bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interpretative evolution of the norm prohibiting torture and inhuman or degrading treatment under the European Convention
Authors: Yildiz Ezgi
Published: May 2022

This chapter provides a socio-political account of how the European Court of Human Rights has transformed the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Arguing that legal interpretation does not take place in a void, the chapter looks at international, institutional and discursive factors enabling and constraining the Court’s interpretative preferences. In particular, it lays out how the Court’s interpretation is influenced by (a) the broader political developments in Europe, (b) the European human rights system’s institutional evolution, and (c) the changing dominant legal discourse. Building upon this analysis, the chapter concludes that the sophistication of norms protecting human rights is not only a moral and legal matter. It is also one of political expediency.
An Intimate Immensity
Authors: Christie Douglas E.
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers the practices of relinquishment that enable one to enter and become lost inside of what Gaston Bachelard describes as “an intimate immensity.” It gives particular attention to the work of twentieth-century artist Agnes Martin and her ideas about merging and formlessness,” about entering “a world without objects, without interruption,” and her sense of what it is to know oneself as part of something endless, infinite. It situates Martin’s work in relation to the sense of openness and freedom that Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, and other Christian mystics call “living without a why.” With the help of these interlocutors, this chapter examines what it means to relinquish dependence on what Eckhart refers to as “ways” or Ruusbroec calls “modes” and open oneself to possibility of living with radical trust and beholding the other with simple openness and love.
Spiritual Bodies and Mental Reality in Blake
Authors: Townsend Chris
Published: May 2022

William Blake is often thought of as a kind of materialist, given the very physical and even embodied nature of his craft; yet his own writings repeatedly and forcefully reject materialism and even the physical world in favour of what Blake called spiritual reality. Taking Berkeley’s thought as its guide, this chapter proposes one way in which the materiality of Blake’s work can be reconciled with his immaterialism: that for Blake, as for Berkeley, what we traditionally think of as physical bodies are already immaterial forms. The chapter outlines the full extent of what we know of Blake’s reading of Berkeley, before reconstructing some of his most Berkeleian concepts in his poetry: the spiritual body, the minute particular, and the structure of generality and general ideas.
Studies in Indian Public Finance
Authors: Rao M. Govinda
Published: May 2022

Studies in Public Finance is a book on the nature and effect of public spending and its financing in India, taking into account the advances in theory and best practice approaches. It brings together several disparate pieces of scholarship on Indian public finance. Public finance begins with reasons for government spending—the failure of the markets to provide public goods, goods with externalities, and bring about desired state of distribution. In Indian context, public expenditure policies are dominated by political economy considerations with interest payments, subsidies, and transfers pre-empting resources leaving inadequate allocation to physical and social infrastructure. The ability to provide essential public services is constrained by the low revenue productivity of the tax system. Inability to finance the required level of expenditures through taxes results in large deficits and debt threatening solvency, stability, and sustainability from time to time. The rule-based fiscal policy evolved to follow a disciplined approach to fiscal policy calibration has not met with much success. The book also analyses the complexity of calibrating public finance policies in a large country with multilevel fiscal system. It also evaluates the effectiveness of intergovernmental transfers in a country marked with wide inter-regional disparities in taxable capacity and standards of public services provided. Finally, the book brings out the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indian public finances. The book will be useful to students of economics, scholars working on the subject and the policymakers.
Public Expenditures in India
Authors: Rao M. Govinda
Published: May 2022

Public expenditure in India has been remarkably stable over the last two decades at around 26–28 per cent of GDP. Over the years, the shares of interest payments, subsidies, and transfers have shown a steady increase, while expenditures on basic economic and social services have stagnated. Despite children in the age group 0–14 constituting 35.4 per cent of total population, spending on basic education and healthcare are very low, and this raises questions on the government’s capacity to achieve human development and reap demographic dividend. The public expenditure allocation to various sectors shows the impact of political economy factors. Interestingly, while most observers focus on Centre’s expenditures, over the years, there has been a steady increase in the States’ share of expenditures from 50 per cent in 1990–1991 to 63 per cent in 2000–2001. In education and healthcare, the shares are over 80 per cent. There are questions on the productivity of expenditures as well.
Goods and Services Tax in India
Authors: Rao M. Govinda
Published: May 2022

The implementation of a destination-based consumption type GST in India in July 2017 is a landmark reform implemented to simplify the tax system and minimize distortions by subsuming all domestic trade taxes on goods and services and enhance revenue productivity. The States were persuaded to forgo their revenue autonomy in favour of tax harmonization. The tax has been evolving, and the structure of the tax continues to be complicated with multiple rates. Failure to stabilize the technology platform has resulted in low compliance defeating the objective of raising revenue productivity. The controversy over the paying of compensation to the States for the loss of revenue due to the pandemic has created a serious trust deficit. The recent attempts to introduce e-invoicing system have improved compliance with monthly revenue exceeding Rs. 1 trillion since October 2020. Increasing trend in revenues provides opportunity to rationalize the rate structure.
Manufacturing Dissent
Authors: Adams R. J. C.
Published: May 2022

