Data as a Lens for Understanding what Constitutes Credibility in Asylum Decision-making

In asylum decision-making, legal authorities rely on the criterion "credibility" as a measure for determining whether an individual has a legitimate asylum claim; that is, whether they have a well-founded fear of persecution upon returning to their country of origin. Nation states, international institutions, and NGOs increasingly seek to leverage data-driven technologies to support such decisions, deploying processes of data cleaning, contestation, and interpretation. We qualitatively analyzed 50 asylum cases to understand how the asylum decision-making process in Denmark leverages data to configure individuals as credible (or not). In this context, data can vary from the applicant's testimony to data acquired on the applicant from registers and alphanumerical data. Our findings suggest that legal authorities assess credibility through a largely discretionary practice, establishing certainty by ruling out divergence or contradiction between the different forms of data and documentation involved in an asylum case. As with other reclassification processes [following Bowker and Star 1999], credibility is an ambiguous prototypical concept for decision-makers to attempt certainty, especially important to consider in the design of data-driven technologies where stakeholders have differential power.

New Dimensions of Global Feminist Influence: Tracking Feminist Mobilization Worldwide, 1975–2015

Feminist mobilization, crucial for advancing women's human rights, has increased in all world regions since 1975. However, we do not know enough about the global impact of this mobilization because we lack adequate databases to explore the ways that feminist mobilization interacts with other factors that enhance and limit women's rights, such as democracy, intergovernmental processes, and transnational, regional organizing. Our ability to explore these questions is obstructed by a lack of data on the global south and measures that focus on formal organizations. This project remedies these gaps, developing an improved measure of feminist mobilization that encompasses autonomous, domestic feminist mobilization in 126 countries, 1975–2015, enabling us to track global and regional trends. Using regional comparisons and statistical analysis, we use this new measure to reveal new patterns and complexities in feminist mobilization. We discern distinct regional patterns in such organizing that defy facile predictions of global convergence and suggest a central role for UN processes advancing women's rights. Our analysis also points to the importance of transnational feminist networks and democratization as factors enabling and strengthening feminist mobilization. We conclude by suggesting some fruitful avenues for exploring relationships between feminist movements, international institutions, and democracy.

Is the Gamification of Scientific Work a Good Idea?

This chapter shows that, contrary to what some researchers claim, setting up the conditions for a “playful environment” is not so simple, in particular when it comes to organizing a new competition for the popularization of science (MT180®). In fact, we will see that popularization does not fit so easily into the “playful environment” desired by the organizers due to the gamified nature of the approach, which gradually colonizes the initial desire to present one's scientific work and pushes some participants to exaggerate their results in order to go as far as possible in the competition. It is therefore feared that the gamification of scientific work, while compatible with neoliberal expectations, will in fact lead to the production of bad science. The question then arises as to whether the need to turn researchers into effective communicators with a view to building the “knowledge society” advocated by international institutions can be achieved through gamified approaches, with the risk of creating an ever-greater distance between (real) scientific knowledge and citizens.

Anarchism: A Legacy of Postmodernism

This study has made the implicit links betweenpostmodernism and anarchism explicit in order to uncoverthe philosophical origins of terrorism in the postmodern society. This studydeals with the Anarchists' philosophical background and howPostmodernism fanned it. Anarchists' approach mainly whirls around asingle point agenda, and that is, they are against the state or existence ofstates' borders. I mention again what Researcher has already mentioned,the state and all other international institutions emerged after a rationalapproach as stated by Hegel. Postmodernism denied that reality in everycontour, whether those are institutions or anything else. Anarchism broughtthis concept into a broader paradigm and started denying the existence ofthe state. So, both postmodernists and anarchists have denied the realityin their own capacities, but the grounds and arguments are the same.Anarchism paved the way for multiple active terrors based centrifugalmovements throughout the world.

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION AND ARMS CONTROL

Did the Biden administration pick up at least some of the pieces of the broken liberal international order caused in some part by his predecessor Trump? Has he been acting according to his and his party’s promises during the presidential-elections campaign or has he stood by his predecessor’s decisions? And especially how much was done or “repaired” in the realm of arms control? These are the questions authors will try to answer in this paper. They will draw their conclusion by analyzing theoretical assumptions that lie behind the Trump’s and Biden’s approach toward the international institutions, including arms control, historical analysis of Trump’s legacy regarding international institutions, content analysis of Biden’s and Democratic Party’s promises and their comparison with the Republican attitudes. In assessing how much was done in the first year of Biden’s mandate in the realm of arms control, authors conclude that the results are mixed – in some cases Biden followed Trump’s decisions and in some other he completely changed the approach.

Re-Evaluating Triage in International Justice during COVID-19 – Complying with the Rule of Law?

This article addresses the challenges (and responses thereto) for those international institutions devoted to mandatory monitoring the individuals’ protection of fundamental rights during and after the COVID pandemic. It covers the practice of several of the main regional (European, Inter-American and African) judicial and quasi-judicial human rights bodies in a comparative overview with the UN human rights monitoring bodies and the International Criminal Court. The interesting medical metaphor of ‘triage’ (i.e., designing a system of priorities to maximize impact, during an emergency) is used to discuss the measures taken to preserve the rule of law, both in their internal functioning as well as in promoting the rule of law within national legal orders when monitoring the States’ compliance with international human rights obligations and guidelines about COVID-19. While overall, procedures in the different bodies were developed to ensure that the rule of law is maintained, which makes it easier to respond to similar crises in the future, the pandemic also sheds light on the need to revisit some substantive concepts in human rights law.