scholarly journals Personal, Powerful, Political

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. vii-xv
Author(s):  
Catherine Vanner ◽  
Anuradha Dugal

“Today I met my role model,” tweeted climate change activist Greta Thunberg on 25 February 2020, captioning a picture of herself with girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai, who also tweeted the picture, proclaiming that Greta was “the only friend I would skip school for.” The proclamations of mutual admiration illustrate a form of solidarity between the two most famous girl activists, who are often pointed to as examples of the power of the individual girl activist in spite of their intentionally collective approaches that connect young activists and civil society organizations around the world. These girl activists have garnered worldwide attention for their causes but have also been subject to problematic media representations that elevate voices of privilege and/or focus on girl activists as exceptional individuals (Gordon and Taft 2010; Hesford 2014), often obscuring the movements behind them. For this reason, this special issue explores activism networks by, for, and with girls and young women, examining and emphasizing girls’ activism in collective and collaborative spaces.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8206
Author(s):  
Andrew Spring ◽  
Erin Nelson ◽  
Irena Knezevic ◽  
Patricia Ballamingie ◽  
Alison Blay-Palmer

Since we first conceived of this Special Issue, “Levering Sustainable Food Systems to Address Climate Change—Possible Transformations”, COVID-19 has turned the world upside down [...]


2021 ◽  

The current political debates about climate change or the coronavirus pandemic reveal the fundamental controversial nature of expertise in politics and society. The contributions in this volume analyse various facets, actors and dynamics of the current conflicts about knowledge and expertise. In addition to examining the contradictions of expertise in politics, the book discusses the political consequences of its controversial nature, the forms and extent of policy advice, expert conflicts in civil society and culture, and the global dimension of expertise. This special issue also contains a forum including reflections on the role of expertise during the coronavirus pandemic. The volume includes perspectives from sociology, political theory, political science and law.


Author(s):  
Matthew Kelly

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 839 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Rodrigo-Comino ◽  
José María Senciales-González ◽  
José Damián Ruiz-Sinoga

In this Special Issue, we have tried to include manuscripts about soil erosion and degradation processes and the accelerated rates due to hydrological processes and climate change. We considered that the main goal was successfully reached. The new research focused on measurements, modelling, and experiments under field or laboratory conditions developed at different scales (pedon, hillslope, and catchment) were submitted and published. This Special Issue received investigations from different parts of the world such as Ethiopia, Morocco, China, Iran, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Spain, among others. We are happy to see that all papers presented findings characterized as unconventional, provocative, innovative and methodologically new. We hope that the readers of the journal Water can enjoy and learn about hydrology and soil erosion using the published material, and share the results with the scientific community, policymakers and stakeholders new research to continue this amazing adventure, featuring plenty of issues and challenges.


Author(s):  
Robin Ramcharan

Citizens of ASEAN states appear to be increasingly involved, through Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), in pushing for greater openness and accountability of their political leaders and public institutions. In particular, ICTs afford citizens of ASEAN States and like-minded counterparts around the world in the human rights community to push for greater accountability of ASEAN’s human rights institutions. With the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2007, ASEAN states embarked on a process of crafting a regional ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), eighteen years after the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria. While the World Conference had reaffirmed the universality of human rights, ASEAN states have moved grudgingly and gradually, egged on by greater global concern for human rights and by the pressures of globalization, towards the protection of human rights. The Terms of Reference (TORs) of the AICHR, adopted in July 2009 and favouring promotion rather than protection of human rights did not provide for an institutionalised role for the media. Subsequent drafting by AICHR of a proposed ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD) has excluded mainstream news media and civil society organizations (CSOs) from the process. In the absence of reporting and substantive reporting by most mainstream media in the region civil society, most importantly the new ICT based media, has played a vital role in seeking to advance the protection of human rights. This includes scrutiny of the specific rights that will be included in the forthcoming AHRD to ensure that international human rights standards are upheld and that ASEAN states honour their existing commitments under international instruments. The new media-environment provides a platform for a multitude of actors to disseminate human rights related information, to document human rights abuses and thereby enhance the protection of human rights in the region.  


