bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mombasa
Authors: Willis Justin
Published: August 2023

Mombasa is the product of ongoing contests. Those contests have been about labor (both waged and unwaged): who should do what kind of work, and on what terms? They have been about land: who controls the right to build or cultivate, and what terms can they demand of potential users? They have also been about commerce: who has the right to control and tax the goods that have been traded in and through Mombasa, and who sets the terms of that trade? Those contests have often been pursued through force: Mombasa’s past can be told as a story of violent struggles over political power. Yet the contestants have also mobilized competing ideas of rights that constantly recur to ideas about identity and belonging. Where people belong has been a source of constant and sometimes violent dispute: who is an immigrant, and who is at home? Where “Mombasa” itself belongs has also been disputed: Is it part of Kenya, part of the coast, or part of an Indian Ocean world that stretches far across the sea? Life in the urban phenomenon that is Mombasa in the 21st century is shaped by these continuing contests: It is a divided city in which people live very different lives in an uneasily shared space.
Modernist Planning in South Africa
Authors: Sparks Stephen
Published: August 2023

Modernist planning first emerged in South Africa in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war. Drawing upon established expert networks and racialized models of social distance within the British empire, an ascendant class of health officials faced intractable sanitation crises and used public health arguments to justify racial segregation. Residential racial segregation predated the South African mineral revolution, but fin-de-siècle developments on and in the vicinity of the mines in Kimberley and Johannesburg clarified a racialized division of labor, residence, and control that was subsequently transposed to a wider social-spatial geography. While Marxian accounts tended to see racial segregation and the repressive institutions emergent in this period as instruments of “racial capitalism” imposed by capital and the state, racist urban geographies were often called into being from below, by white working-class communities. There was an infusion of avant-garde modernist ideas during the 1930s, but official planning interventions remained piecemeal until mid-century. While the muscular modernism of apartheid suggests a radical break, a more interventionist approach to social planning had emerged during World War II, as it had elsewhere. Similarly, industrial decentralization policies that liberal critics characterized as the fanatical imposition of Afrikaner nationalist bureaucrats mirrored global shifts. Planning faces an apparent crisis in the post-apartheid moment, as the country confronts the challenge of continued rapid urban growth against the backdrop of economic decline and the collapse of state capacity.
History and Politics of the Kenya Archives
Authors: Linebaugh Riley
Published: August 2023

Heavily reliant on the use of documents in its style of rule, the British Colonial Government (BCG) in the colony of Kenya had surprisingly poor recordkeepers. The history of Kenya’s archives during the colonial period reveals a disregard for efficient record preservation despite the perceived correlation between administrative and archival efficiency, indicating the gap between the fantasy of a well-ordered empire and the reality on the ground. However, the emergency period (1952–1960) ushered in significant archival changes, wherein the control over its archives greatly concerned the colonial government as a matter of its counter-insurgency efforts. In fact, the colonial administration issued its first draft rules and regulations concerning its archives in 1955, suggesting that it did not foresee its relatively imminent expulsion. However, shortly after appointing its first government archivist, the BCG began disassembling its archives through the strategic destruction and removal of sensitive documents in the early 1960s. The independent Kenyan government pursued the establishment of a national archives as a priority, and the Kenya National Archives was codified by law in 1965. The creation of a national archives was viewed as a way to relegate the colonial administration into a fixed past through the physical removal of colonial-era documents from political offices into storage. In so doing, independent Kenya’s inaugural class of archivists saw themselves as making room for both an independent government and a new national school of history for the first time, archival documents stored in Nairobi were available to members of the public. In contrast to the colonial administration, which maintained its archives with a strict policy of inaccessibility, archival documents stored in Nairobi were available, at least nominally, to members of the public for the first time under an independent government and the terms of the Public Archives Act. However, dynamics other than the law have limited and/or offered archival access incidentally or intentionally. While the relationship between archival and political control has not disappeared, the widening of archival access in Kenya has also nurtured critical scholarship and activism.
Women in Beauty Cultures and Aesthetic Rituals in Africa
Authors: Balogun Oluwakemi
Published: August 2023

Women and their bodies have figured prominently in beauty cultures and aesthetic rituals throughout Africa, and they are tied to specific symbolic practices, political contexts, and economic circumstances. Diverse beauty practices in Africa provide valuable insight into understanding shifting cultural logics and social structures. Beauty practices and aesthetic rituals are socially contingent and hold multiple meanings depending on the historical context that they emerge from. Moreover, women’s aesthetic choices are often heavily politicized within broader local, national, and global tensions. Specific beauty rituals illuminate the social contexts of varied communities and are often connected to rites of passage that signal maturity, fertility, and status. Beauty both reflects and constitutes social values, power differentials, and personal agency.
Ritual Enslavement in West Africa
Authors: Odijie Michael
Published: August 2023