Chapter 3 introduces the National Loan’s potential subscribers and explores the ways in which the loan was promoted. At the same time, it develops the narrative of the National Loan campaign, running from August 1919 to August 1920. The chapter surveys the National Loan’s promotional meetings, press advertisements, and other marketing initiatives. It highlights the extent to which the National Loan relied on the endorsement of senior Roman Catholic clergy. It also shows how, by provoking the British government, the loan was instrumentalized as a driver of public sentiment. Finally, it explores contemporary reports of National Loan collecting subscriptions by intimidation.
Who Subscribed to the National Loan?
Authors: Adams R. J. C.
Published: May 2022

Chapter 4 analyses the results of the Dáil’s National Loan. It gives a geographical overview of the results at national, provincial, and constituency level. Then, using previously unknown archival material containing the names and addresses of 6,351 subscribers, primarily in Monaghan, Longford, and Tipperary, it investigates the identities of the Dáil’s financial supporters. Using detailed maps, it also explores the geographical distribution of subscribers within those counties. Combining the lists of subscribers with the 1911 census of Ireland, details such as age, sex, religion, literacy and numeracy, social class, and occupation are revealed, confirming some elements of the historiography while challenging others. Cultural factors such as Irish language usage are also considered, as are ideological markers, such as membership of the IRA, living with an IRA member, or having donated to previous nationalist fundraising campaigns. Tracing the radicalization of public opinion in Ireland, the chapter examines the overlap in support for the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party’s Home Rule Fund (1913), the advanced nationalist Irish National Aid Association and Volunteers’ Dependents’ Fund (1916), and the Anti-Conscription Fund (1918).
Occupational Pattern and Levels of Workforce
Authors: Khan Bilal Ahmad
Published: May 2022

The most lugubrious that J&K confronting is prolonged civil strife and unrest for more than three decades. The J&K state has been a continuous victim by violence and has been quite unfortunate with regard to political instability right from 1980. This prolonged cycle of unrest became the stumbling block for economic development and turned it into shambles. The government took stock of the performance in major developmental programmes and highlights the policy initiatives. However, the drawbacks and disadvantages of the enduring unrest caused due to conflict have put the state in general and the valley in particular to tremendous economic and welfare hardships. As a result, there are virtually no engines of job creation and resources are used inefficiently and productive sources converted into unproductive factors. Growth and development get retarded to a large extent. Due to serious unemployment and economic downturn during the early turbulent phase of 90s, a large number of youth joined militancy and also forced migration of Kashmiri Hindu and pundits took place to a large extent. Thus, whole pattern of employment gets distorted
Migration Matters
Authors: Barbora Sanjay
Published: May 2022

Venturing beyond the statistical aggregates of migration and remittances, to more intimate matters such as life histories, this chapter draws from some new developments in the old narratives about migration to the region. It argues that the standard notions of migration of peasants and workers to Assam that were crucial to establishing the political discourse framed in settler–indigenous conflicts have changed since the first decades of the 21st century. There are many more individuals leaving the region in search of work than coming in. This raises crucial questions about the kind of transformation that has transpired in the stable, enclave economy framework that had been central to any analysis of politics and society in 20th-century Assam.
A Proposed Approach to the Patent–Competition Interface
Authors: Cheng Thomas K.
Published: May 2022

This chapter proposes a development stage-specific approach to the patent-competition interface for developing countries. The relevance of innovation and technology transfer as means of technological progress varies widely according to the technological capacity of the country at issue. The dynamic efficiency in the context of developing countries is no longer concerned with innovation incentives, but with the incentives to transfer technology. Thus, developing countries need to be mindful of how their patent-competition rules may affect such incentives. Apart from an approach that is sensitive to the stage of development, developing countries require an approach to the patent-competition interface that takes into account the characteristics of specific industries. One concern about the proposed approach to the patent-competition interface in developing countries, however, is enforcement capacity. Another possible concern is that it may be inconsistent with the TRIPS Agreement, in particular with Article 27, which stipulates that patent protection shall be available for all products and processes “in all fields of technology.
Unilateral Refusal to License Patents— A Proposed Framework
Authors: Cheng Thomas K.
Published: May 2022

