegiance—that is, our alliance and our obedience. There is a great human good in being properly related to God, in subordinating our wills to the will of an absolutely perfect being. But this good will be unavailable to us unless God takes a certain practical stance toward us. First, God must not will that we act contrary to the norms of morality that bind us. Second, God’s will must be a sufficiently good proximate standard for action, better than acting on our own discretion or on some other proximate standard. This chapter argues that God can indeed take on a contingent ethics that meets these constraints, either through forming discretionary intentions or through performing certain speech-acts (e.g. making promises to, or covenants with, us humans).
Introduction
Authors: Urquízar-Herrera Antonio
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter opens with the case study of the amendments that the historian Ambrosio de Morales introduced in the manuscript version of his core book Las Antigüedades de las ciudades de España (1575) before sending it to print. The changes in the description of Córdoba Mosque reveal the conflictive status of Islamic architecture in the Spanish historical writing of the time. Upon this example the subject of Admiration and Awe is introduced through three angles: the connection of the topic of the interpretation of Islamic monuments to sixteenth and seventeenth historiographical building of Spanish national identity; a review of recent academic literature on the subject as well as on its possible connection to postcolonial theory; and a survey in the early modern historiographical distinction among medieval Islamic buildings and contemporary uses of Islamic architecture.
Conquest and Plunder
Authors: Urquízar-Herrera Antonio
Published: May 2017

Chapter 1 explores the discourse underlying the medieval interpretation of Islamic monumental architecture. The interaction between the idea of buildings as trophies and the tension surrounding their potential destruction, conservation, and transformation offers a convenient framework for subsequent analysis of the strategies behind the appropriation of the surviving edifices. The chapter sets out the general background by way of a review of the writings of Ambrosio de Morales in relation to the Christian architectonic transformation of Córdoba Mosque. Then, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his medieval idea of restoration as applied to the Christian conquest of Islamic Spain, as well as its consequences in the Humanist interpretation of Islamic buildings, are explained.
The Notion of the Loss of Spain
Authors: Urquízar-Herrera Antonio
Published: May 2017

Chapter 2 explores the relationship between destruction and memory within the historical discourses on the Islamic conquest and the Christian recovery of Spain, which eventually resulted in the thirteenth-century demolition of Toledo Mosque. In the first place, medieval narratives on the Loss of Spain are studied in order to analyze the early modern echoes of its commentaries about the Islamic destruction of Christian Spain, and particularly those about the demolition of churches. In addition, the early modern reuse of that narrative is connected to the Humanist concern about the relationship between architectonic destruction and memory. Finally, the example of the medieval story on the conversion and later destruction of Toledo Mosque is studied as a precedent to subsequent narrations.
Historical Dislocation and Antiquarian Appropriation
Authors: Urquízar-Herrera Antonio
Published: May 2017

Chapter 4 provides a general explanation of the early modern creation of an antiquarian historical interpretation framework for Islamic buildings. Seventeenth-century Rodrigo Caro’s description of Seville ‘Arab stones’, included in his book Antigüedades y principado de la ilustríssima ciudad de Sevilla (1634), provides a valuable example that is used to introduce this historiographical turn. Upon this case, the antiquarian treatment of Spanish Islamic buildings is compared with other contemporary genres of writing dealing with Islamic architecture (traveller’s books, pilgrims’ books, geographical descriptions, etc.), as well as with other national antiquarian traditions (Italy, England). This is done in order to obtain a clarification of the ideological basis of the historical dislocation of these monuments from a coetaneous perception to their anachronic connection to the time of the ancient history of the nation.
The Antiquarian Appropriation of Islamic Monuments
Authors: Urquízar-Herrera Antonio
Published: May 2017

Chapter 6 focuses on three case studies: the appropriation of Córdoba Mosque as a classical edifice, the transformation of Seville Giralda into an antiquity, and, finally, the humanist reading of Toledo. Since in the latter the destruction of the Aljama Mosque had deprived the city of major Islamic buildings, it provides a useful example to explore the limits of antiquarian strategy (Francisco de Pisa, Pedro de Rojas, Cristóbal Lozano). Regarding Córdoba, Pablo de Céspedes’ theory about a section of the mosque actually being Roman is commented on. Regarding Seville, the common praise for the Giralda is analyzed upon its antiquarian description by Alonso Morgado, which was later copied and transformed by Rodrigo Caro.
Calling on the Martyrs
Authors: Urquízar-Herrera Antonio
Published: May 2017

