bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Nearly Two Decades of Concern, Yet Young People Are Still Dying
Authors: Alexander James
Published: September 2023

This chapter outlines the main themes of the book and the related policy debates and data trends. The impact of neighbourhood deprivation on local relationships and street crime are introduced along with the initiatives featured in the research to address such issues. These include developments in targeted youth support, trauma-informed practice and the coproduction of local services. The chapter will give a summary of leading theoretical standpoints within studies relating to youth at risk and urban crime, the control of space, and coproduction and professionalism alongside outlining the Bourdieusian framework used throughout the book. The chapter then gives an overview of the developments in national and local interventions aimed at tackling knife crime.
A New Panorama of Child Voice in the Child Protection Context
Authors: Michail Samia
Published: September 2023

This chapter uses the concept of reflexivity to discuss how child voice, as distinct from children’s participation, is the product of a dynamic interplay of relationships that occurs within and outside of the child protection system. A critical reflection of the significant role of political structures, processes, relationships, narratives, and the linkages between them in child protection work shows the complex variables that influence the implementation of child voice in child protection. The multiplicity of socio-cultural aspects of participation, policymaking, and practice with children is discussed in terms of an ‘ecosystem’ that draws attention to the complexity of structural and cultural conditions that influence child voice. Moreover, our understanding of child voice can be developed by making tangible the unarticulated politicisation of child voice that sits in the background of everyday practice.
Witnessing as an Expression of Critical Empathy: An Examination of Audience Responses to a Refugee-Themed Documentary
Authors: Khorana Sukhmani
Published: September 2023

The mainstream news media narratives that aim to effect social change on the issue of asylum seeker policy in Australia often stop short at conflating humanisation with the invoking of empathy. In this chapter, I unpack how this kind of individually mobilised, transient and selective empathy is problematic. This critique of empathy is followed by the case study of a small-scale project in which the documentary Freedom Stories was screened in a university and audience feedback was obtained. An analysis of the responses emphasises ‘witnessing’ as an expression of critical empathy that is more conducive to taking responsibility through concerted action.
Outlining the Definitional Boundaries of ‘Torture’
Authors: Canning Victoria
Published: September 2023

Contemporary legal and academic frameworks around torture are predominately based in the UN Convention against Torture or Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (United Nations, 1984). Focus is therefore often placed on the intentional infliction of pain or suffering in the context of obtaining information, for the purposes of punishment, and/or with the involvement or consent of a state official, or sometimes working on behalf of a state. As such, torture is an instrument of state violence, one which is inflicted within sites of detention and confinement, and/or in relation to publicly political agendas. As UN Secretary General António Guterres recently noted, ‘The prohibition of torture is absolute – under all circumstances. Yet this core principle is undermined every day in detention centres, prisons, police stations, psychiatric institutions and elsewhere’ (Guterres, 2019). This statement, like many others, reiterates legalistic notions of torture as an infliction of suffering which relates almost exclusively to confinement. While this is of paramount importance in the context of state crime, there is significant scope for developing a gendered analysis of torture both within and beyond this sphere. These discussions, debates and cases about what constitutes torture have serious sociopolitical consequences, as seen in the context of, for example, the ground-breaking Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture (Jones, 2014). However, the one common thread throughout much scholarship and literature is that it takes for granted normative definitions of torture, with little discussion of what torture is or what we mean when we use the term. As this chapter, and later chapters will highlight, over-dependence on this deterministic epistemological stance can be highly problematic.
Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism
Authors: Adébísí Folúké
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on how the society (space, place, and all they contain) around law’s human has been and is being constituted by influences of colonial logics and praxes. This examination takes reference from the use of race as an abstractive technology in the making of property from humanity. Therefore, it leans further into an analysis of how racial capitalism, in particular, and Euro-modern law in general are both entangled in the legal ontologies of, not just human-body negation, but also contingent appropriation/redefinition of land and space. This process ties the constitution of law’s human to the creation of a universalised Euro-modern legal ontology of land as a means of capital accumulation as well as human veneration reliant on this. Thus, this chapter argues that one of the most significant outcomes of the legitimate property-fication of labour, land, and nature through Euro-modern legal epistemologies, is the complicity of legal technologies in continuing the colonial conditions of life that extend beyond the escalating disappearance of testamentary life into the looming endangerment of the planet.
The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
Authors: Adébísí Folúké
Published: September 2023

