Public Health Roles in Addressing Commercial Determinants of Health

The shared challenges posed by the production and distribution of health-harming products have led to growing recognition of the need for policy learning and transfer across problems, populations, and social contexts. The commercial determinants of health (CDoH) can serve as a unifying concept to describe the population health consequences arising from for-profit actors and activities, along with the social structures that sustain them. Strategies to mitigate harms from CDoH have focused on behavioral change, regulation, fiscal policies, consumer and citizen activism, and litigation. While there is evidence of effective measures for each strategy, approaches that combine strategies are generally more impactful. Filling gaps in evidence can inform ways of adapting these strategies to specific populations and social contexts. Overall, CDoH are addressed most effectively not through siloed efforts to reduce consumption of health-harming products, but instead as a set of integrated strategies to reduce exposures to health-harming commercial actors and activities. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 43 is April 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Candlelight Vigils and Citizen Activism

This chapter focuses on modern political and social collective actions in South Korea to illustrate how changing information ecosystems have influenced the ways protests and candlelight vigils have been organized over the past several decades. In particular, the chapter explains how Internet and digital communication technologies began to be used to facilitate collective actions in South Korea in a series of candlelight vigils beginning in 2002, when two South Korean teenage girls were killed by a U.S. armored vehicle. It also covers other major candlelight vigils, including 2004 vigils against the impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun and 2008 vigils against U.S. beef importation. In examining candlelight vigils at different time points and stages of technological development, it considers both what changed and what has remained largely the same, while highlighting key agents and affordances and their interactions at each time period analyzed.

Posthuman rights struggles and environmentalisms from below in the political ontologies of Ecuador and Colombia

In a decolonial determination to resist the modern ontological separation of nature from culture, political ontologies and posthuman legalities in Andean Community countries increasingly recognize natural and cultural forces as inextricably interrelated under the principle of the pluriverse. After years of Indigenous struggles, new social movement mobilizations and citizen activism, twenty-first-century constitutional changes in the region have affirmed the plurinational and intercultural natures of the region’s polities. Drawing upon extensive interdisciplinary ethnographic research in Ecuador and Colombia, the article illustrates how Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities express multispecies relations of care and conviviality in opposition to modern extractivist development through the concept of buen vivir. These grassroots collective life projects and life plans articulate rights ‘from below’ to support new practices of territorialization that further materialize natures’ rights and community ideals. Although human rights have modern origins, the implementation of third generation collective biocultural rights to fulfill natures’ rights may help to materially realize community norms, autonomies and responsibilities that exceed modern ontologies. The ecocentric territorial rights struggles and posthuman legalities we explore are examples of a larger emergent project of decolonizing human rights in a politics appropriate to the Anthropocene.

Do Truth Commissions Really Improve Democracy?

This article presents and tests an original theory that truth commissions (TCs) inspire democratic behaviors, but have little discernible impact on democratic institutions. Using quantitative analyses of countries undergoing transitions between 1970 and 2015, and accounting for endogeneity of TCs, we find that these temporary bodies are associated with greater democratic participation and state agent observance of physical integrity rights. However, they have no measurable effect on institutions like fair elections, rules regulating political association, liberal checks on the executive, or judicial independence. This contradicts a key argument in the transitional justice literature that TCs catalyze institutional reform through investigation and extensive recommendations. This article’s findings might encourage those who intend to use these bodies as a tool to promote citizen activism or police restraint. However, the findings might discourage those who hope TCs could jump-start judicial reforms or create a firewall against executive overreach.

Asset declarations may boost transparency in Paraguay

Significance The decision to put asset declarations in the public domain, which had been bitterly opposed by many politicians, represents a major victory for campaigners in favour of open government and a significant advance in transparency and the fight against public sector corruption. The United States and EU both put out statements welcoming the decision. Impacts Citizen activism will continue to drive anti-corruption moves but progress will be slow. Congressional moves to circumvent transparency measures will compound distrust of politicians. Attention will now focus on whether public disclosure leads to legal consequences for influential officials.

Solidarity Reasoning and Citizenship Agendas: From Socialist Yugoslavia to Neoliberal Serbia

Solidarity and citizenship are intertwined in a very complex manner, where the former usually operates as the “social glue” for the latter, holding together its formal components such as rights, duties, and membership criteria. The “we” that sets the parameters for membership and equality is not only legally defined but also discursively produced and maintained. Here, the rhetoric of solidarity plays an important yet ambiguous role, as it can advocate for interdependence and full inclusion while at the same time solidifying the exclusionary “we.” The aim of this article is to show how solidarity reasoning—the question of with whom we should be solidary and why—plays a functional role in maintaining citizenship agendas, and how this reasoning changes to support and enable shifts in these agendas. The dominant solidarity narratives that have supported prevailing citizenship agendas in Serbia (and across the post-Yugoslav space) over the last couple of decades will be discussed, as will counter-narratives that have served to destabilize hegemonic agendas by envisioning citizenship communities differently. Today, the ambiguous role solidarity can play within a citizenship agenda becomes especially obvious in neoliberal regimes, where, as I will show in the case of contemporary Serbia, calls for solidarity can be deployed to foster very distinct, arguably mutually opposing, kinds of political subjectivities and citizen activism.

Modern Trends in the Institutionalization of Civil Society in Kemerovo Region (Kuzbass): a Regional Study

The article deals with the institutionalization of civil society in Russia at the current stage. The aim of the study was to consider certain aspects of the interaction of the state and civil society in Russia in general and in Kemerovo Region (Kuzbass) in particular. The authors employed the method of sociological survey of the population and the expert assessment of non-profit sector representatives, which made it possible to assess the dynamics of the development of civil society institutions in Russia and in Kemerovo region. The authors used systemic and institutional approaches to identify the changes in the understanding of civil society, as well as to evaluate the work of authorities and public institutions through the prism of public attitude. All the numerous definitions of civil society appeared to provide no common understanding in government bodies and society. The paper focuses on some features of the development of civil society and challenges that inhibit the process of development of civil initiatives in regional politics. The assessed criteria included the level of social and political activity of the population, the trust of the population and non-profit organizations in the civil society institutions and authorities, the information accessibility in the media, and the attitude of the population to the issues of self-government. Social activity, which depends on the level of civic engagement, proved crucial for the development of regional civil institutions. This is especially important in the aspect of young citizen activism.

The Inclusionary Populist Communication Style on Facebook: The Case of Ada Colau in Barcelona

Communication is one of the core elements of populism, especially in social media. Through such digital platforms, political leaders can communicate directly with citizens and build both their discourse and their political leadership. Although the literature has so far identified the existence of a populist political communication style, the expansion of populism and its connection with social media are extending and diversifying the concept, as well as adding new repertoires. In order to analyse this, we propose a study of the communication strategy of the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau who, with a background of citizen activism, became mayor of the city in 2015 thanks to a political organisation situated as left populist. The methodology is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of the content of Colau’s Facebook profile. A total of 226 posts between 2015 and 2017 are analysed. The results make it possible to identify a new specific modality within the populist style of political communication, namely the inclusionary populist type. This focuses on issues related to defense of the rights of the weakest social groups and works within a framework of social justice and solidarity with others. Likewise, the study confirms how Facebook is configured as a preferred platform for the construction of political leadership.