bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Marginal to Central: Tracing the Deployment of Children’s Rights Language in Laws and Action in Ghana
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

In order to understand the development of the systematic use of dominant children’s principles in policy and civil society discourses in Ghana, this chapter takes its departure point from 1979, a year that has come to be associated with the systematic deployment and expansion of not only the language of rights, but a culture of rights, at least within legal and policy discourses, in the country. Specifically, it explores the systematic emergence of dominant children’s rights discourses in legal and policy discourses in Ghana, as well as in broader public discourses. Given that the initial development of this framework coincided with a military take-over of the country that ushered in essentially 13 years of authoritarianism, with its attendant strategies of brutality and intimidation, this chapter additionally devotes attention to the factors that resulted in the development of a so-called culture of children’s rights, at least in relation to the policy and legal frameworks of the country, at a time of political repression and suppression.
Exploring the Multiplicity of Childhoods and Child-Rearing Practices in a Pluralistic Society and the Implications for Children’s Rights
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

To explain the existence of attitudes, discourses and lived experiences which indicate an openness and even an enthusiasm for dominant rights discourses as articulated in international laws such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this chapter highlights the impact of the country’s historical legacy on the pluralistic nature of Ghanaian society generally and on the plurality of childhood experiences that are identifiable in particular. Specifically, it highlights the extent to which the multiple heritages underpinning Ghanaian society shape the plurality of existences or realities that can be identified in the country in the contemporary period, including in relation to understandings of childhood and its termination. It does this by focusing on marriage, kinship relations and puberty rites. While for some families the dynamics of their lifestyle are shaped by one heritage more than the others, many adopt worldviews, behaviours and practices that reflect a hybridity in how they perceive, understand and experience the world around them. This results in multiple childhood and children’s rights experiences or possibilities.
Implications of the Pluralities of Childhood Conceptualizations and Lived Experiences in the Global South for Studies of Children’s Rights
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

This last substantive chapter builds on earlier chapters and considers the insights the Ghana example, focused on in this volume, offers to the broader study of children’s rights, not only in contexts in the South, but also more generally. Specifically, it considers the implications and significance of the existence of such diversities and pluralities in childhood understandings and experiences for how we study and discuss childhoods and children’s rights in contexts of the Global South. It demonstrates the need to move away from a one-dimensional narrative about the South that foregrounds experiences of predominately marginalized childhoods and their implications for the realization of children’s rights and, instead, emphasizes the need to adopt a holistic picture that considers a range of childhood lived experiences in a given context and what that means for how we study and discuss the realization of rights.
The Affective, Gendered Processes of Place Making: Understanding the Home Conservatory as a Place of Artistic Work
Authors: Rumens Nick
Published: January 2025

This chapter conceptualizes the home conservatory as a gendered and affective workspace in relation to the author’s part-time, paid occupation as a visual artist. Weaving together the author’s reflections with theoretical insights derived from human geography and organization studies, the chapter shows how the gendered dynamics of place making are coloured by past, present and projected meanings of place that are layered and accrue over time, some of which persist and cannot be easily contained by partitioning space into work and non-work zones. Place making can be experienced as a series of ongoing affective ebbs and flows that are sensitive to the dynamics of gender, whereby the historical and cultural associations of the home conservatory as feminine can support and detract from it as a place of paid artistic work that is plant centred. This chapter contributes to extant studies on how and where artists work, and how they are affected by places of work that are located in the home.
Placing Postfeminism and Affect: Exploring the Affective Constitution of Postfeminist Subjectivities by Leaders in the City of London
Authors: Lewis Patricia
Published: January 2025

This chapter brings together notions of postfeminism and place to explore the affective positivity and affective dissonance of the identity work of leaders working in the City of London. While leadership as an activity has conventionally been characterized as a realm saturated by masculine norms, a social transformation in our understanding of the ‘good’ leader means that culturally feminine relational behaviours are increasingly expected alongside masculine-marked practices. Postfeminism has produced the cultural conditions that reframe leadership as ‘contradictorily gendered’, as the reconfiguration of subjectivities characterized by the simultaneous uptake of masculine and feminine norms is fundamental to this discursive formation. The interpellation to invest in a postfeminist subjectivity is revealed in the disciplined performance of a set of life regulations alongside affective attachments expressed in the form of ‘feeling rules’, shaping the way individuals manage the demands and contradictions of a leadership identity. Research attention has been directed at postfeminism’s interpellation of women in organizational contexts, with significantly less consideration given to men’s engagement with this cultural phenomenon. Accordingly, this chapter develops a nuanced and context-specific analysis of postfeminism as a psychic and affective phenomenon and its call to men in leadership positions to invest in hybrid postfeminist subjectivities.
Trading from Home: The Affective Relations of ‘Doing Finance’ in the Domestic Setting of the Home
Authors: Sheerin Corina , Simpson Alex
Published: January 2025

