scholarly journals Russia Challenges the West in Ukraine

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Vendil Pallin

Abstract Events in Ukraine have made many re-evaluate their view of Russia and suggest new approaches. While there are good reasons to do so, there is also every reason to revisit some old lessons and draw the right conclusions from events further back in time than the annexation of Crimea. First, Russian domestic politics will continue to play a prominent role in deciding Russia’s room for manoeuvre in its security policy. Second, change can only come from within Russia - the West (mainly the US and Europe) will be able to influence events only on the margins and perhaps not always receiving the intended response. Finally, and perhaps at first a bit paradoxically taking the first two points in view, what the West does will matter. It will matter because it will influence developments inside Russia in a long-term perspective if there is an alternative model. But even more importantly, what the West does will decide what position it finds itself in when Russia does change.

Author(s):  
Ali Mir ◽  
Saadia Toor ◽  
Raza Mir

Prejudice and discrimination in the US against those perceived to be Muslim has reached an all-time high, yet not enough attention has been paid to this phenomenon within the field of management studies. In this chapter, we make the case for why management scholars must address this issue, and do so from within a framework of race and racialization. We show that racism today primarily exists in a cultural form, which is harder to identify and therefore address. Drawing on important insights offered by scholars from various disciplines, we outline the important relationship between religious, and specifically anti-Muslim, prejudice in the West and the origins and evolution of the idea of race. The racialization of Muslims today draws on this history and the various discourses of race so as to construct ‘the Muslim’ as the radical Other of a liberal and progressive West.


2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Anievas ◽  
Kerem Nişancioğlu

AbstractTraditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europe's ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over thelongue duréeand traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain's colonization of India.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511879340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara L. Ley ◽  
Paul R. Brewer

Recent studies have explored how the US public responded to the March for Science protests that took place around the world on April 22, 2017, as well as why individuals participated in these protests. Yet, little research has examined how participants used social media and other channels to learn, communicate, and form behavioral intentions regarding the movement. In addressing these questions, the present study conceptualizes the March for Science as a “networked protest.” It then analyzes data from two surveys: one distributed through social media in the month preceding the March for Science events, and one conducted at the Washington, DC event. The results suggest that social media—particularly Facebook—played key roles in how respondents learned and communicated about the protest. At the same time, respondents also learned and communicated about it through other channels, including texting, email, and face-to-face conversations. Both social media respondents and in-person respondents reported that their experiences with the March had increased their likelihood of undertaking future online and offline actions. Furthermore, communicating through Facebook and Twitter predicted a range of self-reported effects of March experiences on intentions to undertake future actions, whereas learning through social media largely failed to do so. Thus, some—but not all—social media uses may have encouraged participants to sustain both online and offline engagement. Taken together, the findings carry potential implications for how the March for Science and other networked protests can use social media and other communication forms to mobilize supporters and facilitate long-term engagement.


Author(s):  
Hilde Daland

One of Agder University Librarys goals is to support teaching and research at the University of Agder (UoA). To do so, the library should be involved in research projects and offer the right products at the right time. The spring of 2012 a survey was conducted among researchers (academic staff and Ph.D.-students) at the faculty of humanities and education at UoA as well as the library staff. Aditional interviews was made with the library´s research librarians and two of the Ph.D.-students. The surveys and interviews made it clear that researchers and librarians have a different conception on what research support is and should be. While librarians focus mostly on library resources, the researchers focus more generally on practical, economical and administrative help to make research possible. However, the majority answered yes to the question on the library being an important part of research support.Working closely with the researchers can help to offer the right library resources at the right time. Ph.D.-students are less likely to be set in their ways in regards to information behaviour and will often be positive to try new approaches. Also, the Ph.D.-students can be used as a reference group for developing library resources for researchers, for example subject guides. The outside perspective on the library can help to find new ways of approaching research support to make it more useful to researchers.


Significance Harris visited Singapore and Vietnam, both of which figure heavily in US security policy in the region. In Singapore, she weathered criticism of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. In Hanoi, she proposed talks about a strategic partnership, which would mean a significant upgrade to relations with Vietnam. Impacts The Afghanistan withdrawal will make alliances and US reliability central issues in upcoming elections in Japan and South Korea. Japan will strengthen its emerging security cooperation with India, shoring up its defence in the west of the Indo-Pacific region. To test US commitment to the region after the Afghanistan withdrawal, China and North Korea will be increasingly provocative.