Ritual slavery occurs when humans become properties of deities. Ritual slaves fulfill religious purposes for their deity owners, although they may also serve as slaves to a deity’s representative, such as a shrine priest. The transatlantic slave trade altered the ritual slavery practices of communities that were influenced by the slave trade. The abolition of the slave trade also affected the trajectory of ritual slavery. Ritual slavery generally escaped colonial emancipation and the abolition of domestic slavery. As a result, ritual enslavement presents an opportunity to study African indigenous movements for abolition and emancipation, as the colonial administration was typically unconcerned with it and local abolition groups emerged to combat it. The study of ritual enslavement in West Africa mostly focuses on two cases where a domestic campaign evolved. The first is trokosi, which is practiced by the Ga-Adangbe, Fon, and Ewe ethnic groups on Africa’s west coast. Trokosi is the practice of sacrificing young girls to local deities as a means of atonement for misdeeds done by family members. Once dedicated, the girls become slaves of the deity and are typically placed in the custody of the shrine priest, who represents the deity on earth. The second instance is Osu, which is practiced by the Igbo ethnic group in contemporary Nigeria. Osu are people dedicated to becoming properties of the deities. While the majority of the literature has concentrated on trokosi and Osu, owing to the campaign against them, there are other cases for scholars to examine.
African Slaves and the Persian Gulf
Authors: Suzuki Hideaki
Published: August 2023

African slaves played significant roles in the history of the Persian Gulf from at least the 9th century onward, during which period the social, political, and economic significance of African slaves saw a number of changes. For example, the 9th-century Abbasid Caliphate was greatly disturbed by the Zanj Revolt (869–883) in which African slaves took a major part; European travelers in the 17th and 18th centuries frequently noted African eunuchs at royal courts and saw African slave soldiers there, while in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the production of global commodities linking the Persian Gulf with the rest of the world, such as dates and pearls, relied heavily on the labor of enslaved Africans. The historical records are enough to show that most such slaves were shipped to the Persian Gulf from either the East Coast or the Horn of Africa, while genetic studies reveal the significance of West African haplotypes in the population of certain regions of the Persian Gulf.

While the flow of African slaves continued until the beginning of the 20th century, there were two peaks, one in the 9th century and the other a thousand years later in the 19th century. The earlier peak was triggered by the demand for labor in lower Iraq during the Abbasid era but had ended by the time of the Zanj Revolt. The second peak was prompted by global demand for dates and pearls and continued until international solidarity developed against the slave trade, which by the beginning of the 20th century had succeeded in blocking the flow of slaves from Africa into the Persian Gulf. Naturally enough, however, even after imports of slaves from Africa had been stopped, slave demand did not cease and slave trade within the Persian Gulf continued. A number of those traded were descendants of Africans notably of individuals traded from Baluchistan to the Arabian side of the Gulf. Eventually, slavery in the Persian Gulf more or less collapsed during the first half of the 20th century, not as a result of international pressure but because of declines in the date and pearl industries.
Time Consistent Policies and Quasi-Hyperbolic Discounting
Authors: Balbus Łukasz , Reffett Kevin , Woźny Łukasz
Published: August 2023

In dynamic choice models, dynamic inconsistency of preferences is a situation in which a decision-maker’s preferences change over time. Optimal plans under such preferences are time inconsistent if a decision-maker has no incentive to follow in the future the (previously chosen) optimal plan. A typical example of dynamic inconsistency is the case of present bias preferences, where there is a repeated preference toward smaller present rewards versus larger future rewards.

The study of dynamic choice of decision-makers who possess dynamically inconsistent preferences has long been the focal point of much work in behavioral economics. Experimental and empirical literatures both point to the importance of various forms of present-bias. The canonical model of dynamically inconsistent preferences exhibiting present-bias is a model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting. A quasi-hyperbolic discounting model is a dynamic choice model, in which the standard exponential discounting is modified by adding an impatience parameter that additionally discounts the immediately succeeding period.