This chapter starts with the premise taken up in the previous chapters – that decolonisation is a specific anti-colonial political project, instituted by colonised peoples, including, peoples in what is designated the Global South, racialised peoples, and indigenous peoples. It recognises that taking up decolonisation within law schools means that we must firstly, appreciate the deep and often invisible impact of colonialism, as ‘a structure and not an event’, on our work in law schools. This position recognises the nigh impossibility of enacting decolonisation from within law schools. Consequently, this chapter responds with some theoretical reflection and practical suggestions to the question, “What does it mean to dream of new anticolonial worlds from within the law school?” The response to that question in this chapter is grounded in detailed appreciation of the ways in which colonial conditions of life are inaugurated and reproduced, and queries if and how legal knowledge within the Global North can disrupt and unsettle this cycle of (re)production – through the curriculum, research, and other ancillary practices.
Safe Spaces and Solidarity: Confronting Gendered Violence in the US Occupy Encampments
Authors: Montoya Celeste
Published: September 2023

Despite its unifying cry ‘We are the 99%’, the struggle for solidarity and inclusion in the US Occupy movement faced many obstacles, including allegations of sexual violence and harassment in the encampments. Internally groups grappled with how to respond to the allegations of gendered violence. While some participants dismissed or questioned the legitimacy of the claims, feminists organised to demand better. The approaches they took, however, varied within and across camps, with some taking a more intersectional approach than others. This chapter examines the various tactics deployed by feminists to address the violence occurring in protest camps, as well as the challenges they encountered both internally and externally. It concludes that failures to adequately address sexual violence and harassment threaten movement solidarity and success; however, efforts that ignore or even replicate intersecting forms of oppression can do the same.
‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit’ (But You Can Try): Gendered Contestations and Contradictions at Menwith Hill Women’s Peace Camp
Authors: Mackay Finn
Published: September 2023

In the mid-1990s, Menwith Hill Women’s Peace Camp outside the US National Security Agency military base in Yorkshire was the only full-time women-only peace camp in the UK. Its inhabitants were united mainly by a brave and passionate commitment to non-violent direct action (NVDA), and a tolerance for Goddess songs. While the unifying slogans and shared language of the peace camp often invoked lesbian feminist and Radical Feminist themes, it was not necessary to be an actual believer. These cultural norms were effective as humorous, affectionate totems in the building of collective identity, not proof of essentialism. While camp was a women’s space, it was not a gendered space as such. Gender was at once much more vibrant and various than in the mainstream, while also fading into the background. This chapter will reflect on some of the roles, meanings and contradictions of sexuality and gender in the peace camp. It will do so in the light of more recent developments in the feminist movement and protest cultures in the UK, such as the ‘spycops’ sexual abuse scandal and the so-called ‘gender wars’ in which the meaning and exclusions of the category ‘woman’ are under renewed scrutiny.
‘Why the Compost Toilets?’: Ecofeminist (Re)Generations at the HoriZone Ecovillage
Authors: Haran Joan
Published: September 2023

This chapter reflects on the key role played in the HoriZone Ecovillage – a protest camp set up during the July 2005 G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland – by the well-known ecofeminist, Starhawk. I discuss the interweaving of my own path with Starhawk’s, and how my interest in her activism is rooted in my reading of her fiction. I explore the emergence of the Green Bloc from Starhawk’s Earth Activist Training course before focusing on how their vision was implemented in the Ecovillage camp. Finally, I situate Starhawk’s writing and permaculture practices in broader ecofeminist trans-spatial and trans-temporal movement lineages. In so doing, I provide an account of her distinctive contribution to movement capacity-building and to prefiguring alternative ways of living, and in particular to understanding the ways that compost toilets are ‘the political aspects of this’.
Integration
Authors: Scott John , Staines Zoe
Published: September 2023

Although much has been written about rural policing, accounts of policing islands are generally rare. Research in the Global North has presented policing in remote and small-scale societies as community focused, owing to low crime rates in such societies. But is there actually less crime or less reportage of crimes, such as domestic violence, which recent research has found to be endemic in all social contexts? This chapter examines the issue of integration in relation to policing in the Pacific, where most research on policing islands has been conducted. The Pacific Islands are loosely sub-divided into cultural and geographic groupings of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. Most Pacific Island communities (PICs) are microstates with small, geographically dispersed populations. Popular culture has provided a largely idealized account of policing in remote and small societies – characterized as homogenous if slightly eccentric communities. However, policing islands demonstrates the need for caution about valorizing specific models of policing as universally appropriate and functional.
Storying Belonging, Enacting Citizenship? (Dis)articulations of Belonging in a Community Theatre Project with Young Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Leipzig, Germany
Authors: Kirndörfer Elisabeth
Published: September 2023