This chapter begins by outlining various theoretical approaches to determining the legality of the unilateral refusal to deal doctrine and the essential facilities doctrine. It investigates the case law in the US and the EU on unilateral refusal to license and discusses the doctrinal issues raised by these cases. The chapter then proposes a framework for analyzing unilateral refusal to license for developing countries that takes into account their existing technological capacity and the need to preserve incentives for technology transfer. The global mainstream approach to competition law is largely informed by the experiences of industrialized economies of continental scale such as the US and the EU. What has worked for them need not work for developing countries. In fact, in light of the disparate technological capacity of developing countries and the varying enforcement capacity of their competition authorities, there are good reasons to believe that developing countries need to develop an approach to the patent-competition interface that is sensitive to their domestic circumstances.
Conclusion
Authors: Cheng Thomas K.
Published: May 2022

This concluding chapter summarizes the proposed development stage-specific approach to the patent-competition interface that takes into account an individual country–s technological capacity. By putting forward a development stage-specific approach to the patent-competition interface, this book implicitly challenges the drive for convergence that has dominated the global competition law community over the last two decades and puts forward a case for informed divergence. It argues that innovation incentives matter less for most developing countries for a variety of reasons. These include the tendency of the patent system to overcompensate innovators; the availability of other appropriation mechanisms such as lead time that allow the innovator to monetize their innovation; and the lack of potential innovators with the appropriate technological capacity in most developing countries to take advantage of the incentives generated by the patent system. Thus, innovation incentives deserve little weight in calibrating an appropriate approach for the patent-competition interface.
Trends in Sub-National Expenditure and Development Outcomes
Authors: Karnam Gayithri
Published: May 2022

State governments in India account for over 60% of total expenditure in the country. There have been significant changes in the trends and composition of public spending at the sub-national level. Fiscal position of the states has also undergone changes from time to time, experiencing a rollercoaster ride. States moved from their revenue surplus position to deficit and suffered severe fiscal distress during the eighties and nineties. The fiscal reforms introduced in the decade of 2000–09 aided in fiscal recovery and reduction of revenue deficit. Broad trends in the state-level spending presented in this chapter largely pertain to ‘all states’ and the major issues relating to the trends and composition. The discussion is structured to reflect the major changes that have occurred. The first phase pertains to fiscal expansionary phase starting from 1974–75 to 1990–91. This period also resulted in high fiscal and revenue deficits, and by 1991, the country had to announce major structural adjustment and stabilization measures. Analysis pertaining to the period 1990–91 till the framing of the FRBM Act by the central government relates to the second phase. This period was marked by uncontained deficits despite conditionalities attached by the international agencies to gradually reduce the fiscal deficit to 3%. The third phase pertains to post-FRBM till date. This period was marked by a number of fiscal reform initiatives including rule-based governance of deficits.
Empire Infrastructure
Authors: Ninan Thomas Pradip
Published: May 2022

This chapter provides an introduction to the history of the infrastructures of modernity in India that begins during the era of the Indian Mutiny, the end of rule by the East India Company and that coincides with direct rule from Great Britain. It deals with the varied interpretation of colonial information infrastructures in India, highlights in particular the advent of railways and the telegraph, and the ways in which infrastructure as spectacle reinforced the conceits to do with imperial prowess, ingenuity, and superiority. It also highlights the fact that even in colonial times, infrastructures were contested—with the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 as a potent example of deliberate attempts made by “natives” to subvert and curb the uses of railways and the telegraph as a means to control native populations.
The East India Company, the Victorian Internet, and Information Anxieties in India
Authors: Ninan Thomas Pradip
Published: May 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the technologies and management of information in two eras of British rule—during the era of the East India Company when the accent was on informal forms of information surveillance especially that related to commercial information and the era of direct rule characterized by the institutionalization of modern information infrastructures such as the telegraph that enabled the British to control the flows of information on the economy such as the pricing of primary products and the control of political information. These investments in the control and management of rational information structures were, to some extent, a response to the private flows of commercial information to Company directors at the expense of the Crown. Control over information flows became an all-consuming project post the Sepoy Mutiny.
The Satellite Infrastructure
Authors: Ninan Thomas Pradip
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the highs and lows of what one can be considered a “post-colonial sublime”—the ambitious and mostly successful Indian satellite program that has thrived without the benefit of an explicit space policy. India’s satellite program under the aegis of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has been at the forefront of the manufacture of indigenous satellite infrastructure. Tied to India’s Space mission, developmental, and military objectives, India’s satellite program that is largely in the public sector is now facing competition from the private sector. This chapter explores the politics of satellite in India and the competition from both within the country from private sources and from organizations like National Aeronautical Service Administration (NASA) that is keen to hold on to its competitive edge in the satellite launch business. This chapter also explores some of the challenges faced by mapping and sovereignty in the context of mapping apps that are now available on smart phones.
The Infrastructure of Oceanic Cable
Authors: Ninan Thomas Pradip
Published: May 2022