A central problem with the analytical study of decision-makers who possess dynamically inconsistent preferences is how to model their choices in sequential decision problems. One general answer to this problem is to characterize and compute (if they exist) constrained optimal plans that are optimal among the set of time consistent sequential plans. Time consistent plans are those among the set of feasible plans that will actually be followed, or not reoptimized, by agents whose preferences change over time. These are called time consistent plans or policies (TCPs).

Many results of the existence, uniqueness, and characterization of stationary, or time invariant, TCPs in a class of consumption-savings problems with quasi-hyperbolic discounting, as well as provide some discussion of how to compute TCPs in some extensions of the model are presented, and the role of the generalized Bellman equation operator approach is central. This approach provides sufficient conditions for the existence of time consistent solutions and facilitates their computation.

Importantly, the generalized Bellman approach can also be related to a common first-order approach in the literature known as the generalized Euler equation approach. By constructing sufficient conditions for continuously differentiable TCPs on the primitives of the model, sufficient conditions under which a generalized Euler equation approach is valid can be provided.

There are other important facets of TCP, including sufficient conditions for the existence of monotone comparative statics in interesting parameters of the decision environment, as well as generalizations of the generalized Bellman approach to allow for unbounded returns and general certainty equivalents. In addition, the case of multidimensional state space, as well as a general self generation method for characterizing nonstationary TCPs must be considered as well.
The History of Central Banks
Authors: Monnet Eric
Published: August 2023

The historical evolution of the role of central banks has been shaped by two major characteristics of these institutions: they are banks and they are linked—in various legal, administrative, and political ways—to the state. The history of central banking is thus an analysis of how central banks have ensured or failed to ensure the stability of the value of money and the credit system while maintaining supportive or conflicting relationships with governments and private banks. Opening the black box of central banks is necessary to understanding the political economy issues that emerge from the implementation of monetary and credit policy and why, in addition to macroeconomic effects, these policies have major consequences on the structure of financial systems and the financing of public debt. It is also important to read the history of the evolution of central banks since the end of the 19th century as a game of countries wanting to adopt a dominant institutional model. Each historical period was characterized by a dominant model that other countries imitated - or pretended to imitate while retaining substantial national characteristics - with a view to greater international political and financial integration. Recent academic research has explored several issues that underline the importance of central banks to the development of the state, the financial system and on macroeconomic fluctuations: (a) the origin of central banks; (b) their role as a lender of last resort and banking supervisor; (c) the justifications and consequences of domestic macroeconomic policy objectives - inflation, output, etc. -of central banks (monetary policy); (d) the special loans of central banks and their role in the allocation of credit (credit policy); (e) the legal and political links between the central bank and the government (independence); (f) the role of central banks concerning exchange rates and the international monetary system; (g) production of economic research and statistics.
Trade Liberalization and Informal Labor Markets
Authors: Paz Lourenço S. , Poole Jennifer P.
Published: August 2023

In recent decades, economic reforms and technological advances have profoundly altered the way employers do business—for instance, the nature of employment relationships, the skills firms demand, and the goods and services they produce and export. In many developing economies, these changes took place concurrently with a substantive rise in work outside of the formal economy. According to International Labour Organization estimates, informal employment can be as high as 88% of total employment in India, almost 50% in Brazil, and around 35% of employment in South Africa. Such informal employment is typically associated with lower wages, lower productivity, poorer working conditions, weaker employment protections, and fewer job benefits and amenities, and these informal workers are often poorer and more vulnerable than their counterparts in the formalized economy. Informal jobs are a consequence of labor market policies—like severance payments or social security contributions—that make the noncompliant informal job cheaper for the employer than a compliant formal job. Each model has a different benefit (or lack of punishment) for employing formal workers, and a distinct mechanism through which international trade shocks alter the benefit-cost of these types of jobs, which in turn results in a change in the informality share. The empirical literature concerning international trade and formality largely points to an unambiguous increase in informal employment in the aftermath of increased import competition. Interestingly, increased access to foreign markets, via liberalization of major trading partners, offers strongly positive implications for formal employment opportunities, decreasing informality. Such effects are moderated by the de facto enforcement of labor regulations. Expansions toward the formal economy and away from informal wage employment in the aftermath of increased access to foreign markets are smaller in strictly enforced areas of the country.
Corporate Governance Implications of the Growth in Indexing
Authors: Brav Alon , Malenko Andrey , Malenko Nadya
Published: August 2023

Passively managed (index) funds have grown to become among the largest shareholders in many publicly traded companies. Their large ownership stakes and voting power have attracted the attention of market participants, academics, and regulators and have sparked an active debate about their corporate governance role. While many studies explore the governance implications of passive fund growth, they often come to conflicting conclusions.