As McDowell argues, the physical construction of the workplace affects, as well as reflects, the social construction of work and places its inhabitants within a relation to power. This is to both place and understand bodies and their socially encoded meaning in relation to the specific spatial, temporal and cultural context in which they are placed. In global financial centres, the spatial frame has served only to promote and reify a dominant vision of masculinist aggression, greed and competitive one-upmanship. For example, McDowell and Zaloom both highlight the impact of the traditional open-outcry exchanges on performative financial relations. However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of London has largely fallen dormant, as its trading work force has been shifted from the masculine placing of finance work to the feminized sphere of the home. In this context, this chapter capitalizes on COVID-enforced work relocation to offer a unique insight into the challenges. Specifically, it focuses on experiences of conducting a masculinist occupational endeavour in the largely feminized sphere of the home, examining key themes of detachment, loss, tension and negotiation as well as opportunism and possibility.
What Is the Potential of Psychoanalysis to Understand the Relationship between Space, Objects and Subject Formation?
Authors: Baker Darren T.
Published: January 2025

This chapter offers a psychoanalytic reading of Tyler and Cohen’s influential paper on women and space in organizations. It explores the complex relationship between internal selves and our reciprocal interactions with objects and space, moving beyond an analysis of attached discourses to understand how physical objects shape perceptions, emotions and identity. Drawing on Winnicott’s theories of ‘transitional objects’ and ‘potential space’, and Ogden’s later elaborations, the chapter explores how objects and space merge psychic reality and fantasy, enabling the women to construct new identities creatively. It shows a dialectic process of self-negotiation in the face of workplace challenges such as unfairness, harassment and discrimination. Transitional objects play a pivotal role in creating potential space, helping women to make sense of their experiences and, in some instances, directly resisting oppressive forces by crafting new workplace identities. It emphasizes the significance of safe spaces where women can collectively address challenges and promote equity as they move forward in organizations.
Affective Practices and Liminal Space-making in Palestinian Refugee Camps
Authors: Hirst Alison , Schwabenland Christina
Published: January 2025

This chapter draws on the concept of affective practice to show how kitchens and gardens – usually thought of as humble domestic spaces – can become liminal spaces that enable women to take up public identities as chefs and businesswomen alongside their private identities as wives, mothers and daughters. The contexts of this study are women’s social enterprises in two Palestinian refugee camps (established in 1948–49, following the displacement of Palestinians from what is now the state of Israel and the Occupied Territories). The social and spatial boundaries between the camps and their environs are strong and impermeable, leading to a situation where women are doubly confined, both within the camp and within domestic space and roles. We find that the kitchen and gardens allow the simultaneous enactment of traditional and novel affective practices, providing distinctive forms reassurance to family members and external stakeholders. The mutability of the spaces makes it possible for women to transgress both domestic and camp boundaries, and simultaneously redefine their gendered identities.
Placing Fear of Crime: Affect, Gender and Perceptions of Safety
Authors: Lee Murray
Published: January 2025

