scholarly journals Returnees and their neighbors: Migration of the Romanian Roma, networks, social distance, and local development

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Stefánia Toma ◽  
László Fosztó

Migration has a significant impact on the home communities of the migrants through financial and social remittances. There is an ongoing debate about the effects of migration on local development between proponents of approaches inspired by “development optimism” on the one hand, and those that are focused more on the negative consequences. Our study is focused on the ways mobile Roma are repositioning themselves within two ethnically mixed localities in Transylvania. Returnees take advantage, reorient and navigate between local social categories, challenging them to rely on the resources at their disposal to improve the situation of their families and communities. Social networks facilitate migration and also serve as support for the renegotiation of social categories at home. We distinguish between two main patterns of network development. On the one hand there are localities where network ties crosscut ethnic boundaries and facilitate intense exchanges and communication between different segments of local society. In the other case, network ties tend to be tight between members of the same ethnic category, but ties that cut through ethnic boundaries remain weak. We discuss the implications of these patterns for the local development paths of the home localities of the migrants.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 5886
Author(s):  
Antonio Luis Díaz-Aguilar ◽  
Javier Escalera-Reyes

Although family-run micro and small businesses largely form the crux of the locally based tourism sector, either as part of a community organization or as independent units of private enterprise, in El Castillo (Nicaragua) can be found an example of how, even in the absence of a community organization to provide a structural framework, the development of local tourism has sustained practically all businesses set up and run by households, organized largely through family relationships. This structure is pivotal in stoking resilience, not only with regard to private businesses, but also to the system of tourism (specific) and, by extension, to the whole of local society and the surrounding socio-ecosystem, or socio-ecological system (SES) (general). The case study presented here, developed on the basis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork, highlights the role of the family structure within Locally-Based Tourism (LBT) in general and also in specific cases, such as the one studied here, in which it takes on a particularly central role. The confirmation of the importance of families and family relationships as key elements in the robust development of tourism in El Castillo, and of the specific characteristics that its local society presents for this, must be taken into account in order to support Community-Based Tourism projects by institutions and organizations interested in promoting sustainable local development. Indeed, once further case studies are conducted, with a view to providing comparative evidence of these findings, it might even be proven advantageous to create a distinctive subcategory within LBT: Family-Based Tourism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096977642110235
Author(s):  
Thilo Lang ◽  
Donatas Burneika ◽  
Rivo Noorkõiv ◽  
Bianka Plüschke-Altof ◽  
Gintarė Pociūtė-Sereikienė ◽  
...  

Based on a relational understanding of socio-spatial polarisation as a nested, multidimensional and multi-scalar process, the paper applies a comparative perspective on current trends of socio-spatial development in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Comparing current scholarship and data on demographic and economic processes of centralisation and peripheralisation, we also examine political debates around issues of polarisation in different scholarly national perspectives. Despite variations in national discourses, our comparative perspective conveys strong similarities between the three Baltic countries in terms of socio-economic and demographic concentration in the capital regions to the disadvantage of the rest of the country. The analysis of regional policies further points to tensions between a concern for territorial cohesion on the one hand, and an adherence to the neo-liberal logic of growth and competitiveness against the backdrop of post-socialist transition on the other hand. An overview of case studies in the three countries shows a common reliance on endogenous resources to foster local development, conforming to the neo-liberal logics of regional policy. However, these strategies remain niche models with different levels of success for the respective regions and also among the populations in the region. As a result, we argue for a stronger role of regional policy in the Baltic countries that goes beyond the capital regions by better addressing the negative consequences of uneven development.


Author(s):  
Jochen von Bernstorff

The chapter explores the notion of “community interests” with regard to the global “land-grab” phenomenon. Over the last decade, a dramatic increase of foreign investment in agricultural land could be observed. Bilateral investment treaties protect around 75 per cent of these large-scale land acquisitions, many of which came with associated social problems, such as displaced local populations and negative consequences for food security in Third World countries receiving these large-scale foreign investments. Hence, two potentially conflicting areas of international law are relevant in this context: Economic, social, and cultural rights and the principles of permanent sovereignty over natural resources and “food sovereignty” challenging large-scale investments on the one hand, and specific norms of international economic law stabilizing them on the other. The contribution discusses the usefulness of the concept of “community interests” in cases where the two colliding sets of norms are both considered to protect such interests.


Pathogens ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 530
Author(s):  
Ekaterina A. Golenkina ◽  
Svetlana I. Galkina ◽  
Nina G. Dolinnaya ◽  
Evgenii A. Arifulin ◽  
Yulia M. Romanova ◽  
...  

Mimicking bacterial DNA, synthetic CpG-containing oligodeoxyribonucleotides (CpG-ODNs) have a powerful immunomodulatory potential. Their practical application is mainly associated with the production of vaccines, where they are used as adjuvants, as well as in local antimicrobial therapy. CpG-ODNs act on a wide variety of immune cells, including neutrophilic granulocytes. On the one hand, the stimulatory effect provides both the direct implementation of their antimicrobial and fungicidal mechanisms, and an avalanche-like strengthening of the immune signal due to interaction with other participants in the immune process. On the other hand, hyperactivation of neutrophilic granulocytes can have negative consequences. In particular, the formation of unreasonably high amounts of reactive oxygen species leads to tissue damages and, as a consequence, a spontaneous aggravation and prolongation of the inflammatory process. Under physiological conditions, a large number of DNA fragments are present in inflammation foci: both of microbial and self-tissue origin. We investigated effects of several short modified hexanucleotides on the main indicators of neutrophil activation, as well as their influence on the immunomodulatory activity of known synthetic CpG-ODNs. The results obtained show that short oligonucleotides partially inhibit the prooxidant effect of synthetic CpG-ODNs without significantly affecting the ability of the latter to overcome bacteria-induced pro-survival effects on neutrophilic granulocytes.


