Haiti: The Development of “Seamless” Assistance from Disaster Relief to UNPKOs

In this chapter, we will examine Japan’s response to a complex crisis in Haiti, in which a natural disaster and civil unrest were compounded. Persistent insecurity and confusion in Haiti, albeit under the presence of an ongoing United Nations Peacekeeping Operation (UNPKO), further deteriorated after the great earthquake in 2010. This challenge unexpectedly propelled Japan’s move toward closer “integration,” since several layers of civil-military cooperation rapidly developed to cope with the complicated emergency in post-earthquake Haiti. First, the Government of Japan (GoJ) deployed a civilian medical team and the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) emergency medical assistance unit (hereafter, the SDF medical unit) under the Japan Disaster Relief (JDR) Act. Following the SDF medical unit’s JDR work, the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) carried on with medical assistance. Second, once emergency medical support ended, an SDF contingent was dispatched under the Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) Act. The Japan Engineering Groups’ (JEG’s) engagement in reconstruction served as a useful opportunity for the GoJ to refine the “All Japan” approach, further encouraging Japan’s inclination toward “integration.” Meanwhile, the experience in Haiti shed light on the gap in the legal assumptions between the JDR Act and the PKO Act, since neither of them anticipated the protection of civil JDR teams in insecurity.

Illuminating Golden Threads

Pedagogical creativity can function as a vehicle to facilitate connection, restore humanity, and nurture critical hope in the classroom and beyond. Pedagogical creativity is essential and urgent as the confluence of the pandemic, civil unrest, and online learning have created dehumanized, unprecedented learning conditions. This chapter details an undergraduate general education course that leveraged contemporary young adult literature for cultural reformation and to promote social justice. This chapter provides examples of students enacting creativity and social imagination and concludes with a discussion of creativity in connection to this chapter's guiding questions.

Applying a Transformative Justice Approach to Encourage the Participation of Black and Latina Girls in Computing

Global protests and civil unrest in 2020 has renewed the world’s interest in addressing injustice due to structural racism and oppression toward Black and Latinx people in all aspects of society, including computing. In this article, we argue that to address and repair the harm created by institutions, policies, and practices that have systematically excluded Black and Latina girls from computer science, an intersectional, transformative justice approach must be taken. Leveraging testimonial authority, we share our past 8 years of experience designing, implementing, and studying Digital Youth Divas, a programmatic and systemic approach to encouraging middle school Black and Latina girls to participate in STEM. Specifically, we propose three principles to counter structural racism and oppression embedded in society and computing education: computing education must (1) address local histories of injustice by engaging community members; (2) counter negative stereotypes perpetuated in computer science by creating inclusive safe spaces and counter-narratives; and (3) build sustainable, computational capacity in communities. To illustrate each principle, we provide specific examples of the harm created by racist policies and systems and their effect on a specific community. We then describe our attempt to create counter structures and the subsequent outcomes for the girls, their families, and the community. This work contributes a framework for STEM and computing educators to integrate transformative justice as a method of repairing the harm that both society and the field of computing has and continues to cause Black and Latinx communities. We charge policy makers, educators, researchers, and community leaders to examine histories of oppression in their communities and to adopt holistic, transformative approaches that counter structural oppression at the individual and system level.

Right-wing Terrorism and Emerging Threats to the US National Interests

The USA acclaims to be a multicultural land of opportunity assimilating migrant settlers since its inception,but another facet of the USA is a culture of white racial supremacy, and orthodox beliefs regarding blacks, women, religiousand ideological others. The policy of constructing the ideological other, i.e., communism, was the highlight of cold warpolitics. The end of the cold war brought a shift in US policy and led to the rise of right-wing nationalist groups. The Trumpvictory was the triumph of these groups leading to an exponential rise in incidents of domestic terrorism during the TrumpEra. The paper employing Realist IR theory analyzes the Right-wing terrorist ideology through secondary data. One outcomeof the study is that the ideology of populism employing violence is causing civil unrest and is a stigma for USA soft image,and the rise of domestic terrorism is associated with the wave of global religious revivalism.

“We Need to be Better”: Race, Outdoor Recreation, and Corporate Social Advocacy

The summer 2020 protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other African-Americans sparked important conversations about race, police brutality, and institutionalized racism in the United States. In response to widespread civil unrest, organizations across the country issued statements condemning anti-Black violence and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. This essay analyzes public statements released by 50 outdoor sport and recreation organizations. Extending scholarly literature on race and corporate social advocacy, our analysis develops the concept of conciliatory discourse, which functions by rhetorically constructing 1) a non-specification of grievance, 2) an obfuscation of commitments to action, and 3) a reinforcement of previous actions or processes. We argue that while many outdoor recreation organizations took action in support of racial justice, their public statements complicate long-term commitments for inclusivity and diversity.

Geological evidence of an unreported historical Chilean tsunami reveals more frequent inundation

Assessing tsunami hazards commonly relies on historical accounts of past inundations, but such chronicles may be biased by temporal gaps due to historical circumstances. As a possible example, the lack of reports of tsunami inundation from the 1737 south-central Chile earthquake has been attributed to either civil unrest or a small tsunami due to deep fault slip below land. Here we conduct sedimentological and diatom analyses of tidal marsh sediments within the 1737 rupture area and find evidence for a locally-sourced tsunami consistent in age with this event. The evidence is a laterally-extensive sand sheet coincident with abrupt, decimetric subsidence. Coupled dislocation-tsunami models place the causative fault slip mostly offshore rather than below land. Whether associated or not with the 1737 earthquake, our findings reduce the average recurrence interval of tsunami inundation derived from historical records alone, highlighting the importance of combining geological and historical records in tsunami hazard assessment.

The Effects of Pandemics on the Vulnerability of Food Security in West Africa—A Scoping Review

The purpose of this paper was to show the effects of the Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics on food security vulnerability in West Africa. The methodology is based on a scoping literature review using the PRISMA method. The study showed that food security was affected by the restrictive measures in the different West African countries. In addition, it shows that this region is highly vulnerable to such crises, which can combine their effects with those of other events such as climate change and civil unrest. In both pandemics, all pillars of food security were affected. The effects on urban and rural centers may be very different. The study suggests a better understanding of the differences between rural and urban centers and between men and women and how long-term restraint measures can affect rural areas where agriculture is the main lever for reducing food insecurity. Food security must be seriously considered by governments when implementing restrictive measures during a pandemic. Consideration of health factors alone at the expense of food security can greatly exacerbate health problems and even increase cases of disease.

Democratizing Societies Confront Their Past

This chapter examines various processes of democratization and confrontation within the legacies of the last wave of repressive authoritarianism in the Americas. Undergoing periods of civil unrest, repression, and human rights violations, these societies faced a tortuous process of coming to terms with that experience, enforcing policies of transitional justice without an easy way of closing the book on the past. This chapter suggests a comparative look at various policy paths and their consequences, highlighting a transnational spillover effect as countries looked upon one another and drew inferences for calibrating and advancing their own processes of overcoming the scars of authoritarian repression. The analysis identifies the constellation of national and transnational factors that eventually opened institutional ground for belated truth telling and accountability for historical wrongs.