Fear of crime has generally been measured, assessed and discussed through the use of large-scale cross-sectional surveys. While, when designed with nuance, such surveys can produce data offering general insights into perceptions and subsequent behaviours down to neighbourhood level, they provide little insight into how individuals’ affective engagement, encounters and resonances with places and spaces serve to nonconsciously influence negative (or indeed positive) perceptions of safety. Indeed, the proxies for affect in such surveys tend to confuse it with emotion – and even more reductively, deal with it simply as a component of fear (which it is, but it is of course also much more than this). This chapter explores affect in perceptions of safety, drawing on a range of empirical projects, and assesses how the environments we engage and interact with provide nonconscious cues and codes for individuals and dividuals that serve to (re)produce hierarchies of security and safety.
To Be a Homeless Woman in Russia: Coping Strategies and Meanings of ‘Home’ on the Street
Authors: Kuziner Evgeniia
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the affective strategies of homeless women and how they use buildings and public spaces in Russia to construct a ‘home’ on the street. Research suggests that there is an important gender dimension to the problem of homelessness and that women’s homelessness has remained largely invisible because of the particular stigma attached to the ‘unaccommodated woman’ – representative of a form of deviance, even if she may be simultaneously viewed as a victim and in need. Homeless women, therefore, ‘disappear’ from the institutional spaces of homeless shelters and frequently rely on precarious arrangements to be ‘housed’. This chapter is based on research conducted in Russia (2018–21) on homeless women. It explores the gender specifics and affective strategies of coping on the street and gendered differences afforded to meanings and constructions of ‘home’.
Liminality and Affect: Knowing and Belonging among Unscripted Bodies
Authors: Robertson Nyk
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines experiences of queer bodies and the liminal spaces they navigate between being intelligible and illegitimate. These unscripted bodies become expressions of possibility models outside of prescribed gender scripts. These queer bodies offer hope and create space for belonging, authenticity and understanding. This chapter posits that there is a direct link between affect and space for queerness in a way that creates a sense of belonging among unscripted bodies. Community creates space to see possibility models, but also to find connection between each other. By examining the relationship between queer bodies, this chapter argues that these bodies and the relationship between them allows bodies to feel valid and real. The chapter highlights the lack of inclusivity within queer spaces for members of the queer community, including people of colour and people with disabilities. Lastly, the chapter encourages more research to further examine the relationship between affect and intersex bodies, as well as to explore binary systems of sex and the impact on access to resources. This chapter initiates a conversation while emphasizing the need for ongoing research around creating space for queer bodies to be in relationship with one another, and for access to possibility models for unscripted bodies.
Landscape, Gender and Belonging: Male Manual Workers in a UK Seaside Town
Authors: Simpson Ruth , Morgan Rachel
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the ‘gendering’ of landscape and how it is claimed through affective experiences of belonging. It draws on a recent study of male manual workers in a ‘struggling’ UK seaside town: Hastings in East Sussex. It highlights how the physical and cultural attributes of landscape help to generate attitudes of inclusion and exclusion through, in part, the claiming of landscape as well as through ideologically charged and dominant ways of seeing and defining. From this perspective, landscape is not just as a set of physical and topographical features but is also interrelational, marked by history and culturally produced, bound up with personal and affective experience. The chapter explores gendered understandings of landscape and highlights how, in a recursive sense, it generates and reflects affective experiences of belonging, exclusive of ‘outsiders’ and which relate to how landscape is both inhabited and claimed.
Introduction
Authors: Ireland Paddy
Published: January 2025

Why does the value of the wealth possessed by those at the top of the ‘rich lists’ vary so much from year to year? What do these fluctuations tell us about the nature of property in contemporary capitalism? Does contemporary property theory enable us fully to get to grips with the empirical realities of modern property? How is our property system implicated in the ‘polycrisis’ that we are currently experiencing?
The Dual Nature of Property
Authors: Ireland Paddy
Published: January 2025

This chapter looks at the difference between property considered to be wealth and property that is not, examining what has been called the ‘dual nature’ of property and the distinction drawn by some theorists between private property in personal possessions and private property in productive resources. As historians and anthropologists have shown, this is a distinction that has often been drawn in empirical reality. This prefaces a discussion of the nature of capital and of the historical emergence and content of the concepts of ‘capital’, ‘capitalist’ and ‘capitalism’. Capital, it is argued, is property which is ‘invested’ in search of a pecuniary return, hence the idea of ‘property-as-capital’.
Property and Social Transformation
Authors: Ireland Paddy
Published: January 2025

This chapter opens by examining the importance of history and detailed empirical (‘thick’) research to conceptual and theoretical development. It goes on to argue that all the theories of property currently vying for supremacy can make a contribution to our understanding of property in contemporary capitalism, but that a social relational conception is indispensable to understanding property-as-capital. Disagreeing with those who argue there is no such thing as capitalism, it explores the nature of capitalism, arguing that it is distinguished by a particular, historically specific ‘logic of process’ – a logic which finds expression in all areas of social life; it has moral as well as economic dimensions. In recent decades, the operation of this logic has been extended and intensified and is, it is argued, one of the main sources of the polycrisis. The chapter concludes by looking briefly at the implications of the analysis offered by the book for change, seeking to identify, in a suggestive rather than systematic manner, a trajectory for reform.
I, We
Authors: Lallement Michel
Published: January 2025