Participatory theatre, in a wide body of works, is discussed as an artistic format that allows marginalised subjects to articulate their voices and enact citizenship – especially in the context of migration and race. In this contribution, I will critically engage with these perspectives and investigate the ambiguities and ambivalences that come along with story-based theatre projects, particularly when involving young refugees and asylum seekers. Based on three months of fieldwork in a community theatre project in Leipzig (Germany), I will take a closer look at moments of silence, rupture and withdrawal and reflect on (dis)articulation as enactment of citizenship. This work is embedded in the Humanities European Research Area research project ‘The everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in public space’ (2019–2022).
Jackets and Jewellery: Racialised Dispossession and Struggles over Public Space in Denmark
Authors: Jacobsen Malene H.
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers how processes of dispossession are at the centre of contemporary struggles over public space, rights and political belonging, which refugees often become subject to and part of upon their arrival to a country of supposed refuge. In the midst of the recent ‘European refugee crisis’, the Danish government introduced a new law which enabled the Danish state to carry out a search-and-seize order on newly arrived refugees, seizing refugees’ cash, jewellery, electronics and other personal belongings. While this law might be seen as an exception to the humanitarian reception of refugees, I argue that we need to consider how processes of dispossession are at play within Western states’ treatment of refugees and racialised migrants more broadly. In this chapter, I examine dispossession as it relates to racialised youth (including refugees and migrants) in Denmark, focusing on the Danish Prime Minister’s most recent call to confiscate expensive down jackets, watches and mobile phones from so-called ‘indvandrerdrenge’ (immigrant boys) who are deemed to create insecurity in public spaces. Drawing on the analytic of dispossession, I show how processes of gendered and racialised othering are both discursively and materially constituted.
Venezuelan Refugee Youth and Brazilian Schooling: The Individual between Languages and Spaces
Authors: Silva Lucena Camila da , De Nardi Fabiele Stockmans
Published: September 2023

In the year 2018, Brazil began to face its own migration crisis. Despite already receiving refugees from different countries, in recent years the situation became worrying when a large number of Venezuelans began to cross the border. The enrolment of foreign students in the country has doubled in recent years and most of them are concentrated in the public network. Considering this context, the aim of this chapter is to analyse the mechanisms enabling the reception of Venezuelan refugee youth in the school context. This represents a major challenge for Brazilian public education since there is no unity in Brazil in terms of law that indicates how to work with refugee youth in school. For our observations in the school context we use the methodological guidelines for ethnographic work in this context of Medvedovski and colleagues (2015) and Rockwell (2009)
Emotion and Spatial Belonging: Exploring Young Migrant Men’s Emotional Geographies in Cork, Ireland
Authors: Fathi Mastoureh
Published: September 2023

In recent decades the study of emotions in the daily lives and geographies of migrants has received growing attention. In this chapter, I discuss the emotional attachments expressed by young male migrants in relation to public spaces in Cork, Ireland. This chapter interrogates the interrelation of affect and emotion and ‘spatial belonging’ from a migrant perspective, and is based on a recent study of homemaking practices of two subgroups of young male migrants in Ireland: international students and refugees. The data collected through walking interviews and photo elicitation interviews show interesting similarities between these two different groups. This chapter focuses on public spaces as homes and thus offers a novel analysis of emotions within the context of migration of single young male migrants in Europe and their ways of creating a meaningful sense of spatial belonging within public spaces.
Beyond COVID-19 Lockdown Compliance: A Gender Analysis
Authors: Finch Naomi , Halliday Simon , Meers Jed , Tomlinson Joe , Wilberforce Mark
Published: September 2023

In March 2020, the government introduced a set of restrictions to ‘lockdown’ the United Kingdom in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the central purpose of which was to protect public health by both containing the rate of infection and protecting the NHS’ capacity to treat a potential influx of patients. These rules represented a profound interference with everyday life, but it was clear that this interference was experienced differently throughout the population. In this chapter, the authors draw upon an extensive dataset – constituted of national surveys, focus groups, and interviews – gathered during the first wave of the virus in the UK to provide an analysis of how this was experienced by women. The authors test the hypothesis that it may be that women are more likely to find certain rules that interfere with prior caring responsibilities more challenging than others, and argue that research examining compliance to individual rules might better highlight gender differences in compliance than overall compliance.
Markets Are Not Morally Neutral
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