This chapter provides a detailed introduction to the invisible world of oceanic cables that are critical to data flows to the country and from it accounting for over 90 per cent of such flows. That is not in the public eye unless a cable is cut by accident highlights the fact that information infrastructures largely remain invisible. Unlike the satellite business, oceanic cable is largely in the hands of a handful of private entities including the Tatas and Reliance who between them own large swathes of global cable infrastructures and account for global data flows. This chapter explores the private nature of the cable business, its regulation by multiple bodies and the intriguing question of why the State is not directly involved in a business that is critical to data traffic to and from India.
Capturing Cognitive Dissonance
Authors: Cave Terence
Published: May 2022

The topic of cognitive dissonance provides a counterweight to the notion of attunement: the two concepts are co-dependent, since there is no attunement without dissonance, while on the other hand dissonance without the possibility of attunement is in principle cognitively disastrous. Cognitive dissonance is a highly recognizable instantiation of the problems that arise from the complex, multi-layered structure of human cognition, and literature has always drawn on it for its tragic and comic scenarios; examples discussed here include texts by Conrad, Gosse, La Fontaine, and Lear. This chapter then uses cognitive dissonance as a paradigm for the way literary form handles complex content, how it both advertises itself and conserves itself for indefinite, iterative future use.
Proust’s Protozoa
Authors: Cave Terence
Published: May 2022

Chapter 8 begins with close reading of a powerfully kinesic passage from Proust’s novel of phenomenal experience in time. The passage contains one of a number of references in the work to infusoires or protozoa. These microscopic creatures, saturating the atmosphere—especially the marine atmosphere—with smells and colours, are what prompts the release of involuntary memory in the famous episode of the madeleine soaked in an infusion. More broadly, they also afford a vision of sensory experience as essentially and prolifically granular. Inversely, the literary artefact itself, by using what one might think of as a protozoan language, takes on the character of a living thing. The second part of the chapter outlines the biological theory of autopoiesis—life as a self-protecting, self-nourishing, self-reproducing process—in order to characterize literary artefacts as features and products of the cognitive environment.
Home to Home
Authors: Gandhi Gopalkrishna , Suhrud Tridip
Published: May 2022

Home to Home covers the period of 1915-1919 and the Gandhi family’s return to India. When Gandhi and Kasturba return, after a prolonged stay of nearly six months in war-engulfed England, where he offers, with his Boer and Zulu experience behind him, but without much success, to help with an ambulance corps, they learn and begin interaction with Tagore’s ‘Phoenix boys’ in Santiniketan, Bengal. This period covers Gandhi’s first satyagraha in Champaran, Bihar along with Devadas, the role of Mahadev Desai, and Devadas’s move to Madras (under the mentorship of G A Natesan). This segment includes correspondence between Gandhi and Tagore as well as his letters to Devadas written from different parts of the world.
1931-1939
Authors: Gandhi Gopalkrishna , Suhrud Tridip
Published: May 2022

This part covers the 1930s. This includes the Dandi march in Gujarat, Gandhi and his family’s imprisonment; Devadas Gandhi’s career in journalism as Editor of The Hindustan Times and Navajivan, Gandhi’s travels to England and his relationship with prominent political leaders in the Indian political scenario. There are important interactions with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Vallabhbhai Patel, B R Ambedkar, Nehru, and others.
1940-1948
Authors: Gandhi Gopalkrishna , Suhrud Tridip
Published: May 2022

This Part holds letters between father and son exchanged during the last decade of Gandhi’s life. This is the decade that starts under the clouds of World War II when India is also seeing battles of its own, between different forces, parties, people and what the Raj likes to see and categorise as India’s discordant sections and interests.Of these the pan-Indian, cross-community aggregation of the Indian National Congress is the major player, followed by the Muslim League which views itself as the voice of India’s biggest and beleaguered religious minority. The 1940s are therefore, a decade mired in conflict, political, sectarian and civilisational. The section ends with Kasturba’s death and finally, the death of Gandhi.
Plank One
Authors: Withy Katherine
Published: May 2022

Sections 9 and 10 identify phenomena of lēthē, kruptesthai, and kruptein at Wrathall’s first plank. These are phenomena of concealing and concealment involved in speaking, which orients an interlocutor to an entity in some newly determinate way. An interpretation of Heidegger’s account of speaking as overcoming a prior concealment is sketched, and Wrathall’s interpretation of how this form of unconcealing relates to discovering entities (i.e., the second plank of unconcealing) is rejected. Phenomena of concealing and concealment discussed include: giving the entity spoken of predicative determination, the effacing of words, sounds, and symbols in speaking, making false or deceptive statements, and idly talking.
Plank Four
Authors: Withy Katherine
Published: May 2022