This chapter looks at everyday life at Twin Oaks and Acorn through a Goffmanian lens. The focus at this stage is investigating the ways in which a community identity is built, and deciphering the multiple codes and logics that structure ordinary social interactions. This chapter also shows that there are divisions that structure representations and practices. Gender, parental status, and age are major factors.
Introduction
Authors: Brummer Klaus
Published: January 2025

This introduction proceeds in six steps. The next section reviews the FPA literature on foreign policy change and highlights the lack of clarity concerning the role of leaders as drivers, or agents, of major foreign policy change. The following section introduces core tenets of the “leader-centered theory of foreign policy change” whose aim is to address the aforementioned shortcoming. The discussion then turns to the empirical case to which the leader-centered theory is applied, in form of changes in U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba during the Obama administration. Next, alternative explanatory factors are introduced that the FPA literature proposes as key drivers of foreign policy change and which potentially may provide equally good, if not better, explanations for the case under examination. The penultimate section discusses the aspired contributions of this book to the scholarly debate about foreign policy change in general and the specific case of U.S. foreign policy change toward Cuba in particular. The introduction concludes with a brief plan of the book.
Conclusion and Outlook
Authors: Brummer Klaus
Published: January 2025

This book introduced a leader-centered theory of foreign policy change and applied said theory to examine changes in the U.S.-Cuba policy during the Obama administration. This concluding section proceeds in three steps. It first summarizes the argument of the book. It then briefly explores the extent to which the proposed theory can account for additional changes, in the form of reversals of Obama’s policy changes, that were introduced by his successor Donald Trump. The discussion concludes with avenues for future research.
Reflections on 20-Plus Years of Protection from SEA Work
Authors: Martin Sarah
Published: January 2025

In 2005, in the author’s report Must Boys Be Boys? Ending Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peacekeeping, she quoted Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the then head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in the United Nations (UN). He said: ‘If we fail … to approve decisive and visible steps to limit sexual abuse in UN peacekeeping, then it will have serious implications for the future of peacekeeping.’ While writing the report, which laid out her findings about the widespread problem of peacekeepers sexually abusing women and children in UN peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Haiti, Martin hoped that it would generate attention and make the UN take the problem seriously and address the ‘code of conduct’ violations that were rife among the troops. In the years since, however, the political will to address the root problems that underpin the perpetration of sexual exploitation and abuse has been missing. Martin reflects on the 20 plus years she has spent working for humanitarian NGOs and UN agencies, and the evolution of the response in that time. Using personal experiences in the sector, she argues that a central challenge is conservative patriarchal cultures in peacekeeping and humanitarian organizations, which turn a blind eye to rampant abuses of power involving men who sexually harass and harm women – their co-workers, job applicants, patients, employees of other agencies, fellow refugees and vulnerable beneficiaries – preferring to sanction the whistle-blowers than remove the perpetrator or change the status quo. She suggests that efforts to deal with this culture are limited and, with few exceptions, tend to occur in a flurry in the aftermath of a media scandal, making cosmetic changes rather than addressing the issues in a systematic, concerted way that confronts the underlying power imbalances at play.
United Nations Police as a Double-Edged Sword for SEA Accountability
Authors: Kihara-Hunt Ai
Published: January 2025

In delivering its central mandate of establishing the rule of law, United Nations (UN) peace operations need to also ensure accountability, both in terms of institutional accountability for effectively delivering the mandate and as a provision of remedy for individual misconduct by peacekeeping personnel. In both, the United Nations Police (UNPOL) has a key role to play. Regarding the former, because the success of UN peace operations is measured by the extent to which the rule of law is (re)established, it is especially important for UNPOL to competently serve the population and provide good-quality rule of law advice for local rule of law institutions. On the latter, UNPOL currently comprises the main personnel who provide investigation and protection of victims/witnesses. While UNPOL has increased its capacity to deal with such issues of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and accountability, challenges remain. UNPOL officers untrained in democratic policing, and the involvement of some individual UNPOL officers in SEA as perpetrators, can respectively engender undesirable power dynamics and undermine trust in the rule of law among the general population. This chapter explores these polar dimensions of UNPOL’s roles in SEA prevention and accountability.
Victims’ Rights and Remedial Action
Authors: White Sabrina , Nyambeki Leah
Published: January 2025