To understand how the growth in indexing can affect governance, it is important to understand fund managers’ incentives to be engaged shareholders. These incentives depend on fund managers’ compensation contracts, ownership stakes, assets under management, and costs of engagement. Major passive asset managers, such as the Big Three (BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard), may have incentives to be engaged even though they track the indices and their engagement efforts benefit all other funds that track the same indices. This is because such funds’ substantial ownership stakes in multiple firms can both increase the effectiveness of their engagement and create relatively large financial benefits from engagement despite the low fees they collect. However, there is a difference between large and small index fund families: the incentives of the latter are likely to be substantially smaller, and the empirical evidence appears to be consistent with this distinction.

The governance effects of passive fund growth also depend on where flows to passive funds come from, which investors are replaced by passive funds in firms’ ownership structures, how passive funds interact with other shareholders, and how their growth affects other asset managers’ compensation structures. Considering such aggregate effects and interactions can help reconcile the seemingly conflicting findings in the empirical literature. It also suggests that policymakers should be careful in using the existing studies to understand the aggregate governance effects of passive fund growth over the past decades.

Overall, the literature has made important progress in understanding and quantifying passive funds’ incentives to engage, their monitoring activities and voting practices, and their interactions with other shareholders. Based on the findings in the literature, there is yet no clear answer to whether passive fund growth has been beneficial or detrimental for governance, and there are many open questions remaining. These open questions suggest several important directions for future research in this area.
First Trimester Medication Abortion: Public Health Challenges and Clinical Guidance
Authors: Somaiya Devanshi , Lew Candace
Published: August 2023

According to 2015–2019 data, there are 121 million unintended pregnancies each year globally. One hundred eleven million of these occur in low- and middle-income countries. Of all unintended pregnancies, 61%, or about 73 million pregnancies, end in abortions annually, at the rate of 39 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. About half the abortions, or 35 million of them, are unsafe, contributing to the 299,000 maternal deaths each year. These, in turn, have implications for the realization of almost every one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically ensuring good health and well-being, achieving gender equity, and ending poverty.

Abortions occur in every country irrespective of income level or the legal status of abortion. From 1990 to 2019, there has been a greater increase in the proportion of pregnancies ending in abortions in countries where abortion is restricted compared with countries where abortion is broadly legal.

A growing proportion of these abortions are medication abortions, incorporating the use of mifepristone or misoprostol or both. The availability of this becomes even more important in areas where policy or infrastructure or both are more restrictive for providing safe, legal abortions. Providing quality, women-centered, comprehensive abortion care that is equitably accessible hence becomes imperative to addressing a woman’s ability to access appropriate medical care for her reproductive needs. Making this amenable to a digital platform overcomes even more barriers, be they socioeconomic or policy-driven. Fortunately, recent research and evidence support this, hence broadening the availability of safe abortion care into areas and demographics that remained precluded from the availability of comprehensive reproductive health care. Targeted progress and strengthened commitments are needed to further this penetration and provide access to compassionate, safe, and quality care for abortion and family planning.
Intervention Approaches for Osteoarthritis
Authors: Hughes Susan , Der Ananian Cheryl , DeMott Andrew
Published: August 2023

Osteoarthritis (OA) currently affects 32.5 million people in the United States at a cost of $136.8 billion. The available literature on the epidemiology of OA shows that the number of people affected will increase exponentially by the year 2040, affecting 78.4 million people. There is an abundance of evidence that self-management and physical activity (PA) approaches improve multiple outcomes for individuals with arthritis. However, these programs are not widely accessible to the population that can benefit from them across the United States. Two national organizations—the arthritis program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Administration on Community Living (ACL)—have established similar, but distinct, criteria for the review of evidence-based programs and seek to promote their dissemination. The CDC arthritis program has reviewed the evidence bases of arthritis-appropriate, evidence-based intervention programs and classified them as self-management or PA approaches. These “recognized” programs are recommended for national dissemination by the CDC. The ACL has also recognized several of the same programs by using its own criteria and classified them as Self-Management or Falls Prevention approaches. The different review criteria used by these two national public organizations present significant challenges for investigators who design interventions. The situation is further compounded by an investment in funding that hugely supports the discovery of interventions as opposed to the dissemination of interventions that have demonstrated efficacy. The National Public Health Agenda for Osteoarthritis: 2020 Update presents a blueprint that includes nine strategies for improving public health outcomes among persons with OA. These recommendations should be considered by interventionists in the future when developing programs. Other areas that can substantially benefit from further research include weight management and weight loss, injury prevention, technology-based interventions, addressing comorbid conditions, and understanding program mechanisms of action. Finally, underscoring all of these approaches and common to them is the need to enroll underserved populations to improve health equity. Underserved populations disproportionately include African Americans, Hispanics, persons with low socioeconomic status, and persons who live in rural areas of the United States. Policy recommendations to render future approaches to improving health outcomes for persons with OA are (a) to increase funding for the dissemination of programs that demonstrated efficacy and effectiveness, (b) to increase the transparency of the review and funding processes across public agencies, and (c) to nurture, broker, and provide sustainable funding streams to maintain evidence-based programming for all persons with OA across the United States.
Urban Guerrilla Gardening and Health
Authors: Thornton Alec
Published: August 2023

