The Evolving Arms Control Agenda: Implications of the Role of NGOS in Banning Antipersonnel Landmines

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
State Action ◽  
The Public ◽  
Antipersonnel Landmines ◽  
First Time

This article examines the role NGOs have played in placing and controlling the landmineban issue on the international arms control agenda, which eventually changed state behavior toward landmines. It develops a framework for agenda setting to examine how and why NGOs were successful in this role. More importantly, the article also examines how NGOs were able to generate state action toward the support of the Ottawa Treaty banning antipersonnel landmines, which marked the first time a weapon in widespread use has been banned. The article makes two interrelated arguments. First, NGOs initiated the landmine ban by placing it on the international arms control agenda, which gained intense media and public attention for the cause. The NGOs accomplished their goal by utilizing cognitive attribution strategies to educate the public about the minimal military utility of landmines and the humanitarian problems they pose. Second, NGOs changed states’ perception toward the legality and use of landmines once the issue was on the agenda by highlighting the horrible effects and disproportionate consequences of landmine use, playing leadership games with influential individuals and states, and claiming that antiban states were using incoherent arguments. In comparison, NGOs have not been included in the agenda-setting processes of most other major arms control and disarmament treaties, which typically are negotiated at the behest of major powers. These arguments address the broader question of agency in world politics by showing potential conditions of how NGOs can instigate governments to address issues in a way that may culminate in international law.

scholarly journals Unravelling A Regulation Machine

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Dionysia Mylonaki ◽  
Panagiotis Tigas
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Technical Aspect ◽  
Current Approach ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The Public ◽  
Machine Leraning

Computational censorship in the form of fake news and toxic comments regulation is a subject that comes up quite often in the public discourse, as a result of the volatile political circumstances on a global scale and due to the unquestionable impact of journalism on these circumstances. Public attention has been directed to the role of mainstream and other media in the formation of public opinion, either in the form of articles or in the form of usergenerated comments. The purpose is to analyse and allow a deeper understanding of a project that is under development, namely, computational-censorship and to show that algorithmic regulation is not a solution, but rather another layer to a more fundamental problem. This article examines the implicationsof developing Machine Leraning/Artificial Iintelligence (ML/AI) which aims to regulate the internet and we attempt to allow a glimpse into the technical aspect of the problem as a way to back arguments that could be re-jected by the ML/AI research community as “non-pragmatic”. Finally, it aims to highlight the absurdity of the current approach to research in this area, which is the exact opposite of the rationalism that the field claims to be embracing.

Enacting Public Value on the Abc's Q&A: From Normative to Performative Approaches

2013 ◽  
Vol 146 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gay Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Public Address ◽  
Public Value ◽  
The Public ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
Alternative Approach

Is there anything left to say about public value and public service broadcasting (PSB) without lapsing into boosterism, special pleading, or wildly unsubstantiated claims about the role of PSB in making citizens and democracy? This article develops an alternative approach, one that considers publicness not as a pre-given or static value, but as something that has to be continually enacted or performed. Using recent debates in political theory, it examines the processes and ontological effects of what Latour calls ‘making things public’. It makes two assumptions. The first is that there is no such thing as ‘the public’ out there waiting to be addressed; rather, publics have to be called into being The second is that there are a multiplicity of ways in which publicness can be assembled, and the challenge for PSB is to establish why its strategies are better. The example used is the ABC's current affairs discussion show Q&A, which is investigated to see how it generates an ontology of publicness. In what ways is the notion of public address and assembly mobilised? How does the experience of a public as a form of what Warner calls ‘Stranger sociability’ extend from the live audience to the household viewer? In what ways are the notions of public reason and rational discussion enacted and disrupted? And how does this enactment of publicness generate a sometimes poetic, anarchic or ribald shadow reality tweeted in from anonymous participants competing for public attention? Finally, how does it both reproduce and reinvent existing institutional regimes of value within the ABC?

