White Compromises and American Prosperity

The development and protection of American Prosperity was contingent upon Northern and Southern white men making compromises that allowed the continuance of slavery. These white compromises in 1787, 1820, 1850, and 1877 not only protected white supremacy, but also unity of the settler’s economy. The Federal government invaded the Southern states not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the union. After the War, during Reconstruction, Blacks started schools, farmed the land, and were elected to local, state, and national offices. This period of Black empowerment was cut short when Northern and Southern states compromised again to allow the establishment of the Jim Crow regime, the terrorism of lynching, and the re-establishment of the Ku Klux Klan. This compromise was disrupted with the 1960s civil rights movements, which has left us today without the unity necessary to create a climate of justice.

Governmentality, the Local State, and the Commons: An Analysis of Civic Management Facilities in Barcelona

This article deploys the Foucauldian concept of governmentality to study the political tensions that may unfold when commons are enacted through hybrid institutional configurations. We focus on civic management facilities (CMFs) that are located in the city of Barcelona. These are facilities owned by Barcelona City Council which, responding to organised citizens’ demands, are transferred to them so that they can develop their own transformative projects for the community. The hybrid institutional nature of these CMFs makes it impossible for them to avoid maintaining a relationship with the local state. Based on a survey to 51 CMFs, semi‐structured interviews with 41 grassroots members of CMFs and seven semi‐structured interviews with public employees and politicians, we argue that hybrid forms of commons lead to the development of political tensions. On the one hand, we show how the local state’s administrative procedures—to do with accountability and the use of public space—reshape the activities of the CMFs, leading to the depoliticisation of their transformative projects. On the other hand, the analysis also presents the strategies of resistance articulated by the facilities, which enable members to work towards the development of their transformative aims. We conclude that such political tensions cannot be resolved but must be properly governed in order to make the commons’ transformative project an enduring one.

Relocating African Agency: Assessing the Role of ‘Local Patrons’ and Chinese Enterprises in the Construction Sector in Ghana

Contrary to the conventional notion that African agency outside of the state is marginal if not irrelevant, this paper argues that it is ‘local patrons’ in Africa who are actually the most powerful determinants of the success of Chinese enterprises in Africa. These ‘local patrons’ exact financial resources from the Chinese in exchange for their services as brokers between state officials. Specifically, their ‘informal connections’ to local state authorities enables them to insure the Chinese firms against official state prosecution/demands as well as facilitate related bureaucratic procedures. Using the case of the Chinese construction firms operating in Ghana, we will investigate the challenges experienced by Chinese firms entering into new markets and the strategies utilised by them to address and mitigate risk in their search for profit, chief amongst them the employment of ‘local patrons’ to serve as brokers with state officials. This relocation of agency, drawing from scholarship by Mohan, Lampert and Soule-Kohndou as well as the empirical materials based on substantive fieldwork, provides new insights into terms of engagement with local actors that form a bonded relationship facilitating integration of Chinese enterprises into the African political economy.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Needs and Lived Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence Survivors in the United States: Advocate Perspectives

We explored the challenges and lived experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors during the COVID-19 pandemic by interviewing 53 U.S.-based IPV advocates between June and November 2020. Advocates described how the COVID-19 pandemic limited survivors’ abilities to meet their basic needs. The pandemic was also described as being used by abusive partners to perpetrate control and has created unique safety and harm reduction challenges. IPV survivors experienced compounding challenges due to structural inequities. IPV must be considered by local, state, and federal governments when developing disaster planning policies and practices, including in the context of pandemics.

A cadre of professionals: Credentialing emergency managers to meet the disaster challenges of the future

This paper underscores the need for the emergency management field to professionalize further and mentions how this could be accomplished through direct state licensing, Associate Emergency Manager and/or Certified Emergency Manager credentialing, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Independent Study courses, or other state certifications such as the Illinois Professional Emergency Manager credential, in that particular state and as found in other states. This paper identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and then reviews Drabek’s recommendations on how emergency managers may hone their professionalism through the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and abilities. The authors of this work add professional experience and in-person training to this list and discuss the implications of findings for research and practice by identifying several questions that will need to be addressed in the future. The overall recommendation of our article is that more efforts will be required to understand professionalism through research activities and collaboration across all types of emergency management organizations at the local, state, and federal levels—especially if we ever truly expect to enter licensing like professions such as medicine, law, engineering, accountancy, and teaching.