The benefits of gardening for mental and physical health are well known. Gardening is also recognized as a local-level or grassroots response to the negative effects of climate change and global warming. In urban areas, dense neighborhoods, limited green spaces, contaminated brownfield sites, and, at times, restrictive council regulations on the public use of parks and verges can act as barriers to gardening. In the 1970s, guerrilla gardening emerged as a clandestine, environmentally conscious, grassroots activity to reclaim and transform neglected or derelict urban spaces into healthy green spaces. Although not as subversive since its inception, guerrilla gardening in cities is as much a recreational activity as it is an ecological statement of urban activism, which effectively provides urban dwellers an entry point to engage with the outdoors for the planting of edible and nonedible plants in artificial places and spaces where natural life struggles to exist. Guerilla gardening has been impactful to city life through its contributions and controversies in improving urban ecosystems, educating neighbors on nutrition and food production where gardens crop up, and broadly to the health of humans (and other creatures) who live there.
Behavioral Interventions to Reduce and Prevent Racial Bias
Authors: Farmer Nicole , Baginski Alyssa , Gordon Talya
Published: August 2023

Unlike other public health crises, attention to the role of prevention in racial bias has not predominated. Most human actions, including racism, are informed by unconscious thoughts. Behavior-change interventions seek to understand facilitators and barriers to human action and antecedent unconscious thoughts, which are guided not only within an individual but also in interpersonal and societal environments. Current behavioral interventions on implicit and explicit racial bias can identify gaps and opportunities in the literature to evaluate operational definitions of behavior and bias, discuss psychological and neurobiological processes involved in racial bias, that may provide insight into prevention. Furthermore, a focus on public health–based interventions which integrate behavioral science foundations may assist to develop adaptable, accurate, and effective interventions across global communities. Based on the literature results discussed, the benefit for the field of public health may be to inform future studies and create a multilevel, behavioral-based framework to prevent or mitigate racial bias behaviors..
International Law and World Order: Theoretical Perspectives
Authors: Schmidt Dennis R.
Published: August 2023

Debates about the nature and role of international law have preoccupied international relations (IR) scholars since the inception of the discipline. They involve some of the most fundamental questions about the theory and practice of world order: to what extent is IR a rule-based activity? How do rules and institutions emerge and function under conditions of anarchy and power competition? What effects, if any, does law have on the behavior, interests, and identities of global actors? One way of developing and organizing answers to these questions is through theoretical investigation. Each of the discipline’s main theoretical approaches makes arguments about the role of law in the construction and maintenance of the processes and patterns that constitute political order at the global level. Structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz largely dismissed international law as an epiphenomenon to power politics and security competition. Rational institutional literature emerging in the 1980s developed a more nuanced picture, highlighting law’s role in fostering order and cooperation among sovereign states. Contemporary constructivist approaches go one step further and acknowledge law’s centrality for understanding patterns and processes of social ordering, while critical scholarship, including Third World approaches to international law, focuses on revealing and challenging the structures that underpin the formation and operation of law in a stratified global order marked by legacies of colonialism and economic and political inequalities. Some of those theoretical claims are related to and derived from historical analysis, and there now is a recognizable, interdisciplinary move among historians, IR scholars, political theorists, and international lawyers to engage with the role of law in the historical evolution of world order.
Peace, Pacifism, Nonviolence: 21st Century Developments
Authors: Gnoth Aidan , Jackson Richard
Published: August 2023