Chapter 9 expounds on the martyr stories of pre-Islamic and Islamic times. Ambrosio de Morales’s recovery of Eulogius’ writings on the Córdoba Martyrs (1574) fixed the genre in Spain. After that, the history of that city’s mosque was associated to the memory of the martyrs (Martin de Roa and others). Conversely, narratives on Seville Giralda focused on the story of St Justa and St Rufina (Luis de Peraza, Pablo Espinosa, Rodrigo Caro, etc.). Finally, the invention of the Lead Books of Granada, which was related to the demolition of the former minaret of Granada’s Aljama, centred the whole of the subsequent local historiography in the memory of St Caecilius and other martyrs (Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza, Francisco Henríquez de Jorquera, and many others). A key element of this turn was the conversion of the Islamic buildings in archaeological evidences of the martyrdoms and the antiquity of these cities’ Christianity.
Recession, Recovery, and Regime Change: Effects on Child Poverty in Hungary
Authors: Gábos András , Tóth István György
Published: May 2017

Despite high spending on family benefits and the high poverty reduction effectiveness of cash benefits, the risk of child poverty in Hungary have been higher than the EU average since the early 1990s in which the relatively high share of children in very low work-intensity households played a significant role. The crisis period brought an even higher poverty risk for children. According to the chapter’s findings, the increase in child poverty in the first phase of the crisis was driven by labour market processes (an increasing share of children in low work-intensity households), while the automatic stabilizers reduced the magnitude of these effects. By contrast, in the second phase, labour market processes started to improve (although mainly through controversial policy tools, like public work and outward migration), though the shift towards a regressive social policy regime contributed to increased poverty rates via the reduced poverty reduction impacts of cash benefits.
Sweden: Child Poverty during Two Recessions
Authors: Jonsson Jan O. , Mood Carina
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at child poverty trends in Sweden across two recessions, the first (severe) 1991–6, and the second (hardly noticeable) 2008–10, using a number of measures. Absolute (bread-line) household income poverty and economic deprivation surged, with some lag, during the first recession, but shrunk steadily as the macro-economy improved up until around 2006, after which there is no trend but temporary fluctuations. Relative income poverty fell somewhat during the earlier recession but has grown since the mid-1990s, mainly because of a more precarious situation for one-parent families and non-employed parents (often immigrants). In a rare but theoretically important step, child poverty is also measured by young people’s own reports, showing few trends between 2000 and 2011. While material conditions improved somewhat, relative poverty did not change, in stark contrast to household relative poverty—perhaps because poor parents distribute more economic resources to their children during hard times.
USA Child Poverty: The Impact of the Great Recession
Authors: Wimer Christopher , Smeeding Timothy M.
Published: May 2017

The Great Recession (GR) was the most dramatic economic downturn the USA has experienced in more than six decades. But against this backdrop, the USA actually made some limited progress against child poverty over the Great Recession when one considers the new US Supplemental Poverty Measure which lies at about 40 per cent of median income. The main reason was the growth of a well-targeted near cash safety net, combined with earnings enhancements in the form of refundable tax credits. These enhancements helped the working poor, but not many parents of children who could not find jobs. However these improvements had little if any effect on relative poverty counted at a European or cross-national relative poverty standard set at 60 per cent of median income. Greater progress against child poverty in the US requires a continued strong job market coupled with a child allowance.
Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion
Authors: Hamilton Tom
Published: May 2017

The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. When historians interpret these events, inevitably they depend on sources of information gathered by contemporaries, none more valuable than the diaries and the collection of Pierre de L’Estoile (1546–1611), who lived through the civil wars in Paris and shaped how they have been remembered ever since. Taking him out of the footnotes, and demonstrating his significance in the culture of the late Renaissance, this book is the first life of L’Estoile in any language. It examines how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he assembled an extraordinary collection of the relics of the troubles, a collection that he called ‘the storehouse of my curiosities’. The story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. Focusing on a crucial individual for understanding Reformation Europe, this book challenges historians’ assumptions about the widespread impact of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century. L’Estoile’s prudent, non-confessional responses to the events he lived through and recorded were common among his milieu of Gallican Catholics. His life writing and engagement with contemporary news, books, and pictures reveals how individuals used different genres and media to destabilize rather than fix confessional identities. Bringing together the great variety of topics in society and culture that attracted L’Estoile’s curiosity, this book rethinks his world in the Wars of Religion.
The Social World of the Palais de Justice
Authors: Hamilton Tom
Published: May 2017