Sections 18 through 20 consider potential counter-examples to the claim that being and disclosing are self-grounding in a way that amounts to lacking a ground. They consider claims that being and/or disclosing are in fact grounded in temporality, das Ereignis, or what Wrathall calls ‘the clearing’. Temporality and Ereignis are shown to reinforce the claim of self-grounding rather than to stand as counter-examples to it. Wrathall’s clearing is shown not to be a genuine phenomenon of unconcealment, and the fourth plank of unconcealment that he posits for it is shown to house a purported condition of possibility that is not inconsistent with the self-grounding of being and Dasein.
Conclusion
Authors: Withy Katherine
Published: May 2022

The concluding section of Heidegger on Being Self-Concealing argues that, while the self-concealing of being cannot be overcome, the fact that being is self-concealing does not hamper the study of being. It outlines some of topics remaining for ontological consideration, including how being presences, how disclosing is correlated with being, how worlding works, and how Ereignis takes place. There is surely also more to be said about how being is self-concealing and how we experience that. The section ends by imagining how different our relationship to being would be were it not self-concealing, which shows just how essential it is to both our being and to being itself that being be self-concealing.
Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 2
Authors: Titelbaum Michael G.
Published: May 2022

This book introduces readers to the fundamentals of Bayesian epistemology. It begins by motivating and explaining the idea of a degree of belief (also known as a “credence”). It then presents Bayesians’ five core normative rules governing degrees of belief: Kolmogorov’s three probability axioms, the Ratio Formula for conditional credences, and Conditionalization for updating credences over time. After considering a few proposed additions to these norms, it applies the core rules to confirmation and decision theory. The book then details arguments for the Bayesian rules based on representation theorems, Dutch Books, and accuracy measures. Finally, it looks at objections and challenges to Bayesian epistemology. It presents problems concerning memory loss, self-location, old evidence, logical omniscience, and the subjectivity of priors. It considers the rival statistical paradigms of frequentism and likelihoodism. Then it explores alternative Bayesian-style formalisms involving comparative confidence rankings, credences ranges, and Dempster-Shafer functions.
Decision Theory
Authors: Titelbaum Michael G.
Published: May 2022

This chapter begins by introducing the notions of mathematical expectation and utility. Then we explain how expected utility theory connects preference rankings to credence and utilities. We develop Savage’s decision theory, Jeffrey’s evidential decision theory, and causal decision theory. Along the way, such problems as risk aversion, Allais’ paradox, and Newcomb’s problem are considered.
Representation Theorems
Authors: Titelbaum Michael G.
Published: May 2022

This chapter assesses representation theorem arguments for core Bayesian rules. We begin with Ramsey’s process for recovering an agent’s credence and utility distributions from her preference ranking. Then we present Ramsey’s representation theorem, and consider how it might be used to argue for probabilism. After detailing objections to the argument, we reformulate it in the strongest way we can find.
The Latin West
Authors: Plested Marcus
Published: May 2022

The post-Augustinian Latin tradition explored in this chapter was written off within Sophiology as something of a dead-end. This chapter aims to show that this judgement was premature and that the wisdom teachings of the Latin West are of enormous richness and significance with eloquent representatives in figures such as Pope Gregory the Great, Alcuin of York, John Scotus Eriugena, Hildegard of Bingen, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Latin West also offers and intriguing counterpoint to developments in Greek patristic theology over roughly the same time period. The consistent manner in which divine simplicity was construed from Augustine to Aquinas meant that there is no place for wisdom as divine except in relation to the categories of divine substance (with which it is identical) or person (principally, for exegetical reasons, the person of the Son). Thus the space or gap that opens for Sophiology in the Greek East remains largely closed in the Latin West. It is also the case that the West remained consistently focussed on and rooted in biblical wisdom literature and sapiential theology in a way the East often did not. Thomas Aquinas is presented as a particularly rich source of wisdom reflection and as a shining representative of a tradition that Sophiology was too quick to dismiss.
Fever and Food Poisoning: The Two Faces of Salmonella
Authors: Primrose Sandy B.
Published: May 2022

There are two species of Salmonella. Only Salmonella enterica infects warm-blooded animals. The sub-species Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica is the only one to infect humans and other mammals. Infections of humans are the result of the ingestion of certain serotypes of Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica. Typhoidal serotypes cause typhoid fever and non-typhoidal serotypes cause food poisoning. Both typhoidal and non-typhoidal serotypes need to cross the wall of the intestine but do so in different ways and using different effectors. Typhoidal serotypes produce typhoid toxin and pathogenicity is enhanced by the presence of the Vi antigen. They have undergone genomic degradation by losing the function of certain biosynthetic genes present in non-typhoidal serotypes. There is little genomic variation in typhoidal serotypes isolated from different parts of the world whereas non-typhoidal serotypes show a great deal of variation. In sub-Saharan Africa there is evidence that non-typhoidal serotypes are undergoing genomic degradation and becoming invasive.
Tracking the Origins of Clostridium difficile Infections
Authors: Primrose Sandy B.
Published: May 2022