Despite the achievements of pacifist and nonviolent movements in influencing the course and nature of international politics over the last century or more, and despite obvious theoretical overlaps and connections, pacifism and nonviolence have largely been excluded from contemporary theories and practices of peace. Instead, the dominant conception of peace in both international relations and peace and conflict studies has been of “negative peace” narrowly defined as the absence or management of large-scale political violence. In this conception, states, militaries, and international organizations are viewed as essential to the maintenance of peace, which are primarily associated with stability, law and order, and strong public institutions. Some attempts to expand the conception of peace beyond a negative value have occurred, including the rise of critical peace building in the early 2000s and new mainstream frameworks of peace studies such as quality peace, the peace continuum, world peace, and varieties of peace. Upon examination, it can be argued that these approaches remain rooted in a state-centric, militaristic paradigm, or they problematically fail to go beyond descriptive analysis. Few, if any, take nonviolence and pacifism seriously and seek to radically transform the existing violent state-based international order. Nevertheless, the present historical juncture provides an opportune moment for rethinking the theory and practice of peace and for seeking to transform politics and political theory away from states, militarism, and the values of “negative peace” toward nonviolent, pacifistic, social justice–based forms of “positive peace.” Notwithstanding a number of conceptual and practical obstacles, existing conceptions of agonistic peace, feminist peace, and decolonial peace, among others, as well as expanding interest in the field of nonviolent resistance, provide an important foundation for advancing this important objective.
Civil Resistance
Authors: Merriman Hardy
Published: August 2023

Civil resistance is a way for people—often those who have no special status or privilege—to wield power without the threat or use of violence. It consists of a range of acts of protests (e.g., mass demonstrations); noncooperation (e.g., strikes, boycotts); intervention (e.g., blockades, mass demonstrations); and the development of new relationships, behavior patterns, and organizations (e.g., alternative institutions). Diverse people from societies worldwide have engaged in civil resistance for millennia. Individuals can initiate acts of civil resistance spontaneously, and many have done so at some point in their lives, for example, by defying or reducing their cooperation with institutional policies as students or employees. However, the study of this field has focused on collective acts of civil resistance through popular movements and campaigns that are organized to achieve shared goals and involve some degree of strategic planning. While civil resistance can be used to advance an array of causes, much of the research has focused on efforts within societies to overcome authoritarian rule and advance democratic change. Scholarship in the field has developed at an accelerating pace in the early 21st century, as civil resistance becomes increasingly recognized as a powerful driver of political change and democratic development worldwide. The field concerns itself with a range of questions, including: How do ordinary people self-organize against powerful and oppressive adversaries? What is the interplay of structure and agency in determining the emergence and trajectories of civil resistance movements? What kinds of strategies increase a movement’s prospects of success? What counter-strategies are most effectively employed against movements? How do movements manage the repression used against them? What is the success rate of civil resistance movements compared to violent insurgencies? What kinds of long-term impacts do civil resistance movements have on societies? How is civil resistance effectively employed for a range of different causes? What is the relationship between civil resistance and other forms of addressing conflict such as electoral politics, negotiations, and peacebuilding? Why and how do civil resistance movements induce defections among their adversary’s supporters? How should international law regard civil resistance movements? What role can external actors play in supporting or inhibiting such movements?
The Politics of (In)Visibility: Geopolitics and Subaltern Bodies
Authors: Rossone de Paula Francine
Published: August 2023

The materiality of (living, dead, and surviving) bodies has been highlighted as a productive element of resistance against intersectional violence and oppression in Latin America. While acknowledging the potential of feminist solidarities and embodied resistance to reinscribe meaning on political spaces by cutting across these spaces and opening new territories for recognition and social justice, it remains important to acknowledge the precarity of certain bodies’ geopolitical positions. Processes through which some bodies are simultaneously concealed and exposed, and whose movements are continuously perceived as excessive to the status quo, may be revealing of these bodies’ inherent potential for disruption and politicization as both a symbolic and physical presence. However, when visibility is itself a symptom of their “displacement” from dominant representations sustaining the ordering of space, these bodies’ visibility is rarely translated into audibility or legibility. In other words, they exceed the “map,” and their visibility is revealing of their condition of being “out of place.” Historic and contemporary feminist movements in Latin America show that when recognition is conditioned by the perception of presence as displacement, this may prevent subaltern bodies not only to speak to the political but also mainly to be heard. A closer look at their positionings and potentialities reveal the conditions for gendered and racist geographies of visibility, recognition, and agency and calls for a radicalization of the geo in geo-politics (with a hyphen) toward the de-normalization of violence as the everyday of international politics.
Drivers of Religious Extremism in South Asia
Authors: Ahmed Zahid Shahab
Published: August 2023