After initially reviewing then rejecting Gregory Mankiw’s, and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz’s, explanations for inequality, this chapter turns to Thomas Piketty’s concern with inheritance and structural exploitation via investment instruments, showing that his thesis is more radical than critics acknowledge. Still, Piketty stops short of offering a critique of the contingency of inheritance itself and the institutional structure created to sustain its political potency.
Practice Case Study: Programme Commissioning and Co-opetition in the UK and Australia
Authors: Baker Orla , Ingold Jo , Crichton Emma , Carr Tony
Published: September 2023

Employer engagement is increasingly recognized by policymakers across countries as being critical to the success of active labour market policies and programmes, yet businesses are rarely considered to be genuine stakeholders and programmes are too often developed without consideration being given to the needs and wants of employers. In this commissioning and funding environment, labour markets are awash with programmes, providers and products that vie for businesses’ attention. Additionally, the competitive landscape underpinning programmes in countries such as the UK and Australia that have embraced quasi-marketization reduces cooperation between providers, undermining services for both unemployed people and employers. In both the UK and Australia, central government departments are beginning to signal the importance of collaboration and ‘co-opetition’ between providers. However, successful employer engagement in programmes begins at the level of policy development and design. Drawing on policy and commissioning developments in the UK and Australia, this chapter argues that programme commissioners at all spatial levels need to recognize that the current landscape is not designed around businesses but there is significant potential to introduce collaborative and co-opetitive models based on mutual principles where all stakeholders gain.
Vertical Relationships: Connecting the Local to the National and Global
Authors: Leonardsson Hanna
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the notion of vertical relationships through complementarity, autonomy and agency, arguing that vertical relationships matter for other local developments, which in turn mitigate conflict. This chapter highlights a multi-level approach to local peacebuilding through vertical relationships between the municipality of Tyre, Bourj Hammoud and Saida and central state authorities, national political figures and international actors. In addition to discussing the municipalities’ relationships to these actors, the chapter analyses them in relation to local infrastructural developments and waste management. The chapter concludes that when vertical relationships promote a common vision, the municipality gains capacity and autonomy to pursue local developments with a peacebuilding potential. However, vertical relationships also differ and municipalities navigate different vertical relationships to pursue local goals. In Lebanon’s divided state and the polarization of the Middle East, such relationships may promote local peacebuilding through national and international divides, or pursue national peacebuilding goals at the expense of local peace.
Finance Takes Flight
Authors: Roscoe Philip
Published: September 2023

Theorists have argued that capital always seeks to break free from the circuits of production, and Chapter 13 shows how such a leap took place. It follows the transformation in finance as it moves to a fully electronic high-speed form of trading. It looks at the technological innovations and transformations to the architecture of markets that made this possible – London’s Tradepoint market and New York’s Island and the ‘SOES’ bandits – how these were mimicked and outcompeted by a fully automated system; and how these innovations made their way into the mainstream. It follows the final unsuccessful transformation of OFEX into a high-speed trading venue or dark pool.
Global City Tokyo: Japan’s Diversification from Within
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 shifts the lens to Tokyo, a vibrant metropolis and business hub in the Asia-Pacific region and the capital city of Japan, an ‘island nation’ and country that, despite an influx of migrants over the past three decades, continues to be perceived as largely homogeneous both from within and outside of Japan. The chapter discusses how Japan has rapidly opened up to migration in recent years, leading to an immense diversification of Tokyo’s resident population, including its foreign residents. However, foreigners are still seen as guests rather than immigrants. The chapter traces the roots of Japan’s constructions of difference and thereby explains the peculiar positioning of the (mostly white) European migrants in contemporary Tokyo society.
Conclusion
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

The conclusion highlights the complex decision-making processes and the structural constraints involved in migrants’ geographical, organisational/career and social mobility. It emphasises the significance that the three entangled dimensions of mobility assume for the EU Generation’s pursuit of middle-class life paths in Asian global cities. The longitudinal research foregrounds how the particular generation and life stage upon the EU Generation’s emigration from Europe have turned geographically distant Asian cities into attractive destinations for career progression and distinction in a time of flexible labour and shorter employment contracts. Previously accumulated mobility capital and the notion of insecurity lying ahead in any globalised labour market render continuous mobility or residence abroad the most reasonable path to choose for the time being and thus pave the way for an entire life stage, or longer, in Asia. The discussion identifies remaining and newly emerging obstacles to the incorporation of independently moving middle-class migrants such as the EU Generation in both cities. In doing so, the conclusion reaffirms the rationale for considering Singapore and Tokyo, and potentially other non-Western global cities, as a viable option and a potentially long-term residence for the EU Generation and middle-class labour migrants in general.
Addressing the Digital Gender Gap
Authors: Henshaw Alexis
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the problem of differential access to technology worldwide, interrogating the meaningfulness of current efforts to understand the issue. It makes the argument that current international frameworks, which envision the digital divide primarily as an issue of underdevelopment, ignore important security-related factors that shape gendered access to technology. It further highlights how increased engagement with technology – absent an understanding of the diverse lived experiences of women – produces new forms of insecurity. These themes are further illustrated with case studies from South Asia, which demonstrate both gendered insecurities and the emerging spaces for discourse on digital rights.
Extremism and Gender-Based Violence Online
Authors: Henshaw Alexis
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores how policy initiatives related to the protection of women and girls find relevance in the digital space, while also problematizing how overly simplistic notions of gender contribute to a failure to stem the rising tide of online gender-based extremism. With a particular focus on extremist communities including highly organized groups like the Islamic State and more diffuse (but still defined) communities like male supremacist movements, this chapter explores the diverse ways that extremists commit online violence against women, engage in homophobic and transphobic violence, and deploy discourse using gender as a recruitment tool.
How to Grasp Agency: The Power Resources Approach
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

