Global Challenges, Local Knowledges: Politics and Expertise at the World Population Conference in Bucharest, 1974

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 215-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Doboș

Population dynamics became a key variable of the developmentalist rhetoric during the postwar era. The World Population Conference (wpc) in Bucharest (1974) was marked by open disagreements regarding the interpretation of the relationship between the ‘Third World’s’ underdevelopment and its overpopulation. The main outcome of the wpc 1974, the World Population Plan of Action (wppa) was the product of negotiations and compromises reached by the parties involved. The study deals with the role that the Romanian representatives at wpc 1974 played in the creation of wppa’s final version. The organization of the wpc in Bucharest gave the Romanian delegation a privileged position. The study contextualizes its contribution to the wppa within the particular conditions of population expertise’s emergence in postwar Romania. The study investigates previously unexplored archival fonds (the Archive of Romanian Ministry for Foreign Affairs) and brings into play unknown details of the maneuvers by various actors during the Bucharest conference. The Romanian version of the story adds nuance to the general narrative on the wpc’s outcomes, which presumes a strict separation between the domains of expertise and politics. The article argues that the Romanians’ alternative interpretations of the wppa were not only the result of the political control and ideological conformity, but also an expression of the particular way in which the field of population expertise developed in twentieth-century Romania.

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (8) ◽  
pp. 9-45
Author(s):  
Henry Veltmeyer ◽  
◽  
James Petras ◽  

The literature on imperialism suffers from a fundamental confusion surrounding the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. The aim of this work is to bring clarification. In the first part, we state our position regarding the capitalism-imperialism relationship; in the second, we discuss some important points in the marxist debate on imperialism; and in the third, we review the various paths imperialism has taken in Latin America under capitalist development. The central point of this work is the way that it places imperialism at the conjuncture of capitalist development, particularly extractive capitalism. This conjuncture is characterized by the decline of neoliberalism as an economic model; a growing demand for energy, minerals and other «natural» resources in the world market; and the political economy of the development of natural resources (large-scale investment to acquire lands and the natural resources they contain, the export of primary products). The key dynamic of what we call «imperialist extractivism» is analyzed in the South American context, which represents the most advanced, but regressive, form that capitalism has taken, so far, in the new milennium. Our analysis of this dynamic is summaried in 12 theses.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serena Stefani ◽  
Gabriele Prati

Research on the relationship between fertility and gender ideology revealed inconsistent results. In the present study, we argue that inconsistencies may be due to the fact that such relationship may be nonlinear. We hypothesize a U- shaped relationship between two dimensions of gender ideology (i.e. primacy of breadwinner role and acceptance of male privilege) and fertility rates. We conducted a cross-national analysis of 60 countries using data from the World Values Survey as well as the World Population Prospects 2019. Controlling for gross domestic product, we found support for a U-shaped relationship between gender ideology and fertility. Higher levels of fertility rates were found at lower and especially higher levels of traditional gender ideology, while a medium level of gender ideology was associated with the lowest fertility rate. This curvilinear relationship is in agreement with the phase of the gender revolution in which the country is located. Traditional beliefs are linked to a complementary division of private versus public sphere between sexes, while egalitarian attitudes are associated with a more equitable division. Both conditions strengthen fertility. Instead, as in the transition phase, intermediate levels of gender ideology’s support are associated with an overload and a difficult reconciliation of the roles that women have to embody (i.e. working and nurturing) so reducing fertility. The present study has contributed to the literature by addressing the inconsistencies of prior research by demonstrating that the relationship between gender ideology and fertility rates is curvilinear rather than linear.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Author(s):  
Isao Okayasu ◽  
Chi-Ok Oh ◽  
Duarte B Morais

Running is one of the most popular activities in the world. Runners’ attitudes and behaviors vary depending on their running style. This study aims to construct different measures of running specialization based on the theory of specialization. This study also tests a runner’s stage of specialization segmentation based on recreation specialization and examines the predictive relationship between a runner’s specialization and event attachment. Three groups of sampling data assess the performance of diverse specialization measures for running in three marathon events. First, two surveys were conducted with marathon participants to assess the performance of diverse specialization measures for runners. Second, the third dataset was used to examine the relationship between a runner’s recreation specialization and event attachment.The study results showed that the 15 measures of specialization showed a good fit to the data. Our research showed how runners’ recreation specialization is connected to their event attachment. In addition, this study suggested event management for subdivisions of runners. Its practical implication is that recreation specialization for running can help us understand event attachment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (08) ◽  
pp. 20-26
Author(s):  
Эллада Амирага гызы Аббасова ◽  

The development of international cooperation in the field of culture is extremely important, since it ensures wide and in-depth interaction between states and peoples, makes a real opportunity for dialogue, unites the cultures of the peoples of the world. Two fraternal countries have actively taken root in international cultural exchange; Azerbaijan and Tatarstan. Azerbaijan is a multicultural country that is home to many peoples and ethnic minorities. Representatives of the peoples inhabiting this region are full citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan, including the Tatars. The radical transformations that befell these countries at the end of the twentieth century influenced future events and their development. The Azerbaijani and Tatar peoples, whose relations have a long history, are linked by a common origin, similarity of language, culture and traditions. The relationship between the two peoples has strengthened even more during the years of independence. Key words: Tatars in Azerbaijan, activities of the Tatar community, cultural exchange, Tugan-Tel, Yashlek, Ak-Kalfak


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (20) ◽  
pp. e2022491118
Author(s):  
Jeroen M. van Baar ◽  
David J. Halpern ◽  
Oriel FeldmanHall

Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals’ and conservatives’ (n = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not during a neutrally worded news clip on polarized topics or a nonpolitical documentary. During the political debate, neural synchrony in mentalizing and valuation networks was modulated by one’s aversion to uncertainty: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents—an effect observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, the greater the neural synchrony between committed partisans, the more likely that two individuals formed similar, polarized attitudes about the debate. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.


2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
André-Louis Sanguin

Following upon the Third Conference on the Law of the Sea begun in 1973, the principal maritime States of the world assumed exclusive national jurisdiction over a 12- mile zone extending from their coastlines and a 188-mile economic zone beyond territorial waters. Together they constitute the more familiarly referred to « 200-mile zone ». This new practice radically changed the political geography of the oceans, lessened the area within which the freedom of the seas exists, diminished by more than a third the surface area of the high seas and dealt a heavy blow to the fishing xpeditions of foreign trawlers. Canada is one of the principal users and one of the most vigourous defenders of the 200-mile principle for geographical reasons as much as for economic or political ones. The excessive exploitation of the seabed has been felt to be a threat for a portion of the population of the Eastern part of Canada. A firm policy criticized for being somewhat unilateral has enabled Canada to eliminate foreign fleets from its 200-mile zone. Over a period of 30 years the International Commission for North-West Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF) attempted to introduce a positive international cooperation in order to eliminate the anarchic excessive exploitation. It was replaced in 1979 by the North-West Atlantic Fisheries Organization. A major dispute exists between France and Canada with respect to the delimitation of the economic zone of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, French land since 1604. More generally, the question is posed as to how long the 200-mile principle will prevail in this new political geography of the oceans.


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