This chapter follows L’Estoile’s life and collecting at the outset of the Wars of Religion. It evaluates how he attempted to write non-confessional histories of his family life and the civil wars that conformed to his traditional, Gallican beliefs. Yet, however disinterested L’Estoile tried to appear in his family book, he struggled to come to terms with tragic events such as the death of his wife, Anne de Baillon, and took comfort in her salvation by faith alone. And however impartial L’Estoile aspired to be in presenting his poetry miscellany concerning the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, his life writing and personal prejudices continued to shape his narrative and selection of sources, especially in his sympathy for Protestant perspectives.
Tangled Governance
Authors: Henning C. Randall
Published: May 2017

This book addresses the institutions that were deployed to fight the euro crisis, re-establish financial stability, and prevent contagion beyond Europe. It addresses why European leaders chose to include the International Monetary Fund and provides a detailed account of the decisions of the institutions that make up the “troika” (the European Commission, European Central Bank, and IMF). The study explains the institutions’ negotiating strategies, the outcomes of their interaction, and the effectiveness of their cooperation. It also explores the strategies of the member states, including Germany and the United States, with respect to the institutions and the advantages they sought in directing them to work together. The book locates the analysis within the framework of regime complexity, clusters of overlapping and intersecting regional and multilateral institutions. It tests conjectures spawned by that literature against the seven cases of financial rescues of euro-area countries that were stricken by crisis during 2010–15. The book concludes that regime complexity is the consequence of a strategy by key states to control “agency drift.” States mediate conflicts among institutions, through informal as well as formal mechanisms, and thereby limit fragmentation of the regime complex and underpin substantive efficacy. In so doing, the book answers several key puzzles, including why (a) Germany and other northern European countries supported IMF inclusion despite substantive positions opposed to their economic preferences, (b) crisis-fighting arrangements endured intense conflicts among the institutions, and (c) the United States and the IMF promoted further steps to “complete” the monetary union.
Introduction
Authors: Henning C. Randall
Published: May 2017

European governments, against their initial instincts, invited the International Monetary Fund to design financial rescue programs during the euro crisis in cooperation with the European Commission and European Central Bank. These institutions, known as the “troika,” constitute a regime complex in the parlance of international political economy. This book poses four questions about the regime complex for crisis finance in the euro area: Why did European governments choose this particular mix of institutions? What was the strategy of key member states in directing several institutions to collaborate on lending programs? Why did this arrangement endure despite severe conflicts among the institutions? Should the member states of the euro area “go it alone” by creating a European Monetary Fund? This chapter elaborates on these questions and provides an overview of the book.
Greece 2010
Authors: Henning C. Randall
Published: May 2017

The Greek crisis of 2010 was a formative episode, during which European governments chose the mix of institutions that would formulate the rescue program and the institutions established the modalities for cooperation. This chapter examines the onset of the crisis in Greece and the genesis of its financial rescue. Specifically, it addresses the opposition to including the International Monetary Fund in the institutional mix for the first Greek program and the reasons why euro-area member states eventually selected it. The chapter also examines some of the institutional alternatives to the troika that might have been chosen but were rejected, creation of financial facilities of the euro area (the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism and temporary European Financial Stability Facility), and role of German politics and preferences in the development of the euro area’s institutional framework.
Greece 2012 and Cyprus 2013
Authors: Henning C. Randall
Published: May 2017

Greece posed the greatest challenge among the program countries, while Cyprus, linked to Greece through the banking system and debt restructuring, was the smallest of the country programs. The second Greek program was accompanied by substantial debt relief, but the process of granting it exposed sharp disagreements within the regime complex for crisis finance. The IMF and some euro-area member states advocated private-sector involvement, but split on the sustainability of the remaining official claims on Greece, with the Fund using its debt sustainability analysis as leverage. The case of Cyprus demonstrates that the IMF can be influential even if it contributes a relatively small share of the financing, when it is backed by key creditor states. In both cases, despite substantive conflict, key European creditors adhered faithfully to including the IMF and mediated among the institutions when they became deadlocked.
Greece, the Crisis Continues
Authors: Henning C. Randall
Published: May 2017

Rather than emerge from its second program cleanly, as did other countries from their respective programs, Greece required a third program when Syriza assumed control of government in early 2015. The program was negotiated against the backdrop of a tumultuous series of events—European Council and Eurogroup meetings, a referendum, and a second election—during which Greece was threatened with ejection from the monetary union, “Grexit.” Creditor states successfully insisted that the new government negotiate with the institutions and wanted the International Monetary Fund fully involved. The IMF, however, insisted on the restructuring of debt to official creditors and withheld any financial contribution until satisfied. The case demonstrates the consistency of European demand for IMF involvement, importance of Germany and other key creditor states in mediating institutional conflict, and opportunities afforded to the mediators to influence outcomes.
Lessons and Conclusions
Authors: Henning C. Randall
Published: May 2017