1970 ◽  
pp. 10-11
Author(s):  
Heba El-Shazli

How have women in the Arab world fared in the development and promotion of civil society in the region? The following contributions to this issue of Al-Raida will give us a glimpse into the world of women activists in Arab civil society and whether they have made any achievements. One will conclude that the road is still long and arduous, yet important steps have been taken by men and women activists working to promote the role of Arab women in civil society organizations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Stevie Leonard Harison

Climate change has become one of the most challenging issues for the international system in this 21st century because its negative impact has been founded in every regions in the world. One of those is Africa with its far-lagged behind and poorer performance in political, economic, and social sectors than any other parts of the world. This article tries to analyze the ongoing process of the creation of good governance in Africa's climate change dynamics. In Africa, the progress of civil society activism is predicted to be more important factor than the policy outcome from its government in making good governance. In this context, the rise of civil society should be better understood as being an equal partner than a competitor to the policy-makers to have more intensive cooperation and collaboration to solve the urgent climate problems in Africa at present.


2021 ◽  
Vol 258 ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
Dawn Holland ◽  
Hande Kucuk ◽  
Miguel León-Ledesma

Climate change is one of the most serious risks facing humanity. Temperature rises can lead to catastrophic climate and natural events that threaten livelihoods. From rising sea levels to flooding, bush fires, extreme temperatures and droughts, the economic and human cost is too large to ignore. More than 190 world leaders got together in Glasgow during November 2021 at the UN’s COP26 climate change summit to discuss progress on the Paris Agreement (COP21) and to agree on new measures to limit global warming. In Paris, countries agreed to limit global warming to well below 2° and aim for 1.5° as well as to adapt to the impacts of a changing climate and raise the necessary funding to deliver on these aims. However, actions to date were not nearly enough as highlighted by the IPCC (2018) special report. The world is still on track to reach warming above 3° by 2100. As evident from figure 1, global temperatures have been on a steadily increasing path since the start of the 20th century and this process has substantially accelerated since the beginning of the 1980s. This has been unevenly distributed, with temperatures in the Northern hemisphere being a full 1°C higher than for the 1961–1990 average, whilst temperatures in the Southern hemisphere have increased by almost 0.5°C.


Author(s):  
Hartmut Wessler ◽  
Julia Lück ◽  
Antal Wozniak

The annual United Nations Climate Change Conferences, officially called Conferences of the Parties (COPs), are the main drivers of media attention to climate change around the world. Even more so than the Rio and Rio+20 “Earth Summits” (1992 and 2012) and the meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the COPs offer multiple access points for the communicative engagement of all kinds of stakeholders. COPs convene up to 20,000 people in one place for two weeks, including national delegations, civil society and business representatives, scientific organizations, representatives from other international organizations, as well as journalists from around the world. While intergovernmental negotiation under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) constitutes the core of COP business, these multifunctional events also offer arenas for civil society mobilization, economic lobbying, as well as expert communication and knowledge transfer. The media image of the COPs emerges as a product of distinct networks of coproduction constituted by journalists, professional communicators from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and national delegations. Production structures at the COPs are relatively globalized with uniform access rules for journalists from all over the world, a few transnational news agencies dominating distribution of both basic information and news visuals, and dense localized interaction between public relations (PR) professionals and journalists. Photo opportunities created by globally coordinated environmental NGOs meet the selection of journalists much better than the visual strategies pursued by delegation spokespeople. This gives NGOs the upper hand in the visual framing contest, whereas in textual framing NGOs are sidelined and national politicians clearly dominate media coverage. The globalized production environment leads to relatively similar patterns of basic news framing in national media coverage of the COPs that reflect overarching ways of approaching the topic: through a focus on problems and victims; a perspective on civil society demands and solutions; an emphasis on conflict in negotiations; or a focus on the benefits of clean energy production. News narratives, on the other hand, give journalists from different countries more leeway in adapting COP news to national audiences’ presumed interests and preoccupations. Even after the adoption of a new global treaty at COP21 in Paris in 2015 that specifies emission reduction targets for all participating countries, the annual UN Climate Change Conferences are likely to remain in the media spotlight. Future research could look more systematically at the impact of global civil society and media in monitoring the national contributions to climate change mitigation introduced in the Paris Agreement and shoring up even more ambitious commitments needed to reach the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius as compared to pre-industrial levels.


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