This chapter traces the emergence of victim and survivor support mechanisms in protection from sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA), particularly through strategies and practices on remedial action from the 1990s to 2023. Remedial action, which centres on the response to allegations, constitutes the third prong of the United Nations’ (UN’s) long-standing strategy on PSEA (the first and second being prevention and enforcement of the zero tolerance policy). The remedial action response evolved through the development of the UN’s integrity system for PSEA. It has aligned more closely with victims’ rights frameworks following a series of public scandals in 2015. Yet many old challenges remain. Responses that inadequately address factors constraining victims’ access to justice and assistance – including political priorities, organizational reluctance, investigative capacity, resourcing and donor expectations – limit the protection of victims’ and survivors’ rights.
The Imperative of Prioritizing Victims’ Rights
Authors: Connors Jane
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on implementation of the centrepiece of United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres’ strategy to confront sexual exploitation and abuse by UN staff and non-staff personnel, which pledges to provide victims with a platform for their voices that the world cannot ignore, and to put their rights and dignity at the forefront of prevention and response. The chapter tracks the author’s work as the first UN Victims’ Rights Advocate and the work of the four Senior Victims’ Rights Officers deployed in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and South Sudan. It highlights the impact of the presence of a person on the ground tasked with prioritizing victims’ rights – someone victims trust and can turn to for assistance. The chapter identifies challenges in securing a victims’ rights approach in prevention and response, highlighting practical, institutional and resourcing challenges, and the need for clarifying the meaning of a victims’ rights approach and the concept of ‘accountability’. The author argues that moving the gaze from the reputation of organizations and the employment, criminal and civil accountability of perpetrators towards realizing the rights and dignity of victims has been positive. However, more is required to connect efforts across the complex system to regain the trust of those who have been harmed.
Agency and Affect in PSEA: Understanding Agency through a Transnational Intersectional Lens
Authors: Nasser-Eddin Nof
Published: January 2025

This chapter analyses safeguarding and preventing sexual exploitation and abuse practices within international organizations. The author argues that there is a need to decentralize northern understandings of victim-centred approaches. International approaches assume that the needs of victims and survivors revolve around material requirements such as legal, psychosocial, medical and monetary support. In contrast, research shows that many victims and survivors demand reparations beyond the material and have more restorative visions for the justice they seek. Although policy makers speak to the importance of centring the victim in traditional safeguarding systems, they often assume that survivors have uniform material needs. Little attention is paid to the fact that individuals are affected by abusive practices in myriad ways and to varying degrees, and that the their needs are also different. I propose transnationalism as a tool to shift power and decentre dominant and hegemonic understandings of agency and victim-centred approaches. I adopt an intersectional transnational lens to unravel people’s different agencies and move beyond universalizing victims’ and survivors’ experiences. I explore how agency can be understood and centralized through ‘affect’ and emotions, thereby decentring universalized approaches to SEA. This is particularly important to be able to build just accountability frameworks which do not stereotype and overlook victims’ experiences.
Empowered Aid: Transforming Gender and Power Dynamics in the Distribution of Humanitarian Aid
Authors: Potts Alina
Published: January 2025

For over two decades, the aid community has expressed shock when large-scale abuses have come to light – from the widespread abuse of children by peacekeepers and aid workers brought to light in West Africa in 2002 to the abuse by World Health Organization and NGO staff responding to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, uncovered by journalists in 2020. It is clear that those sent to help people affected by conflict and disaster can sometimes harm them. Why, despite efforts to hold offending individuals and organizations accountable, does it persist? Unequal power on the basis of heteronormative gender roles – with men generally having more access to and control over resources than women – is a root cause of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and other forms of gender-based violence. These power imbalances are further entrenched in systems of humanitarian aid, in which the people affected by crisis and dependent on aid for their survival have the least say in how it is delivered and the least ability to hold aid actors to account. Displaced women and girls fall at the intersection of these inequities, with their voices often missing even when crisis-affected communities are consulted by aid actors. Yet working with diverse women and girls to shift power and recentre their experiences – and their solutions – is necessary to confront these underlying power imbalances and address the root causes of SEA.
Rethinking PSEA: Reflections for Policy Makers
Authors: Westendorf Jasmine-Kim
Published: January 2025

This chapter builds on the discussions in each of the preceding chapters to highlight the overarching policy implications this collection has for how we might better understand and respond to sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in peacekeeping and aid. The author reflects on the fault-lines that have emerged in efforts to protect individuals and communities from sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA) and the cumulative lessons from the chapters in this volume, and argues that structural and systemic obstacles continue to hamper effective, grounded local PSEA work despite both significant progress and investment in building stronger integrity systems across the United Nations and humanitarian sectors and the elevation of victim-centred approaches as a cornerstone of PSEA. Drawing on the pathways set out in individual chapters, the author considers the potential for new ways of making sense of, and responding to, SEA perpetrated by peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers against those populations in conflict and crisis, in which they live and work.
Introduction
Authors: Castellino Joshua
Published: January 2025

