The Hobbesian Moment

This chapter reviews how once in power, populist leaders try to assert their political dominance, which is invariably contested by some societal and institutional actors, and shows how this moment of decisive political confrontation determines the ulterior trajectory of the populist government. If populist chief executives succeed during this moment, an aggrandized executive emerges and electoral democracy will transition to a hybrid regime; if they are defeated or constrained, the possibility of regime change is averted. The chapter identifies the permissive and productive conditions that explain the failure or success of populist leaders in emerging victorious from this inflection point. The key permissive condition is voters’ support for radical institutional change. The key productive condition is the ability of populist leaders to use the state’s repressive apparatus to impose their political will. An additional productive condition is sometimes present: the organization and mobilization of low-income voters to support the populist project.

#presidentspartingwords at a Critical Juncture: Reclaiming the Autonomous Subject in Social Media Discourse on Coronavirus in Belarus

This study explores #presidentspartingwords, a viral hashtag that accompanied the eulogy-like posts that social media users created about themselves in spring 2020 by satirically emulating president Alexander Lukashenko’s patronizing remarks about the first coronavirus victims in Belarus, an authoritarian post-Soviet country. The study examines how the online public used these discursive sites to challenge the governmentally sanctioned subject positions, which construct Belarusians as inapt dependents of the state, by articulating themselves as efficacious,autonomous agents. The study argues the coronavirus pandemic served as a “permissive condition” for critical juncture by disrupting thelogic of the official discourse in which Lukashenko is assigned the role of the major, if not the only, rhetor imbued with the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the Belarusian people. I argue that approaching the coronavirus as a potential critical juncture offers critical mediascholars a useful analytical category for theorizing the discursive conditionality of political change.

HA and HS Changes in Endothelial Inflammatory Activation

Cardiovascular diseases are a group of disorders caused by the presence of a combination of risk factors, such as tobacco use, unhealthy diet and obesity, physical inactivity, etc., which cause the modification of the composition of the vessel’s matrix and lead to the alteration of blood flow, matched with an inflammation condition. Nevertheless, it is not clear if the inflammation is a permissive condition or a consequent one. In order to investigate the effect of inflammation on the onset of vascular disease, we treated endothelial cells with the cytokine TNF-α that is increased in obese patients and is reported to induce cardiometabolic diseases. The inflammation induced a large change in the extracellular matrix, increasing the pericellular hyaluronan and altering the heparan sulfate Syndecans sets, which seems to be related to layer permeability but does not influence cell proliferation or migration nor induce blood cell recruitment or activation.

Inhibition of cell membrane ingression at the division site by cell wall in fission yeast

Eukaryotic cells assemble an actomyosin ring during cytokinesis to function as a force-generating machine to drive membrane invagination, and to counteract the intracellular pressure and the cell surface tension. It is unclear whether additional factors such as the extracellular matrix (cell wall in yeasts and fungi) affect the actomyosin ring contraction. While studying the fission yeast β-glucan synthase mutant cps1-191, which is defective in division septum synthesis and actomyosin ring contraction, we found that significantly weakening of the extracellular glycan matrix caused the spheroplasts to divide at the non-permissive condition. This division was dependent on a functional actomyosin ring and vesicular trafficking, but independent of normal septum synthesis. cps1-191 cells with weakened extracellular glycan matrix divide non-medially with a much slower ring contraction rate compared to wild type cells under similar conditions, which we term as cytofission. Interestingly, the high turgor pressure appears to play minimal roles in inhibiting ring contraction in cps1-191 mutants as decreasing the turgor pressure alone does not enable cytofission. We propose that during cytokinesis, the extracellular glycan matrix restricts actomyosin ring contraction and membrane ingression, and remodeling of the extracellular components through division septum synthesis relieves the inhibition and facilitates actomyosin ring contraction.

The Politics of Progress in Human Development

This chapter analyses approaches to understanding the politics underlying success and failure on human development, which are of critical importance for progress, as shown in earlier chapters. It draws on Polanyi’s analysis of a long-term swing of a pendulum between emphasis on markets and emphasis on social objectives, and on theories of social movements and social change, for example put forward by Tarrow and Tilly. It illustrates the relevance of both these approaches with empirical examples. The chapter contends that democracy is a permissive condition, providing space for collective action (social movements, workers’ movements action, and political parties) to promote change favouring human development. The chapter also discusses how far politics has been incorporated into the human development and capabilities approaches, considering and critiquing the view that what is needed is a ‘democratic consensus’.

APC/CCdh1-dependent proteolysis of USP1 regulates the response to UV-mediated DNA damage

Targeted protein destruction of critical cellular regulators during the G1 phase of the cell cycle is achieved by anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosomeCdh1 (APC/CCdh1), a multisubunit E3 ubiquitin ligase. Cells lacking Cdh1 have been shown to accumulate deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) damage, suggesting that it may play a previously unrecognized role in maintaining genomic stability. The ubiquitin-specific protease 1 (USP1) is a known critical regulator of DNA repair and genomic stability. In this paper, we report that USP1 was degraded in G1 via APC/CCdh1. USP1 levels were kept low in G1 to provide a permissive condition for inducing proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) monoubiquitination in response to ultraviolet (UV) damage before DNA replication. Importantly, expression of a USP1 mutant that cannot be degraded via APC/CCdh1 inhibited PCNA monoubiquitination during G1, likely compromising the recruitment of trans-lesion synthesis polymerase to UV repair sites. Thus, we propose a role for APC/CCdh1 in modulating the status of PCNA monoubiquitination and UV DNA repair before S phase entry.

Humanitarian Intervention, American Public Opinion, and the Future of R2P

This article examines the evolution of humanitarian interventions in the 1990s and examines whether or not R2P can be a catalyst for shifting the norm of humanitarian intervention from a permissive condition – whereby it is generally considered allowable in the international system – to an obligation on states to protect against mass violence against civilians. I conclude that shifting to a norm of obligation is likely to be a tough sell in the United States. While Americans express general support for responding to genocide, there are strong indications that both the public and elites are not likely to endorse a new norm that obligates the deployment of American troops into regional and civil conflicts around the globe. This article examines the prospects of American support for this pillar of R2P. It begins with an examination of the literature on how norms are created and then provides an overview of the process by which the norm of humanitarian intervention emerged in the 1990s and the degree to which it is embedded in American public opinion and decision-making circles. It then examines the challenges of gaining American public and political support for transforming the permissive norm of humanitarian intervention into a more formal obligation under R2P.