Clostridium difficile is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections and rates of infection are directly linked to the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics. The bacterium can be present asymptomatically in the gut and only becomes a problem when the normal gut flora is eliminated by antibiotics. The bacterium produces two toxins, TcdA and TcdB, that cause death of intestinal epithelial cells and diarrhoea. When spores of Clostridium difficile are ingested, bile induces their germination to vegetative cells that produce the toxins. The cells then sporulate and are excreted in large numbers with the diarrhoea. There are many different ribotypes of Clostridium difficile and certain ones appear to be hypervirulent although the reason why is not known. Certain of these hypervirulent ribotypes are hospital-acquired and tend to be resistant to fluoroquinolones that are widely-used clinically. Other hypervirulent ribotypes are tetracycline-resistant and these are linked with farm animals, especially where tetracycline has been used as an animal supplement. Fidaxomicin is a new antibiotic that coats spores in the gut and prevents spore outgrowth and toxin production.
The Inadvertent Pathogen: Borrelia burgdorferi and Lyme Disease
Authors: Primrose Sandy B.
Published: May 2022

Borrelia burgdorferi, the organism causing Lyme disease, infects humans via tick bites. The European tick vector is different from the North American tick vector. Humans are inadvertent hosts for the ticks which normally feed on wild animals. Following infection with Borrelia burgdorferi, the symptoms range from none to very severe, the latter including arthritis, neurological disorders, and carditis. Arthritis is caused by release of peptidoglycan cell wall components that stimulate inflammation but the causes of the other symptoms are not known. Tick larvae acquire Borrelia during their first blood meal. The bacterium over-winters in the tick midgut with the aid of its OspA protein. The first blood meal the following Spring cause the bacterium to stop making OspA and now make the OspC protein. This permits the bacterium to move to the salivary glands and be injected into a new host. Borrelia avoids the immune system of its mammalian hosts using the vls (variable major protein-like sequence) system to create highly diverse epitopes of the outer membrane VlsE lipoprotein. The genome of Borrelia is small but very complex as each strain has thirteen to twenty-one plasmids. The majority of genes facilitating life in the tick vector and the mammalian host are found on the plasmids. The genes responsible for many of the symptoms of Lyme disease have not been identified but, given the differing symptoms between Europe and North America, probably are located on one or more plasmids.
‘A new dawn’
Authors: Day Adam
Published: May 2022

This chapter employs complexity to trace the evolution of South Sudan’s governance system, from colonial times to its independence in 2011. Focusing on the rise of ethno-military forms of rule during the civil war, it argues that South Sudan developed a strong attractor to two dominant forms of governance: one where resources and influence flowed through the rebel army, and where ethnicity played a powerful role in stabilizing the system. Violence thus became a form of communication within the South Sudanese system, allowing different groups to reposition themselves within the political settlement. As a result, South Sudan never built strong state institutions, relying instead on a network of relations spanning the military and the traditional ethnic leadership. By employing complexity theory, this chapter demonstrates how the network of relations evolved over time, creating a resilient, adaptive system of governance.
Myopia and mirages: The unmaking of UNMISS
Authors: Day Adam
Published: May 2022

Building on the earlier analysis, this chapter examines the establishment of the United Nations (UN) Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the first two years of its statebuilding mandate. Following a typical logic of extension of state authority and capacitybuilding of the state, UNMISS had one of the largest statebuilding tasks in the history of the UN, one that was described as building up the South Sudanese state ‘from scratch’. Despite massive resources and a sweeping mandate, however, UNMISS witnessed the rapid disintegration of South Sudan into a new civil war. Employing complexity theory, this chapter offers an explanation for this failure: South Sudan’s system of governance was strongly resistant to the kind of state-centric capacitybuilding at the heart of UNMISS’ work. Instead, resources and political energy ostensibly directed towards state institutions became caught up in the system’s strong attractors, directed into an ‘ethno-military’ network that stretched well beyond the state institutions at the heart of UNMISS’ work. The South Sudanese governance system not only resisted UNMISS’ statebuilding efforts, but complexity theory illuminates how the UN unintentionally bolstered some of its most predatory, violent tendencies.
Sisyphean statebuilding in the Congo
Authors: Day Adam
Published: May 2022