Discussions around colonial crime are summarily dismissed in former colonial powers, whose official histories airbrush these activities out. Efforts to reference colonization are met with vehement rebuttal from those who do not feel the need to make themselves aware of the facts, or with irritated pauses prior to a change of subject. This cultivated mass amnesia lies in contrast to discussions in former colonies, where all ills are blamed on colonial history, thus exonerating post-colonial governments. This introductory chapter sets the scene for understanding why the planet’s most recent colonial history is deeply relevant to its present. It also highlights the necessity for careful calibration of the issues in order to design solutions that mitigate society’s multiple and complicated contemporary challenges.
Combatting the Challenge of Colonial Crime: Ten Hurdles
Authors: Castellino Joshua
Published: January 2025

The momentum that swept colonial governments away in the last century shepherded the emergence of a swathe of independent States. This decolonization process is celebrated as a stunning success. Yet the crimes committed under colonial rule remain unaccounted for. Decolonization was more akin to a privatization of former colonies, where ‘ownership’ passed to select elites that maintained hegemony rather than to subjugated masses who aspired to peaceful, independent and free societies. This chapter identifies ten specific hurdles to be overcome in order to account for the crimes perpetrated during colonial rule.
Curing Cancer: A Five-Point Plan to Address Colonial Crime
Authors: Castellino Joshua
Published: January 2025

This final chapter in Part I outlines the remedies that must be developed to address colonial crime. It begins by emphasizing the importance of recognition of these activities as wrong. It addresses current activities, including meaningful apologies, litigation, return of cultural property and reparations processes, and derives inspiration from initiatives instigated by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and others. The chapter outlines how restitution, reparations and compensation alongside a solidarity-oriented attitude can replace denial with accountability, greed with empathy and harm with recovery.
Colonial Crime, Environmental Destruction and Indigenous Peoples: A Roadmap to Accountability and Protection
Authors: Castellino Joshua
Published: January 2025

With the need to mitigate climate change highest on the agenda for structural change, this chapter underscores how colonial-era systems underpin the present crisis. It traces the erection of the extractive exploitative economy that was built on the territories of Indigenous peoples. This replaced sustainable circular economies with consumption-oriented profit-motivated drives that are still venerated as progress despite scientifically backed evidence of the damage they cause to biodiversity, communities and the planet. The chapter identifies Indigenous peoples’ leadership as key for critical climate adaptation and mitigation, but also for the medium-term goal of achieving sustainability.
Introduction: Toward a New Politics of Fear
Authors: Flinders Matthew , Degerman Dan , Johnson Matthew
Published: January 2025

At the start of the pandemic, three of us came together out of shared concern for the place of emotions in politics and shared belief that many orthodoxies on fear as an instrument of public administration were just wrong. As the pandemic worked its way through communities and countries across the globe, it became increasingly clear that longstanding rejections of fear as a politically destructive or pre-political emotion failed to grasp the vital role it can play in enabling societies to deal with crises. We set out the ways in which key frames of analysis had been rendered inadequate by the pandemic. We argued that influential critiques of fear as anti-political, irrational, and borne of ignorance, were contradicted by examples of collective action, effective responses to real and concrete threats, and the central role of scientific information in framing the pandemic as a fearful threat (Degerman et al, 2020). Our conclusion was that, as a consequence, there was space for new scholarship on the politics of fear. This volume is the most substantive iteration of that work. COVID-19 reminded us of a truth apparent since our emergence as a species: we are animals vulnerable to communicable disease. In that context, it seems not just arrogant but ridiculous for human beings to have dismissed as pathological an evolutionary adaptation so vital for dealing with threats to existence. Fear stems from perception of threat and serves as a stimulus for action. It is not just a trigger of fight or flight.
Castration Anxiety, COVID-19 and the Extremist Right
Authors: Leeb Claudia
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, I draw on Theodor W. Adorno's psychoanalytically inspired works on (neo-)fascism and psychoanalytic theory to outline the threat of castration in contemporary capitalist societies on economic, interpersonal and bodily levels. I then explain how the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened people's castration anxieties on all three levels in a class- and gender-specific way. Finally, I expose how the right extremist president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the right extremist leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, Norbert Hofer, utilised castration anxieties in their psychologically oriented tricks to strengthen their base and capture new followers.
Politics of Fear in Brazil: Far-Right Conspiracy Theories on COVID-19
Authors: Kalil Isabela , Silveira Sofia Cherto , Pinheiro Weslei , Kalil Álex , Vicente Pereira João , Azarias Wiverson , Amparo Ana Beatriz
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we present an analysis of narratives mobilised by extreme right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, from March to December 2020. Our research indicates that, throughout that year, despite changes in the categories used, fear was continuously mobilised by the Brazilian president connecting an alleged 'communist conspiracy' to the coronavirus pandemic by creating narratives around the terms 'Chinese virus' and 'Chinese vaccine'. Mapping these conspiratorial discourses, we hope to better understand (1) how Bolsonaro converts conspiracy theories into official state discourse as well as public policy, and (2) how Bolsonaro and his mediatic representatives weaponise tensions between individual freedom and public healthcare and the scientific community. Taking this scenario into account, we analyse how Bolsonaro uses social fear during the pandemic as part of his permanent campaign in a process resulting in serious risks to both public health and democracy.
‘Fora, Bolsonaro genocida!’: COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Neo-Nationalism and Neoliberal Necropolitics in Brazil. A Reply to Kalil et al
Authors: Borba Rodrigo
Published: January 2025