Religious extremism is not a new phenomenon in South Asia but it has certainly grown during the 21st century and that too across the region. While there are historical reasons behind religious divisions and fissures in South Asia (e.g., the two-nation theory with reference to the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent), religious nationalism is a key driver behind the securitization of religious minorities. Although the existence of Muslim extremists is linked to how religion was used as a tool to recruit and mobilize mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1988, the global dynamics after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the “war on terror” have also influenced religious radicalization and extremism in Pakistan. In contrast, Buddhist and Hindu nationalism have been key drivers of religiously motivated extremism targeting religious minorities, especially Muslims, in Sri Lanka and India. There are similarities in terms of how Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim extremist groups have been propagating hate and inciting violence; for instance, many extremist groups now increasingly use social media. As this article argues, the presence of religious extremism in South Asia presents a significant challenge to peace and security. This includes various forms of extremism targeting different religious groups and promoting anti-Western sentiments. International terrorist organizations are active in the region, while Hindu and Buddhist nationalists contribute to the marginalization and violence against Muslims. Creating an environment of tolerance, inclusivity, and respect for all religious communities is crucial to address these complex issues effectively.
Risk Preferences and War
Authors: Schwarz Christopher , Bueno de Mesquita Bruce
Published: August 2023

Despite a long legacy within the study of international politics, risk preference remains an understudied source of behavioral variation. This is most apparent within the study of violent conflict, which, being inherently risky, might be naturally explained by variation in the preferences of the actors involved. Rather than taking this seemingly obvious route, much of the formal theoretic literature continues to assume that the actors under consideration are either risk neutral or risk adverse. This blind spot is troubling since the effects of variables on outcomes generally reverse when risk preferences move from adverse to seeking, a generally unrecognized scope condition for many theoretical results. There are three central reasons why risk preferences have been neglected within the recent literature despite their theoretical and empirical importance. First, there is a sociological pathology within the field where the seeming obviousness of risk preference as an explanation for war has led to its lack of attention. Second, many formal applications of risk preference become quickly intractable, indicating a deficiency in the formal architecture available to modelers. Third, until recently, risk preferences have generally been assumed rather than explained, with this theoretical underdevelopment leading to intellectual discomfort in the use of the concept. Under the shadow of these problems, the study of risk preference as an explanation for war has gone through three intellectual periods. Starting in the late 1970s, the concept of risk preference was introduced to the field and applied widely to the phenomenon of war. This cumulative development abruptly ended in the early 1990s with the wide adoption of prospect theory and the undue dismissal of risk preference as a nonrationalist explanation for war. Under these conditions, the field bifurcated into two more or less isolated groups of scholars: political psychologists using nonformal versions of prospect theory and heuristic definitions of risk preference, on the one side, and rationalistic formal modelers universally assuming risk-neutral or risk-averse preferences, on the other. By the early 2000s, the wave of informal applications of prospect theory began to subside, carrying with it the use of risk preference as an explanation for war. By 2010, the concept had all but disappeared from the literature. Following this decade of silence, the concept of risk preference was reintroduced to the field in the early 2020s and has been demonstrated to explain some of the major empirical findings from 1990 to 2020. This reintroduction holds the potential for providing unified theoretical foundations for increasingly wide swaths of the conflict literature and may provide a rich basis for the derivation of novel empirical implications.
The Ethnoarchaeology of Coffee in Ethiopia
Authors: Derara Megenassa Worku
Published: August 2023

Coffea arabica, the most widely consumed variety of the plant globally, is indigenous to the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia. However, archaeological data on the origins and domestication of the plant in its home of origin is very scarce. Likewise, historical accounts that provide first-hand information on the early cultivation and consumption of the plant, especially for the southern half, are remarkably rare, and the first mention of coffee in local sources itself dates back to the 16th century. Much of the lore of coffee in Ethiopia is still handed down orally and our knowledge about the earliest consumption of the plant is, thus, veiled in mystery.