This chapter employs complexity theory to describe how the United Nations (UN)’s interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) failed to deliver on their promise of extension of state authority and more viable state institutions. It argues that Congo’s governance system had a strong tendency to strip state institutions of resources and power, channelling them instead through a network of actors that included armed groups, private businesses, traditional leaders, and individual politicians. This meant that even well-intentioned efforts to extend state capacities into the ‘ungoverned’ spaces of eastern Congo often resulted in temporary increases in violence as the system of governance reasserted itself. By failing to account for the complex, interrelated governance system in the DRC, the UN may have contributed to greater levels of violence in some cases, and largely fell short of its core goal of building up state institutional capacity in the peripheries of the country.
Resilient systems of governance: Comparing South Sudan and Congo
Authors: Day Adam
Published: May 2022

This chapter argues that the Congolese and South Sudanese systems, while different in many respects, share several characteristics that tend to work against United Nations (UN)-led statebuilding. Both possess highly interdependent systems of governance with strong attractors to violence as a stabilizing aspect of the system. Both have exhibited a very limited tendency to change in the kind of linear gradualist path expected by the UN, and thus arrived at similar outcomes: the UN was unable to generate a fundamental governance transformation. This comparison in systemic terms adds significant findings to the political economy and political science research on statebuilding to date. While much of this scholarship has found the UN to be disconnected from local realities and pursuing ineffective top-down strategies, it has not explored the underlying patterns in different systems that generate resistance to change. Merely pointing to ‘corruption’ or ‘lack of political will’, or ‘local realities’ tends to punt the question rather than address it. Complexity offers insights into the patterns at play across different systems, explaining the ways in which extremely disparate systems can frustrate statebuilding.
The Latitude-Preserving Nature of Commendatory Reasons
Authors: Little Margaret , Macnamara Coleen
Published: May 2022

Many theorists believe that latitude is a paradigmatic aspect of the life of agency. Not everyone agrees. But for those who do, a critical question is how to account for such latitude and understand its nature. Two broad strategies for securing latitude dominate current discussion: a balancing and permitting strategy. The first half of Chapter 3 details these dominant strategies, and provides an analysis of the nature—and the limits—of the latitude that is secured through them. In the second half, the chapter turns to a small but growing camp of theorists (the authors included), that have recently argued that latitude is sometimes secured in a very different way. Sometimes, latitude exists because the reasons in play are purely commendatory. The chapter characterizes commendatory reasons and provides an analysis of the nature, and the structure—and advantages—of the latitude they provide.
Weighing Reasons Against
Authors: Tucker Chris
Published: May 2022

Ethicists increasingly reject the scale as a useful metaphor for weighing reasons. Yet they generally retain the metaphor of a reason’s weight. This combination is incoherent. The metaphor of weight entails a very specific scale-based model of weighing reasons, Dual Scale. Justin Snedegar worries that scale-based models of weighing reasons can’t properly weigh reasons against an option. Chapter 4 shows that there are, in fact, two different reasons for/against distinctions, and provides an account of the relationship between the various kinds of reason for and against. With this account in hand, we’ll see that Dual Scale has no problem weighing any kind of reason against.
What’s in an Aim?
Authors: Singh Keshav
Published: May 2022

Metaethical constitutivists seek to ground normativity in facts about what is constitutive of agency. One strand of constitutivism locates the foundations of normativity in constitutive aims, which are standardly conceived of in teleological terms. Chapter 6 presents three challenges that show that the teleological conception of constitutive aims is inadequate for the constitutivist project. It sketches an alternative conception of constitutive aims in the form of a commitment-based conception. On the commitment-based conception, actions and attitudes constitutively represent their objects as having certain properties, and their constitutive aims are fixed by the accuracy-conditions of these representations. Because such representations constitutively involve a commitment on the part of the agent to the object’s having the relevant property, they generate authoritative norms for the agent. The chapter concludes that, unlike the teleological conception, the commitment-based conception promises to yield a unified constitutivism that delivers authoritative normative standards for both actions and attitudes.
Evolutionary Explanations of Our Reliability
Authors: Dogramaci Sinan
Published: May 2022

It can easily look like evolution is in a better position to explain the reliability of our perceptual beliefs than the reliability of our moral beliefs. Chapter 8 takes a closer look at the issue and argues that there’s no reason—no reason which armchair philosophers could uncover—to think evolution can better explain perceptual reliability than moral reliability. It also offers a diagnosis of why it seemed otherwise. The diagnosis concerns our need to use the truth predicate as a generalizing logical device in the perceptual case but not in the moral case.
What Viruses Want
Authors: Johnson Dominic D. P.
Published: May 2022