Agenda-Setting Theory

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell McCombs ◽  
Sebastián Valenzuela
Keyword(s):  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Agenda ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
The Media ◽  
Setting Theory ◽  
Attribute Priming ◽  
Attribute Agenda Setting

This chapter discusses contemporary directions of agenda-setting research. It reviews the basic concept of agenda setting, the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda as a key step in the formation of public opinion, the concept of need for orientation as a determinant of issue salience, the ways people learn the media agenda, attribute agenda setting, and the consequences of agenda setting that result from priming and attribute priming. Across the theoretical areas found in the agenda-setting tradition, future studies can contribute to the role of news in media effects by showing how agenda setting evolves in the new and expanding media landscape as well as continuing to refine agenda setting’s core concepts.

Georges Gilles de la Tourette

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Walusinski
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
The Public ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Complete Bibliography ◽  
First Time ◽  
Jean Martin Charcot

An exhaustive biography of French neuropsychiatrist Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904) has never been undertaken. Gilles de la Tourette worked closely with the nineteenth-century founder of neurology in Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot. His name is universally known because of the eponymous, disabling syndrome that affects 0.9% of children/adolescents. Unpublished family archives, as well as Gilles de la Tourette’s correspondence with the Parisian journalist Georges Montorgueil, conserved at the national Archives in Paris, were examined together with press and police archives to portray Georges Gilles de la Tourette’s family and professional life in an original light. These archives have never before been studied or made available to the public. How the eponymous syndrome was isolated, the errors initially made in its description, the hidden role of Jean-Martin Charcot, and the disputes with other authors are covered in detail based on multiple sources, original or already published. An in-depth analysis of the genesis of Gilles de la Tourette’s prolific neurological and psychiatric works within their historical context rounds out this biography. Major figures of neurology of the time are also featured—including Freud, Charcot and his son, Brissaud, and Babiński. Interwoven with Gilles de la Tourette’s life and times are discussions of politics, theater, literature, the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, and numerous letters exchanged with Jules Claretie of the Académie Française to highlight his significant involvement in each of these domains. The book concludes with a complete bibliography of all works written by Gilles de la Tourette, compiled for the first time.

scholarly journals Reflections on the role of less-than-comprehensive (exclusionary) private health insurance hospital products in the Australian healthcare system

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter E. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Health Insurance ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Private Health Insurance ◽  
Insurance Scheme ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Insurance Policies ◽  
Exclusionary Policies ◽  
First Time

The number of people in Australia that are currently covered by a hospital private health insurance product continues to rise every quarter. In September 2010, for the first time since the introduction of the public universal social insurance scheme, Medicare, more than 10 million persons in Australia are covered by private health insurance. Although the number of persons covered by private health insurance continues to grow, the quality and level of cover that members are holding is changing significantly. In an effort to limit premium rises and to reduce the benefits paid for treatment, private health insurers have introduced, and moved a large number of existing members to, less-than-comprehensive private health insurance policies. These policies, known as ‘exclusionary’ policies, are changing the dynamics of private health insurance in Australia. After examining the emergence and prevalence of these products, this commentary gives three different examples to illustrate how such products are changing the nature of private health insurance in Australia and are now set to create a series of policy issues that will require future attention.

Public Health Laboratory Network

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 194
Author(s):  
John R Bates
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Health Laboratory ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Public Health Importance ◽  
Inaugural Meeting ◽  
The Public ◽  
Laboratory Network ◽  
Outbreak Investigations ◽  
First Time

The Public Health Laboratory Network had its inaugural meeting on 26 June 1997. The meeting was chaired by Professor Lyn Gilbert who played a pivotal role in establishing this group. This was the first time that all the state and territory public health laboratory directors had been called to meet together. Members expressed a strong desire to communicate more closely on issues of public health importance and recognised the importance of promoting the role of public health laboratories in outbreak investigations and routine and enhanced surveillance.

Arena or Temple?

