Mindful unlearning in unprecedented times: Implications for management and organizations

Crises trigger both learning and unlearning at both intra-organizational and inter-organizational levels. This article stresses the need to facilitate unlearning for effective crisis management and shows how we could use mindfulness practice to enhance unlearning and transformative learning in a crisis. This study proposes the conceptualization of mindful unlearning in crisis with different mechanisms to foster unlearning in three stages of crisis (pre-crisis, during-crisis, and post-crisis). These mechanisms include mindful awareness of impermanence and sensual processing (pre-crisis stage), mindful awareness of interdependence and right intention (crisis management stage), and mindful awareness of transiency and past experiences (post-crisis stage).

Jus ad vim

Jus ad vim is the set of moral principles governing the decision to use limited force. This chapter interrogates the moral permissions and restraints of these principles by recalibrating the traditional jus ad bellum criteria (just cause, last resort, proportionality, probability of success, right intention, and legitimate authority) and delineating the novel probability of escalation principle. The chapter begins with an illustration of just cause for vim, which is more permissive than for bellum, meaning there are more moral reasons to use limited force than to go to war. The concern that this view of just cause would lower the threshold for violence too far is called the permissiveness critique. The remainder of the chapter charts a course of restraint ad vim. Recalibrating last resort yields the moral independence thesis, the view that acts of limited force should not be conceived as part of the actions leading to war but rather should be thought of as an alternative set of options, while the Rubicon assessment is the deliberation process to discern what level of force is justified. The restrictive core of jus ad vim lies in satisfying a new criterion—the probability of escalation principle, which blends elements of the jus ad bellum proportionality and probability of success criteria to conceive the risks of using limited force. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how right intention and legitimate authority can be reinterpreted in a limited force context to curtail acting too easily on just cause.

The Impacts of COVID-19 to Small Scale Fisheries in Tun Mustapha Park, Sabah, Malaysia; What Do We Know So Far?

As early as February 2020, many countries have started imposing measures to curb the spread of Covid-19. Despite the right intention, it is a challenging moment for the people, especially the rural population living in the coastal areas. The document presents the preliminary findings on the impacts of Covid-19 on the small scale fisheries in Tun Mustapha Park, Sabah, Malaysia.

The Reputational Costs and Ethical Implications of Coercive Limited Air Strikes: The Fallacy of the Middle-Ground Approach

Limited air strikes present an attractive “middle-ground approach” for policymakers, as they are less costly to coercers than deploying troops on the ground. Policymakers believe that threatening and employing limited air strikes signal their resolve to targets. In this essay, as part of the roundtable on “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” I debunk this fallacy and explain how the same factors that make limited air strikes attractive to coercers are also those that undermine their efficacy as a coercive tool of foreign policy. The limited nature of these air strikes undermines the ability of coercers to effectively signal their resolve. In turn, coercive threats of limited air strikes are less likely to be credible, creating a vicious cycle: policymakers threaten to employ air strikes because they are less costly but then often need to follow through on those threats as target states fail to acquiesce to their demands, precisely because limited air strikes are less costly for the coercer. Limited air strikes, therefore, can actually be a source of conflict escalation and lead policymakers to engage in military action that they would prefer to avoid. I further explain why failing to follow through on such coercive threats can undermine a leader's reputation for resolve and lead to future crisis escalation. Finally, I discuss what this quagmire means for the ethics of the threat and the use of air strikes, particularly for the principles of right intention, likelihood of success, and probability of escalation.