The concluding chapter draws on the seven program cases to answer questions that were posed at the outset of the study. It explains in particular the choice of the institutional mix for countries’ financial rescues: Euro-area member states wished to involve the IMF because their preferences diverged from those of the European Commission. Regime complexity is thus the consequence of states’ strategies to control agency drift. The choice of the institutions also inhered in the diversity of preferences among member states and in unanimous decision-making within the euro area. This argument, unlike other explanations, helps to explain why Germany adhered to the IMF despite sharp substantive conflicts on particular points of program design and why heated conflicts among the institutions did not lead to the demise of the troika. The chapter also recommends institutional reforms to prepare for the next crisis and proposes an agenda for future research on regime complexity.
The History and Politics of Energy Transitions
Authors: Sovacool Benjamin K.
Published: May 2017

According to some definitions, an energy transition refers to the time that elapses between the introduction of a new primary energy source, or prime mover, and its rise to claiming a substantial share of the overall energy market. According to one academic view, energy transitions take an incredibly long time to occur. Another view argues the opposite. It suggests that there have been many transitions at varying scales that have occurred quite quickly—that is, between a few years and a decade or so, or within a single generation. This chapter holds that both sides are partly right, and partly wrong. After presenting evidence in support of either thesis, it elucidates four lessons for energy analysts and policymakers.
Support Policies for Renewables: Instrument Choice and Instrument Change from a Public Choice Perspective
Authors: Gawel Erik , Strunz Sebastian , Lehmann Paul
Published: May 2017

This chapter frames the transition towards clean energies as a sequential process of instrument choice and instrument change. First, regulators decide how to initiate the transition away from fossil energies. Here, support policies for renewable electricity are politically convenient because they face low resistance from fossil energies’ interest groups. In the second stage, regulators need to adapt support policies for renewables to challenges arising along the transition pathway. This theoretical two-stage framework is empirically substantiated by tracing the development of support policies in Germany. Against the backdrop of this analysis, small-step policies that could foster the energy transition process are pointed out.
Understanding Indicator Choice for the Assessment of RD&D Financing of Low-Carbon Energy Technologies
Authors: Sonnenschein Jonas
Published: May 2017

Rapid decarbonization requires additional research, development, and demonstration of low-carbon energy technologies. Various financing instruments are in place to support this development. They are frequently assessed through indicator-based evaluations. There is no standard set of indicators for this purpose. This study looks at the Nordic countries, which are leading countries with respect to eco-innovation. Different indicators to assess financing instruments are analysed with respect to their acceptance, the ease of monitoring, and their robustness. None of the indicators emerges as clearly superior from the analysis. Indicator choice is subject to trade-offs and leaves room for steering evaluation results in a desired direction. The study concludes by discussing potential policy implications of biases in indicator-based evaluation.
An Enquiry into the Political Economy of the Global Clean Energy Transition Policies and Nigeria’s Federal and State Governments’ Fiscal Policies
Authors: Agu David Onyinyechi , Ogbeide-Osaretin Evelyn Nwamaka
Published: May 2017

In order to implement clean energy transition programmes, the national and sub-national governments in Nigeria will incur certain costs. Similarly, failure to implement the policies will come with some costs. This chapter therefore considers the fiscal policy implications of Nigerian governments’ implementation of clean energy transition policies in the country. The analysis also reveals that the observed reluctance of Nigerian governments in implementing the policies is obviously unconnected with their dependence on oil revenues. The study further shows the fiscal policy implications of Nigerian governments’ inaction especially when other countries implement their clean energy transition policies. The study concludes that to implement clean energy policies, Nigerian governments may not necessarily increase cost, but prioritize clean energy projects.
European Energy Security
Authors: Heshmati Almas , Abolhosseini Shahrouz
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews relevant literature on the current state and effectiveness of developing renewable energy on energy security in general, and on energy security in the European Union (EU) in particular. The chapter elaborates on primary energy import sources, possible alternatives, and how energy security is affected by the sources of supply. It also gives an analysis of the effects of the Ukrainian crisis, the isolation of Iran on diversification sources, and on European energy security. It examines EU’s energy policy, analyses the best motivation for a new energy policy direction within Europe, and suggests alternative solutions for enhanced energy supply security. The aim is to suggest suitable solutions for energy security in Europe through energy supply diversification. Supply diversification includes alternative energy corridors for reducing dependency on Russia as a supplier and enhancing the power generated by renewable energy sources under the European Union 2020 strategy.