In this context, ethnoarchaeology can be a key method to approach the origins of coffee cultivation and contribute to our knowledge on issues related to its production, consumption, and cultural role. Thus, ethnoarchaeological research on the cultivation and consumption of coffee among the Kafecho, the Majangir, and the Oromo living in southwestern Ethiopia demonstrates the presence of great variation in the degree of human involvement in the four major types of coffee cultivation systems (garden coffee, semi-forest coffee, forest coffee, and plantation coffee) known in Ethiopia. They shed light on the diverse possible scenarios of the initial process of domestication. From a technological point of view, some of the traditional wooden agricultural implements employed in the cultivation of the plant can probably be traced back to the period predating agriculture or to the onset of agriculture. As a social beverage, coffee is consumed to buttress relations between neighbors or to create otherness and delimit boundaries between different groups. In the early 21st century, the uses of coffee in different rituals and ceremonies suggest that the prime motive behind the initial domestication of the plant, unlike other food crops, could be associated with religious and social needs.
Labor and Black Power
Authors: McCoy Austin
Published: August 2023

From the early 1960s through the 1970s, Black workers in various economic sectors organized and were inspired by Black Power principles such as community control, self-determination, and racial solidarity. This Black Power unionism utilized an array of strategies and tactics, ranging from direct action and radical class struggle to negotiation and lawsuits, to combat racial discrimination in employment. Black workers in sectors such as construction and auto and steel industries also utilized strikes, shutdowns, and other forms of protest to combat the intransigence of labor unions that failed to address segregation at the workplace, poor treatment of Black workers, and seniority policies that made work more precarious for them. While Black Power unionism enjoyed some successes—albeit often incomplete—their efforts to enact “affirmative action from below” encountered stiff opposition from employers and unions in the context of the economic and political crises of the 1970s. Ultimately, Black Power unionism exposed the limits of post-Jim Crow desegregation policy in US racial capitalism. Black Power unionism was a political movement that was as salient for Black workers as the Black Panther Party. Although its achievements were limited, its influence far outlived the Black Panther Party itself.
Buddhist Wall Paintings
Authors: Lee Sonya S.
Published: August 2023

Wall paintings are integral to the built environment of the Buddhist world. Images of deities, celestial spheres, and biographical narratives of all sorts constitute an integral part of Buddhist architecture, serving as the material and conceptual interfaces between art, society, and the ecosystem that link their viewers to the world they live in and realms in their imagination. Buddhist wall paintings are meant to make abstract doctrines and concepts comprehensible through visual means while promoting key moral lessons to devotees in vivid and memorable ways. They provide donors with an opportunity to express piety and accumulate merit for creating a beautiful home for the Buddha that would enable his followers to follow his footsteps and at the same time impress nonbelievers. Though far from a vehicle of individualism, the medium of wall painting challenges artists to be innovative with age-old iconographic formulae and compositional schemes in order to make the tradition anew for their own time and place.

This important artistic medium developed in tandem with the emergence of Buddhism as a world religion during the 1st millennium ce. To underscore the remarkable flexibility that Buddhist concepts and practices exhibited as they were adapted into disparate local cultures, the present study will focus on major sites in the Taklamakan and Gobi Deserts in China to explore the inter- and intraregional connections in the dissemination of Buddhist wall painting across Eurasia.
History of Muslims in Canada
Authors: Selby Jennifer A.
Published: August 2023

Diverse Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyya, Sufi, and other Muslims have lived in Canada since before its Confederation in 1867. The first were likely slaves being moved along the country's Atlantic coast, but there is little historical record to date. Settlers to Alberta have been examined to a greater extent, in part because there are more records of their presence. The first Canadian census in 1871 documented eight Muslims in Northern Alberta who likely worked as merchants and fur traders. There were, however, surely more than eight; Canadian Muslim minorities have long had reason to not be counted. The first officially recognized mosque followed, also in Alberta, in 1938. Immigration policies have long shaped Canadian Muslim life. War Measures Acts in 1914 and 1939 and policies that overtly preferred British Protestant subjects (until 1952) sharply limited Canadian religious diversity, including for Muslims. Initially, most of the early Muslim community were of Middle Eastern origin, but post–World War II immigration policy shifts meant that, beginning in 1968, Muslim Canadians became the country’s most ethnically, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse religious group. The largest Muslim population growth to date in Canada came in the 1990s, with a 130-percent increase, the same period in which there was greater institutionalization of Muslim organizations across the country.

In 2021, Canadian Muslims made up approximately 4.8 percent of the national population. Most Muslim Canadians have settled in Canada’s largest and most cosmopolitan urban regions in and surrounding Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. While statistical data show a growth in population, data on the different sectarian branches among the traditions of Islam have been largely inferred based on individual Muslims’ countries of origin. The largest group are Sunnis.

Notable Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism have been charted since 2001; the number of reported Islamophobic incidents escalated sharply beginning in 2015, when federal-level anti-niqab policies were introduced. In 2019, anti-niqab laws were established in the province of Quebec.