As this book seeks to move away from a deterministic analysis, its analytical framework includes not just how workers are organized but also how they organize themselves. This chapter thus provides the second part of its analytical framework to investigate the agency of workers. While this does not constitute the focus of the book, it refers to the importance of class consciousness and subjectivity, in order to bridge the relations of alienation within the larger analysis of agency. It then focuses on sketching out the Power Resources Approach (PRA), inspired primarily, but not exclusively, by the works of Beverly Silver and Erik Olin Wright. It presents four different power resources that workers mobilize while navigating (counteracting) political–economic conditions. Understanding these power resources as co-evolving with one another and bound to their larger context, this chapter first presents the structural power of workers (marketplace and workplace), tying the latter to different forms of resistance. It then moves on to discuss associational power, institutional power and societal power (coalitional and discursive power). The analysis of these power resources is integral to examining the case studies, highlighting labor’s different efforts in organizing and fostering solidarity given the implications but to an extent also possibilities of the differing nature of the platform and of the work.
Instrumentalizing Technology: Digital Solidarity with and among MTurk Workers
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

As the second half of the analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, this chapter looks at their agency to focus on the new challenges and different possibilities created by the organization of the platform and wider political–economic, social and technological conditions. It engages with their structural, associational, institutional and societal power resources in relation to the platform’s web-based gig nature. Despite a weak marketplace and workplace power and having their hands tied on MTurk, workers navigate and, in varying ways, reclaim and instrumentalize the very infrastructure of the Internet for their interests. In doing so, they form solidarity, interact and provide support for one another through alternative spaces of online associations and collectivities beyond traditional unions. This potential of an associational power is not accompanied, however, by any institutional power for MTurk workers, as their precarious status leaves them outside of any governing legal and industrial relations framework. This may be changing, in view efforts to reclassify workers and improve their conditions, thereby also strengthening their societal power. Studying the case of the MTurk workers can shed light on the repercussions of web-based labor and precarization for their agency within and beyond the platform economy, as well as potentialities for collective organization.
The Power of Amazon Workers and Platform Workers
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

This chapter contrasts the power resources of its two Amazon cases, while contextualizing them within the larger platform economy. It discusses the implications of the different configurations of platform organization regarding the larger question of agency. Despite hostility from capital and despite being undermined by the broader context, traditional time laborers like Amazon warehouse workers have mobilized their growing workplace and associational power and show signs of an institutional power. Such location-based workers, including gig ones, hold an advantage over web-based workers when it comes to their societal power because of their visibility in society. Gig workers generally experience, however, overall weaker power resources because of the nature of their work and, in MTurk’s case, additionally the web-based nature of the platform. Yet they have demonstrated alternative ways of forming solidarity and digital collectives, instrumentalizing the very infrastructure of the Internet. This chapter thus highlights both traditional and more bottom-up grassroots and alternative ways of organizing in the platform economy, forming inter- and intra-platform solidarity and showing the potential of a growing labor movement. It ultimately emphasizes that, just as the conditions of the platform economy need to be understood historically and holistically, so too does the agency of workers, as it co-evolves alongside the larger political–economic and technological context.
Introduction
Authors: Roth Antoine
Published: September 2023