2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gundars Rudzitis

American history, and particularly that of the West where, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, mining for gold and silver flourished, and periodically continues to do so, is based on a frontier mentality. Indeed, we in the United States of America are still not far removed from that mentality, and have our roots in exploitation based on the idea, historically, of unlimited resources. We have created a variety of myths. Myths need not be bad, but ours have not served us well. We have started to learn slowly from our mistakes and to accept, in however belated a fashion, that we should avoid repeating them. Here I try briefly to sketch some of the outcomes from our history as it relates to mining, in the hope that New Zealand will not suffer some of the same consequences as mining communities and regions have in the US.


1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Fendius Elman

The received wisdom in international relations suggests that we can best account for the foreign policies of small states by examining structural/systemic rather than domestic level factors. This article challenges this scholarly consensus. The distribution of power and the balance of threat do influence domestic institutional formation and change in emerging states. However, the subsequent military strategies of these weak states are likely to reflect such domestic institutional choices in a number of important and predictable ways. The article tests this argument against pre-1900 US domestic regime change and foreign security policy. The historical evidence suggests that while international preconditions were critically linked to constitutional reform, the institutional structures and rules of democratic presidentialism affected both the timing and substance of US military strategies in later periods. The US case study provides a springboard for speculating on the international context of democratization in Eastern Europe and the long-term foreign-policy consequences of this domestic regime choice.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 2933-2949 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Simon ◽  
P. V. Bhave ◽  
J. L. Swall ◽  
N. H. Frank ◽  
W. C. Malm

Abstract. Data from the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) network are used to estimate organic mass to organic carbon (OM/OC) ratios across the United States by extending previously published multiple regression techniques. Our new methodology addresses common pitfalls of multiple regression including measurement uncertainty, colinearity of covariates, dataset selection, and model selection. As expected, summertime OM/OC ratios are larger than wintertime values across the US with all regional median OM/OC values tightly confined between 1.80 and 1.95. Further, we find that OM/OC ratios during the winter are distinctly larger in the eastern US than in the West (regional medians are 1.58, 1.64, and 1.85 in the great lakes, southeast, and northeast regions, versus 1.29 and 1.32 in the western and central states). We find less spatial variability in long-term averaged OM/OC ratios across the US (90% of our multiyear regressions estimate OM/OC ratios between 1.37 and 1.94) than previous studies (90% fell between 1.30 and 2.10). We attribute this difference largely to the inclusion of EC as a covariate in previous regression studies. Due to the colinearity of EC and OC, we find that up to one-quarter of the OM/OC estimates in a previous study are biased low. Assumptions about OC measurement artifacts add uncertainty to our estimates of OM/OC. In addition to estimating OM/OC ratios, our technique reveals trends that may be contrasted with conventional assumptions regarding nitrate, sulfate, and soil across the IMPROVE network. For example, our regressions show pronounced seasonal and spatial variability in both nitrate volatilization and sulfate neutralization and hydration.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-613
Author(s):  
BHUBHINDAR SINGH

AbstractThe paper examines the domestic politics explanations to Japanese security policy expansion between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. In response to the various explanations offered in the literature, such as the implementation of administrative and institutional reforms since 1994 that resulted in the centralization of the decision-making process, changes to the balance of power of political parties within the Japanese political system, and shift in the type of politicians that dominate the LDP, opposition parties and security policymaking structure, this paper argues that it is important to incorporate collective identity into understanding Japanese security policy expansion. Two reasons highlight the importance of collective identity – first, without collective identity, it is difficult to understand the type of security policy produced as the discussion of vision is omitted; and, second, collective identity reveals the organizational make-up of the security policymaking structure that is responsible for the formulation of security policy. To explicate the collective identity–institution relationship, this paper focuses on Japanese security identity and the Japanese security policymaking regime in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Two security identities for Japan are examined – the peace-state and international-state; and three elements of the regime are studied – the agents involved or marginalized in the security policymaking process, the decision-making structure of the security policymaking, and the role of the US. This paper aids in our understanding of how collective identities are sustained and supported within an institution, and how Japanese security policy expanded in the post-Cold War period.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-372
Author(s):  
Jean-François Bégin

AbstractIn this article, we study parameter uncertainty and its actuarial implications in the context of economic scenario generators. To account for this additional source of uncertainty in a consistent manner, we cast Wilkie’s four-factor framework into a Bayesian model. The posterior distribution of the model parameters is estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and is used to perform Bayesian predictions on the future values of the inflation rate, the dividend yield, the dividend index return and the long-term interest rate. According to the US data, parameter uncertainty has a significant impact on the dispersion of the four economic variables of Wilkie’s framework. The impact of such parameter uncertainty is then assessed for a portfolio of annuities: the right tail of the loss distribution is significantly heavier when parameters are assumed random and when this uncertainty is estimated in a consistent manner. The risk measures on the loss variable computed with parameter uncertainty are at least 12% larger than their deterministic counterparts.


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