In both popular culture and academe, renewed interest in conspiracy theories (CTs) has followed in the wake of the recent global rise of far-right extremism. Examples abound: allegations that Hilary Clinton ran a child-trafficking ring from a Washington pizza parlour gained momentum during the 2016 US elections; survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 have been portrayed as crisis actors hired to advance gun-prohibition policies; QAnon supporters aver that Donald Trump has defended US democracy against the 'deep state', namely political and economic elites that supposedly control democratically elected governments from behind the scenes; more recently, voter fraud accusations were raised to counter Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election; and during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has furthered theories that the virus was created in a laboratory in China to advance its plans of economic domination, while in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has championed smear campaigns against health authorities and the media, undermining their recommendations for masks and physical distancing. This overlap between CTs and far-right extremism is not that surprising for at least two reasons. On the one hand, CTs flourish in moments of stark social change because they serve as explanatory devices to make sense of events that threaten existing worldviews (Douglas et al, 2019). On the other, studies seem to suggest that right-wingers (and authoritarian ones at that) are more prone to foster conspiracy thinking due to their need to manage uncertainty which, in turn, provides grounds for extremism (Richey, 2017).
The Collective Disorientation of the COVID-19 Crisis
Authors: Velasco Pablo Fernández , Perroy Bastien , Casati Roberto
Published: January 2025

One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the warping of our sense of time during lockdown), to name but a few. This generalised state of disorientation has substantial effects on wellbeing and decision making. In this chapter, we review the multiple dimensions of disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis and use state-of-the art research on disorientation to gain insight into the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic. Just like standard, spatial cases of disorientation, the non-spatial forms of disorientation prevalent in the current crisis consist in the mismatch between our frames of reference and our immediate experience, and they result in anxiety, helplessness and isolation, but also in the possibility of re-orienting. The current crisis provides a unique environment in which to study non-spatial forms of disorientation. In turn, existing knowledge about spatial disorientation can shed light on the shifting landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Disorientation, Distrust and the Pandemic: A Reply to Fernández Velasco et al
Authors: Ratcliffe Matthew
Published: January 2025

In their chapter, 'The Collective Disorientation of the Covid-19 Crisis', Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati (2021) reflect on the 'multifarious state of disorientation' that many of us have found ourselves in during the pandemic. They provide a rich and insightful account, which ties together complementary strands of research in various disciplines. In particular, they do an excellent job of bringing phenomenology into dialogue with relevant findings in the cognitive sciences. The term 'disorientation' can be used to describe a range of experiences, arising in contexts that include illness, bereavement and loss, political change, and migration. What might these experiences have in common? For instance, how does feeling spatially disoriented in unfamiliar surroundings resemble disorientation in the face of political upheaval? In an earlier study of disorientation, Harbin (2016: 13-17) settles for family resemblance between the various forms of disorientation. Instead, Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati seek to identify a feature shared by all. Disorientations, they propose, involve a feeling stemming from the 'evaluation and regulation of processes integrating frames of reference pertaining to a variety of domains'. I have some sympathy with this overall approach and accept that all disorientations may well share something in common. However, in what follows, I want to draw a distinction between two importantly different types of disorientation (both of which accommodate considerable variety). This will involve further reflecting on the interpersonal and social dimensions of disorientation. In finding our way around different 'domains', from the spatial to the political, we do not rely exclusively on internalised frames of reference.
Orientation, Disorientation, Reorientation: A Reply to Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati
Authors: Di Friedberg Marcella Schmidt
Published: January 2025