This chapter locates this book’s argument within broader debates about China’s attitude towards international order. It explains the book’s focus on China’s vision for order in Asia in particular, on continuity between imperial past and present, and on the concept of hierarchy. It also presents the analytical framework of the book, based on international relations concepts developed by the English School, such as the distinction between international system and international society, and on Max Weber’s method for interpretative sociology grounded on the use of ideal types. The chapter explains how this book aims to build an ideal type of hierarchical order based on the Confucian–Legalist mainstream of traditional Chinese political philosophy, and use it to highlight continuities in certain significant features of Chinese foreign policy from its imperial past to the current period of the People’s Republic dominated by the figure of Xi Jinping.
Moral Discourse and Ritual in Contemporary Chinese Diplomacy
Authors: Roth Antoine
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at the two most distinctive features of China’s contemporary vision for a hierarchical international order in Asia, namely, its moralizing diplomatic discourse and the role of rituals and ‘codes of proper conduct’ in its diplomatic practice. It shows that PRC leaders have consistently argued they offer a ‘better type’ of international relations than the Western one and that Xi Jinping has supplemented this message with callbacks to an idealized vision of China’s imperial past, meant to highlight its unique benevolence today. The chapter also looks at the way Chinese leaders have sought diplomatic recognition of their special position among Asian states, on whom they still tried to impose standards of ‘correct’ behaviour in a manner reminiscent of imperial times. Xi Jinping has doubled down on those efforts, both in trying to define standards of conduct for China’s neighbours and in seeking to establish a pattern of Asian diplomacy that regularly reaffirms China’s place at the centre of the region.
Organizing the Collective Action of Digital Workers
Authors: Porta Donatella della , Chesta Riccardo Emilio , Cini Lorenzo
Published: September 2023

This chapter offers an overview of the vast array of organizational forms and action repertoires that Amazon drivers and food-delivery couriers have adopted over the course of the last decade in order to improve their working conditions. We do so by drawing on our research fieldwork, and on the growing empirical research in the fields of industrial relations and social movement studies, which have recently dealt with the collective organization of various segments of this new precarious workforce. The mobilization of digital workers is particularly puzzling, as they are employed under working conditions that share several features usually considered in scholarly literature as not conducive to the emergence of collective action. Among these, we explicitly consider 1) the high levels of technological and organizational innovation, and 2) the absence or ineffectiveness of traditional trade unionism. Focusing on the organizational process, the overall aim of the chapter is to understand why and how these protests have occurred ‘against the odds’, looking at the mobilization of alternative sources of power rather than the ones usually considered in industrial relations.
Worker Collective Identity and Solidarity in Action in the Digital Age
Authors: Porta Donatella della , Chesta Riccardo Emilio , Cini Lorenzo
Published: September 2023

The chapter explores the processes of identity formation concerning Amazon drivers and food-delivery couriers. Such processes are located within a ‘solidarity in action’ framework, which emphasizes the dynamic and processual components of workers’ political identity. In doing so, we draw on Alessandro Pizzorno’s concept of recognition struggle, looking at the development of group identification among workers as the precondition for such a process of collective identity to emerge. In the chapter, we show how this process of identification is also crucial in the identity-making of the categories of digital work under investigation. Developing Pizzorno’s framework, we look at how the processes of identity formation have not only been confined to their work setting, but rather build upon and affect specific political and social conditions beyond the workplace. By moving the analytical focus beyond the employment relationship and firm boundaries, we broaden the analysis of what defines the primary identities of digital workers and how they voice in workplace and societal affairs.
Peacekeeping: An Emerging Area of Southeast Asia’s Defence and Security Cooperation?
Authors: Jenne Nicole
Published: September 2023

Since the 1990s, Southeast Asian states have deployed their militaries in UN peace operations. Often couched in terms of ‘Global South’ or Asian solidarity, peace operations have become part of Southeast Asia’s regionally promoted defence diplomacy that necessarily fuses civil and military functions. It is widely assumed that participation in peace operations will further the consolidation of the ASEAN Political-Security Community by creating convergence in national defence policies and personal contacts among security officials. The chapter asks whether Southeast Asia’s peacekeeping activity effectively constitutes such a form of successful security cooperation. The analysis concludes on a cautious note. Given its liberal origins, peacekeeping challenges but is unlikely to change the quintessential norms of ASEAN cooperation such as face saving and non-interference. However, peacekeeping facilitates a non-confrontational discursive diplomatic channel between Southeast Asian militaries and reinforces the civilian nature of the region’s sublime, peace-preserving regional international society in the form of ASEAN.
Subjective Conditional Control: Return of the Strongman in China’s Party–Army Relations
Authors: Char James
Published: September 2023