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-203
Author(s):  
Mark Seymour
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
New Type ◽  
Murder Trial ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Emotional Style ◽  
First Time

States anxious to wrest power from religious authorities viewed their courts of law as quasi-sacred spaces, often characterizing them as a form of ‘temple’ to signal the reverential emotional style required within. Foregrounding the emotional overlap between religious and legal spaces, this chapter portrays Rome’s Court of Assizes during the Fadda murder trial as both secular temple and emotional arena with great symbolic value for Liberal Italy. The argument is contextualized against analysis of the symbolic role of law at crucial stages in the development of other states, particularly England and France. After unification, Italian courts were opened to the public, in some cases for the first time. The civic audience in legal hearings, especially in criminal cases, was a fundamental tenet of Italy’s liberal ideology. The chapter analyses public participation in the Fadda trial against the background of a state’s need to engage its citizens in spaces and rituals that were unmistakably identified with the nation. The Fadda trial’s fascination both helped and hindered the state’s cause, drawing great crowds but provoking emotions that threatened to blur the line between dignified court and popular arena. The trial lasted a month and dominated the nation’s newspapers, drawing Italians from all over the peninsula into the drama in Rome. Ultimately the event was an opportunity to establish the contours of a new type of social space, a new emotional arena, for a new nation.

scholarly journals “The People Who Write to Us Are the People Who Don't Like Us”: Class, Gender, and Citizenship in the Survey of Sickness, 1943–1952

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daisy Payling
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Public Health Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
And Gender ◽  
British State ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second World

AbstractThe Second World War and the rise of social medicine in 1940s Britain reframed population health as a social problem in need of state investigation. The resulting government inquiry, the Survey of Sickness, sampled the whole adult population of England and Wales, engaging a broad and diverse cross-section in public health research for the first time. Complaints made against the Survey of Sickness reveal a complex set of relationships between different sections of the public and the British state. This article situates complaints about privacy, liberty, and wasted resources, as well as challenges to the authority of survey fieldworkers, in the context of wider resistance to postwar controls. By viewing these protests and criticisms in light of the material circumstances of the people who made them, this article argues that, for those with social, economic, and political capital, the role of the public in public health was up for negotiation in postwar Britain. The everyday politics of the survey's doorstep encounters were heavily influenced by gendered notions of home and citizenship. This exploration of how different sections of the public were constructed by public health and how they responded to that construction describes the hierarchies of expertise under formation while illuminating how class and gender informed contemporary understandings of citizenship in the emerging postwar British state.

scholarly journals The far-right’s influence on Twitter during the 2018 Andalusian elections: an approach through political leaders

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242
Author(s):  
Rubén Rivas-de-Roca ◽  
Mar García-Gordillo ◽  
Ofa Bezunartea-Valencia
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Great Expectation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Regional Elections ◽  
First Time

New technologies allow politicians to spread their messages omitting the role of mediators. In this context, the Internet has also promoted the emergence of a new actor, digital opinion leaders, who go beyond traditional politics and seek to set the public agenda. One of the main questions nowadays is whether social media, and in particular Twitter as a consolidated tool for political communication, is only used as a sounding board for their political statements, spurring the messages of populist forces. With this in mind, the main objective of this research is to explore the influence of the far-right in the public debate of political leaders on Twitter, analyzing the specific case of the Andalusian regional elections held in December 2018. These elections can be considered a political turning point, with an extreme right party winning seats in a Spanish regional election for the first time in 35 years. In this paper we analyze if Vox used a differentiated strategy via this social network compared to the candidates of the traditional parties: PSOE, PP, Ciudadanos, and Adelante Andalucía. Using content analysis on Twitter as a method, this research determines how Vox candidates worked as influencers of the digital political debate, despite being extra-parliamentary. Vox marked the agenda for the rest of the leaders, while generating great expectation among the audience.

scholarly journals J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2019 ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Sabah Atallah Khalifa Ali ◽  
Zaid Ibrahim Ismael
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Lord Of The Rings ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Phoenix ◽  
Invasion Of Iraq

Like J. J. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and many other fantasies, Rowling’s Harry Potter is rich with allegorical implications that reflect the political anxiety of the era in which it was written. The critics and readers found connections between the events of the early parts of the novel and the historical havoc in world politics, like Hitler and World War II, a thing which Rowling attested in many of her interviews. Still, the texts are still open for other readings. It is possible to draw political parallels with contemporary issues. For instance, the American and British readers have been unable to resist identification with the events which mirror the international campaign on terrorism. This study is a political reading of Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It sheds light on the role of the Ministry of Magic in the novel and its relation to the governments’ policies to misguide the public about the terrorist threats to world powers, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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