This chapter applies an evolutionary lens to the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlights recurrent patterns common to all viruses and pandemics. An evolutionary perspective offers the opportunity to step back and consider the implications of the biology and behaviour of viruses, as well as the biology and behaviour of their hosts—that is, us—for pandemic responses. Rather than a static threat, the pandemic represents a dynamic, rapidly changing host–parasite interaction in which there is a constant arms race of offensive and defensive tactics. Despite herculean efforts in public policy and the development of treatments and vaccines, viruses are often able to stay one step ahead precisely because they are evolving, and quickly. This is compounded by the fact that even massive policy responses are blunted by our own evolutionary legacy. Rather than being rational actors, human beings have a variety of evolved dispositions and cognitive biases that lead us to underestimate the threat, overestimate our ability to deal with it, respond inadequately to lockdown restrictions even when we are sick but feel fine, and allow self-interest to hamper collective action. An evolutionary perspective gives us a healthy dose of reality about how hard it is to fight a global pandemic—with important lessons for more lethal ones in the future. But it also gives us novel ideas about how to fight them better.
Will COVID-19 Bring Down Governments? Will It Bring Rebellions and Revolutions?
Authors: Goldstone Jack A.
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines how the global COVID-19 pandemic has affected political stability and change in both democracies and autocracies. For the most part, the disease has stabilized regimes. In both autocracies that handled the disease well and democracies with populist rulers (even if they handled the disease poorly), leaders have held or increased their popularity in the wake of the pandemic. Only in a few autocracies that handled the pandemic poorly, such as Belarus, has it had any perceptible impact on the risk of political upheaval. It appears that, as with the global flu pandemic of 1918, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 will be remembered for its health impact, not for any great political consequences.
Bioterrorism and Pandemics
Authors: Guitton Matthieu J.
Published: May 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated our vulnerability to biological threats. Besides diseases of natural origin, this vulnerability also extends to bioterrorism—the use of biological agents for terrorist goals. Whether of natural origin or resulting from human-made pathogenic biological agents, infections share the same determinants. Therefore, if occurring at the same time, pandemics and bioterrorist events can become synergistic, resulting in an increase of the burden on the population, on health systems, and on food production and supply. This chapter identifies the risks related to a potential synergy between pandemics and bioterrorism. We explore the factors that increase the vulnerability to both natural pandemics and weaponized biological agents. We then demonstrate how the convergence of technologies between biotechnology and cybertechnology potentiates the risks related to bioterrorism at the societal level. By analysing the ontogeny of fear in the digital age, we describe how social media can be used to propagate erroneous information, contributing to an increased perception of fear amongst the population and triggering segmentations of the population by creating stigmatized groups. Finally, we explore the issue of preparedness to bioterrorism from a security viewpoint, both from the perspective of risk prevention by counterintelligence and the perspective of trouble management by police and other security services.
Europe and the Pandemic
Authors: Bickerton Christopher
Published: May 2022

This chapter looks at how regional integration processes interact with global pandemics. The chapter focuses on the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. It concentrates on the impact of COVID-19 upon relations between member states and on the relations between member states and supranational European Union (EU) institutions. The chapter provides an account of the variety of national experiences in Europe during the first phases of the COVID-19 crisis. It looks at the EU-level responses, distinguishing between health- and economic-related measures. The chapter assesses these measures in line with a discussion about the role of transnational solidarity in the EU. It concludes that regional integration was a mediating factor in the experience of the pandemic for European citizens, though with mixed results in terms of expressions of transnational solidarity. It also concludes that some of the more lasting policy effects of the pandemic are likely to be felt within the macro-economic field, rather than in public health policy, in part because of the problems faced by the EU’s collective vaccine procurement programme. The chapter notes that it is too early to say anything definitive about the institutional effects of the global pandemic on the EU.
Pandemics and the City
Authors: Hooper Michael
Published: May 2022

Cities have long been viewed as sites of risk in pandemics. These concerns, which reach back at least to the medieval period, have been reawakened by the COVID-19 pandemic. As in the past, many contemporary writers and policymakers have argued that cities, and particularly those with high density, are dangerous in times of disease outbreak. Such worries have led to countless articles in the news media extolling the dangers of urban life and the perils of density. They have also led to the flight of some residents from cities as, following in the path of urban residents in past pandemics, they have fled to the countryside. These trends are particularly pressing for planners and city officials because the COVID-19 pandemic came at a time when there had been notable headway made in advancing arguments for both dense cities and for densification efforts. These pro-density arguments were rooted in evidence that there are environmental, economic, and social benefits that come with density. This chapter examines how pandemics, including that associated with COVID-19, intersect in complex ways with urban density. It then evaluates what we can learn from these crises to build more equitable and sustainable cities, where the benefits and costs of density are more fairly shared.