It is a great pleasure for me to comment on the chapter by Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati (2021) (Chapter 9) for three reasons. First, because it speaks to a topic of personal interest to me, which I have long been committed to researching; second, because it offers a broad treatment of the theme of disorientation that extends beyond the spatial dimension; and third, because it insightfully identifies disorientation as a key feature of the COVID-19 emergency we are currently going through. Spatial disorientation is of crucial relevance in the contemporary world and is 'a profoundly geographical theme that concerns our relationship with space, places, the body, emotions, and time' (Schmidt di Friedberg, 2018: 15). In their wide-ranging article, Fernández Velasco et al examine both spatial and non-spatial forms of disorientation and the relationships between them, all against the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic. The authors open the chapter by reporting on recent interest in disorientation in all its different forms and across different fields, whether spatial, cultural, political, social, or related to migrants and refugees, and presenting an up-to-the minute review of recent studies. Disorientation is a powerful metaphor for the contemporary era. It is used across a broad range of contexts, both spatial and non-spatial, to express the challenges associated with finding reference points in the world we live in. However, the authors of this chapter go beyond the metaphorical meaning of disorientation and usefully explore its inherently affective dimension. Disorientation - they argue - may be viewed as a metacognitive feeling that permeates the entire affective sphere, giving rise to experiences of 'anxiety, confusion, helplessness and self-diminishment'.
Obedience in Times of COVID-19 Pandemics: A Renewed Governmentality of Unease?
Authors: Bigo Didier , Guild Elspeth , Kuskonmaz Elif Mendos
Published: January 2025

This chapter transects and articulates different disciplines and lines of thought in order to understand the redefinitions of the boundaries of political power in times of COVID-19, and the practices which may outlive the potential normalisation of the crisis when an efficient vaccine is discovered. We claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is an original form of governmentality by unease articulating three dimensions. First, the basic reaction of modern states when faced with uncertainty is to apply national-territorial logics of controls. Second, bureaucracies consider the virus as a danger to security and organise public health emergencies according to the rules of the game of national security, creating tensions between internal security, public health and the economy because policymakers may be unsure about the priorities and may prioritise border controls. Third, resistance against the chosen national policies show that people are not led by a politics of fear and/or protection, but rather their own concerns about themselves with peer-to-peer surveillance as a key element of their compliance. Contact tracing technologies and strategies of border controls are key elements to analyse. We do so in different contexts: the UK, the EU and Turkey.
What Is the New Governmentality of the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Reply to Bigo et al
Authors: Villadsen Kaspar
Published: January 2025

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has spurred extensive governmental reactions worldwide, such as the closure of borders, the lockdown of entire countries, unprecedented economic stimulus packages, and the invention of digital tracking devices that enable authorities to monitor infection rates and the movements of infected individuals. An important question is to what extent the more detailed surveillance of citizens established by health authorities and governments in many countries will outlive the COVID-19 crisis. What does the pandemic tell us about the ease by which governments have revived the timeworn instruments of state sovereignty, such as territorial closure, restrictions of access to public spaces, and the privileging of national populations as the ultimate object of government? Do we witness a certain convergence between countries considered liberal-democratic and authoritarian regimes in terms of the parallel enhancements of citizen surveillance, rule by appeals to fear, and restrictions of our freedom in terms of governments' use of personal data? In their chapter, 'Obedience in Times of COVID-19 Pandemics: A Renewed Governmentality of Unease?', Didier Bigo, Elspeth Guild and Elif Mendos Ku?konmaz (2021) offer a series of timely reflections on the above questions. The chapter has the format of an essay in which the authors offer their thoughts on three themes related to the COVID-19 pandemic: the exercise of state power; the relation between medical expertise and governance; and the significance of digital surveillance technology. The analyses are tentative and, given the ongoing and open-ended unfolding of the pandemic, more contextualised research will be required to substantiate the chapter's, at times, sweeping claims and conclusions.