Civil–military relations in post-Reform China continues to confound Western logic, with the Chinese PLA having steered clear of politics and largely subordinating itself to its CCP master. But given the unprecedented growth of PLA autonomy prior to Xi Jinping’s ascent as China’s top leader at the 18th Party Congress, efforts to enforce greater civilian authority over the Party’s army has seen the new commander-in-chief utilize more intrusive methods of subjective control. Towards that end, the incumbent has evidently drawn inspiration from the regime’s original strongman to assert himself on the Party’s coercive forces to dominate Chinese politics. Despite the incompatibilities between the PLA’s growing professionalism and the civilian leader’s egregious interest in military affairs, the CCP’s control over its armed wing in the post-Deng era has never been stronger.
The Deficient Evolution of Civil–Military Relations in India
Authors: Pant Harsh V. , Mukherjee Tuneer
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the state of civil–military relations in India against the backdrop of the country being a major military power in the Indo-Pacific. The chapter also profiles the evolution of India’s civil–military relations by examining the changing relationship between the different members of its defence leadership and its resulting impact on the nation’s military effectiveness. The chapter engages with contemporary debates in India’s defence management concerning national security policy, jointness among forces, bureaucratic efficiency, force modernization and development, and politico-military diplomacy to discern the parameters of civilian control over the Indian military organization. It is concluded that India’s institutional framework of higher defence management is unsuitable for its current security obligations and requires critical policy adjustments.
On Power (2017)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

An invitation to speak on soft power afforded the author another opportunity to revisit an early interest—in this case power, a concept central to politics—and link it to causation as one of this volume’s central concerns. That the term soft lends power metaphorical power helps to explain the enormous success of Joseph Nye’s compelling formula; Nye himself joined many other scholars in discussing power in causal terms. Weight and balance as correlative metaphors point to the Scientific Revolution as the moment in which a proximate sense of cause suffuses social thought and dominates relations of ‘the great powers’ after the Westphalian settlement in 1648. Lost is an Aristotelian sensibility linking cause to purpose. So is an appreciation of human powers, only now subject to revival, and finally an adequate accounting of agency and its metaphorical cognates.
Rules for Torture? (2009)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Without rules, there would be no society. Rules establishing what is valued in any given society, rules telling members of that society how they should generally conduct themselves to protect or advance values: these rules constitute a system of ethics for that society. We members of modern societies are disposed to call such rules principles in order to emphasize their significance—their margin-defining properties for society at large. We also tend to denigrate local rules at odds with ethical principles and condemn people who devise and follow such rules for their unprincipled conduct. Chapter 5 considers a hard case: the conduct of people who engage in torture. Principles aside, even torturers are responsive to an elaborate set of local rules reflecting their skills, tools, relations with prisoners and the presumptive value of torture in practice.
The Dinosaur Speaks! (2018)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Chapter 13 develops the author’s reflections on the origins of constructivism in the field of International Relations, occasioned by a workshop sizing up a quarter-century of constructivism in the field. The ‘dinosaur’ insisted that the ‘question of foundations’ is never off limits for constructivists and then argued that we humans are cognitively equipped to fill the world with ‘moderate-sized dry goods’. The way we make useful, moderate-sized social objects with material properties, the way we infuse them with value (which is what makes them goods), the way we do it together through a myriad of cognitive and linguistic operations: this is exactly what seems to entrance constructivists. And only constructivists. Everyone else starts with goods already in place. Suitably revised, these remarks ended up as the Foreword to an excellent symposium volume called Constructivism Reconsidered.
Afterword
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

When this volume was in draft, an enthusiastic reviewer wondered what its ‘through-line’ might be. Theory is the obvious candidate. This term shows up in the book’s title, four times in its first paragraph, in every chapter, hundreds of times altogether. Yet theory is a misleading term for what holds this collection of loosely related essays together; a looser term, such as theorizing, might be better. As linguistically mediated activity ranging from speculation to stipulation, it offers insufficient guidance as a red thread running through a patchwork of essays attending to a number of themes. Metatheory is another possibility. Theorizing about theorizing is an activity, a craft, a vocation, a through-line. This is what the author does: high modernist theorizing, complete with fancy language, in late modern circumstances. Storytelling. Margin-making. Mythmaking. World-making.
Introduction
Authors: Caudill David S.
Published: September 2023