1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartik Kalyan Raman

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Nikula ◽  
I. Kopoteva

The peripheral (rural) regions in most countries face four vicious circles that contribute to their low level of development and inability to achieve the sustainable level of development. The first vicious circle is related to demography and is caused by the vulnerable population; very few young people and imbalance of women and men lead to poor economy, i.e. dominance of subsistence economy over production or trade; unfavorable age structure combined with poor services lead to very low birth rate and high levels of migration. The second vicious circle of remoteness is related to the fact that poor infrastructure does not attract businesses or new residents in the area, which contributes to high levels of migration as young and working-age population, especially families with young children, move out. The third vicious circle is related to education: the low level of education and skills mean that there is no labor force available in the region, which prevents business from entering the local market. Lack of employment means high poverty risk, which again accelerates migration from the rural areas. All these processes undermine the possibilities for local development simply because there is not enough human or economic capital to sustain rural development. These negative trends are not only typical for rural areas of Russia but have a strong impact on peripheral areas of many other post-socialist and European countries. The governments in Russia and European Union introduced various programs and measures to promote local development so that to overcome the negative consequences of all the mentioned vicious circles. In the first part of the article, the authors evaluate some local development efforts funded by the Ladoga Initiative project, successful and failed projects aimed at overcoming the vicious circles. In the second part of the article, the authors describe grant and priority programs introduced in Russia to support local development.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucius Caviola ◽  
Stefan Schubert ◽  
Andreas Mogensen

Across eight experiments (N = 2,310), we studied whether people would prioritize rescuing individuals who may be thought to contribute more to society. We found that participants were generally dismissive of general rules that prioritize more socially beneficial individuals, such as doctors instead of unemployed people. By contrast, participants were more supportive of one-off decisions to save the life of a more socially beneficial individual, even when such cases were the same as those covered by the rule. This generality effect occurred robustly even when controlling for various factors. It occurred when the decision-maker was the same in both cases, when the pairs of people differing in the extent of their indirect social utility was varied, when the scenarios were varied, when the participant samples came from different countries, and when the general rule only covered cases that are exactly the same as the situation described in the one-off condition. The effect occurred even when the general rule was introduced via a concrete precedent case. Participants’ tendency to be more supportive of the one-off proposal than the general rule was significantly reduced when they evaluated the two proposals jointly as opposed to separately. Finally, the effect also occurred in sacrificial moral dilemmas, suggesting it is a more general phenomenon in certain moral contexts. We discuss possible explanations of the effect, including concerns about negative consequences of the rule and a deontological aversion against making difficult trade-off decisions unless they are absolutelynecessary.


1979 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Kasfir

Most concepts of ethnicity are unsuitable for political analysis because they ignore either subjective or objective aspects, and because they ignore the fluid and situational nature of ethnicity. The approach flowing from the concept proposed here permits the observer to examine empirical variations that tend to be treated as rigid assumptions by modernization analysts on the one hand and class analysts on the other. The concept is applied to a study of the Nubians of Uganda because of the intermixture of class and ethnic features involved in their fall from status at the beginning of the colonial period and their subsequent sudden rise following the 1071 coup d'état of Idi Amin. The fairly recent creation of the Nubians as an ethnic category and the relative ease with which others can become members illustrate other features of the proposed concept of ethnicity. Finally, this concept is used to examine and criticize overly restrictive notions of ethnicity found in theories based upon both cultural pluralism and consociationalism.


2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (No. 10) ◽  
pp. 477-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Zagata

The paper tackles the issue of regional and social development. From a sociological point of view, it focuses on the phenomenon of complementary currency systems. The analysis shows that money, as a social institution, has got certain features, which have an impact on economic behavior of people. Establishing a currency on the local level, which would circulate as a complement of the national currency, brings certain social benefits to local society. Nowadays, there are many complementary currency systems all over the world, including Europe. The paper attempts to answer the question, how they can contribute to the local development.


Water Policy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 1042-1058 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matej Vojtek ◽  
Jana Vojteková

Abstract The article is focused on the creation of flood maps for ungauged basins (i.e. local spatial scale areas), using a hydrologic-hydraulic approach, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing techniques, and their role in local spatial planning. The case study is represented by the Turniansky potok catchment which was not mapped in the preliminary flood risk assessment (EU Floods Directive) as an area with existing potential risk. The design discharges were estimated by applying the regional formula. The design discharge with 100-year return period was chosen for hydraulic modeling using the one-dimensional HEC-RAS model. The basis for creating the flood vulnerability map for the selected hydraulic domain was the current land use. Each land use category was assigned a category of acceptable risk (low, medium, high). Furthermore, the vulnerability was defined by digitizing buildings within the hydraulic domain. The role of the created flood maps, as regulatory tools in local spatial planning (i.e. local development plan of municipality), was highlighted and discussed. The importance of flood maps is primarily seen in limiting the irresponsible expansion and densification of construction in the areas near the watercourse which were assigned the low acceptable risk.


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