This introduction to the book explains that the so-called “crisis of expertise,” wherein large segments of the population distrust consensus science, is not a new phenomenon. The crisis was, however, exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This book addresses the public controversies that arise when there is some science on both sides of the dispute, such as a dispute between fringe views by minority scientists and consensus views by the majority in a scientific community. The book recommends that both sides respect each other to encourage communication about scientific matters, especially because both sides have ideological commitments and values that drive scientific positions. Both sides should therefore be recognized as experts, not because both sides are correct, but because both sides represent respective communities of believers. Due to the inevitable uncertainties of science, consensus scientists cannot assume that their views are obvious, or that their facts are unassailable. Persuasive communication is needed, based on an understanding of how the other side thinks.
Introduction
Authors: Revillard Anne
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter develops a theoretical framework combining policy analysis (with an approach in terms of policy reception) and the sociology of law (through the study of rights realization at the individual level) to address the main question raised by the book: to what extent and how does policy reception enable disability rights to become effective in people’s experience? It presents the French context of disability policy and rights, and the methods of the study, drawing on biographical interviews.
Life on the Line
Authors: Densley James , Mclean Robert , Brick Carlton
Published: September 2023

This chapter walks readers through the first few days of drug sales in A-Town, emphasizing the tools, techniques and tactics our interviewees used to ship, store and sell drugs in the area. We discover that some drug dealers enthusiastically embrace the always-on culture of modern drug dealing and the use of smartphones and social media to reach customers, while others find delivery dealing a chore, and they only do it to keep up with consumer demands and customer preferences. The chapter also explores the dynamics of debt collection and conflict management in B-Town, and precisely why violence can be bad for business. These findings help flesh out the standard story of county lines by illuminating some of the dark corners of the practice and the strategic decision making that is usually shrouded in secrecy.
Crossing the Line
Authors: Densley James , Mclean Robert , Brick Carlton
Published: September 2023

Playing on the immortal words of Ernest Hemingway, this chapter demonstrates how county lines can go bankrupt suddenly but more often gradually. This chapter highlights how personal pride and greed undermine group cohesiveness, and how lies and mistrust ultimately lead to the downfall of the criminal enterprise.
The Concept of a System: Ecology, Sociology, and the Social Side Effects of Law/Policy
Authors: Barnett Larry D.
Published: September 2023

The chapter points out that the disciplines of ecology and sociology both rely on the concept of a system and thus have a basis for collaboration even though the phenomena they study are substantively dissimilar. The character of a system is explained, and the implications of a system are discussed for human societies, for law and government, and for the consequences of government undertakings to alter the incidence of key social activities such as fertility. The chapter proposes that, because childbearing has been found to decrease as population density increases, urban planning may be able to reduce human fertility by promoting high-density housing.
Fertility Rates, Mean Age of Childbearing, and Childlessness
Authors: Barnett Larry D.
Published: September 2023

The chapter offers insights into the demography of human-population growth in the world as a whole and in nations grouped by income level. Graphs are used to examine trends since the middle of the twentieth century in age-specific fertility rates, mean age of childbearing among women, and total fertility rates. The chapter also discusses childlessness and the importance of the extent of childlessness to population growth.
Remediating Antebellum Laughter: Sheppard Lee , Bert Williams, and the Subversion of Blackface in Get Out
Authors: Atassi Sami H
Published: September 2023

abstract: This article examines the literary and cinematic use of blackface typically employed to dehumanize and mimic Black life, arguing that Jordan Peele's 2017 film Get Out is a contemporized reframing of blackface through use of the Coagula transplantation procedure and the "Sunken Place." Unlike precursors Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself (1836) and the minstrelsy of actor Bert Williams, Get Out 's depiction of the Sunken Place and especially the performance of actress Betty Gabriel are meant to dismantle rather than propagate the weaponization of blackface and "antebellum laughter" tropes against Black people.
AI and Catastrophic Risk
Authors: Bengio Yoshua
Published: September 2023

Abstract: Since OpenAI's release of the very large language models Chat-GPT and GPT-4, the potential dangers of AI have garnered widespread public attention. In this essay, the author reviews the threats to democracy posed by the possibility of "rogue AIs," dangerous and powerful AIs that would execute harmful goals, irrespective of whether the outcomes are intended by humans. To mitigate against the risk that rogue AIs present to democracy and geopolitical stability, the author argues that research into safe and defensive AIs should be conducted by a multilateral, international network of research laboratories.
Three Works
Authors: Nelson Juanita Morrow , Battalen’s Louis Herbert
Published: September 2023

Abstract: This portfolio presents three works—an essay, a play, and a poem—all previously unpublished, to honor the late Juanita Morrow Nelson, an anti-war activist, on the centennial of her birth in August 2023. Nelson was involved in various activist fronts including the civil rights movement of the 60s and war tax resistance, and these works represent the spirit of Nelson’s politics and the examination of the injustices of America in the second half of the 20th century.