Effects of Negative Societal Reaction to Alcoholism on Alcoholics’ Participation in Development Project in Nyahururu Sub County, Laikipia County, Kenya

Many societies across the globe have been using alcohol for religious, social, cultural, and recreational purposes for ages. Over the period, societies have come to recognize the negative outcomes of alcohol misuse to individual users, their families, and the society in general. Different societies therefore adopted various ways of controlling alcohol misuse, mainly guided by a society’s cultural and social norms. Norms related to alcohol use and misuse therefore plays an important role in determining how a specific society reacts to alcohol use and abuse. Negative societal reaction to alcoholism and alcoholics influences levels of alcoholics’ interaction with other members of the society as well as their access to information on development projects in their localities. Alcoholics’ reaction on societal sanctions related to alcoholism and alcoholics determines as well determines their level of marginalization. Level of alcoholics’ social interaction and access to information, influences their participation in development project. This article explores effects of negative societal reaction to alcoholism on alcoholics’ participation in development projects in Nyahururu Sub County, Kenya. It outlines the findings, conclusions and recommendations of the study with a view of creating awareness on identified effects and recommends ways of minimizing alcoholics’ marginalization in development projects.

SENTENCE OF LIFE IMPRISONMENT IN THE LAW OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AND CASE LAW OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

In the system of measures of societal reaction towards the perpetrators of criminal offences, all the modern criminal laws, including the new legislation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, recognise sentences in the first place. They are the main types of criminal sanctions whose purpose can be achieved to the fullest, and that is the protection of society and social goods from all forms and types of injury and threat caused by the commission of criminal offences. Given that in the structure of criminal offences occur those with serious consequences, violating the highest social values, committed with a severe form of guilt by a repeat offender, in concurrence or by a group or organised crime group, it is logical that all penal systems recognise the harshest sentence - longterm or life imprisonment - especially after the abolition of the death sentence - capital punishment, for the severest forms of crimes. The paper analyses issues related to the harshest sentence, long-term, or life imprisonment in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the special emphasis on the European Court of Human Rights case law.

An integrated view on society readiness and initial reaction to COVID–19: A study across European countries

With the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of society’s capability to deal with an acute health crisis is, once again, brought to the forefront. In the core is the need to broaden the perspective on the determinants of a country’s ability to cope with the spread of the virus. This paper is about bringing together diverse aspects of readiness and initial reaction to a COVID-19 outbreak. We proposed an integrated evaluation framework which encapsulates six dimensions of readiness and initial reaction. Using a specific multi-level outranking method, we analysed how these dimensions affect the relative positioning of European countries in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. The results revealed that the order of countries based on our six-dimensional assessment framework is significantly reminiscent of the actual positioning of countries in terms of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in the initial phase of the pandemic. Our findings confirm that only when a country’s readiness is complemented by an appropriate societal reaction we can expect a less severe outcome. Moreover, our study revealed different patterns of performance between former communist Eastern European and Western European countries.

Polish Migration Policy in the Context of the Migration Crisis

The migration crisis of 2015 has left its mark on many EU countries. Some, such as Greece or Spain, were countries on the front line. Others, namely Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden became destination countries for many newcomers. Some, like the countries of the Visegrad Group, opposed the actions and decisions of the EU made in the face of the crisis. European solidarity has become a big question mark and we can observe a serious upsetting of the whole integration project which is, of course, up for discussion. This state of affairs consisted of the attitudes towards the crises of such countries as Poland or Hungary, where anti-immigration and populist parties came to power, creating a vision of flexible solidarity on the European political scene. The purpose of this article is to analyse the Polish migration policy, show the direction of the changes in its construction along with the change of government and the societal reaction to strangers, as a direct result of actions taken by the ruling parties. It is important to understand the political, economic and social context of the changes occurring in the social consciousness and to attempt to formulate a forecast for the future.

Life of Transgender in Ethical Milieu: A Study of Selected Transgenders of Bhubaneswar, India

Societal life of a transgender is not very normal and smooth; rather, it has been full of controversies in acceptance, treatment, and trust. Taking birth as a transgender is never a matter of choice. Due to obliviousness, society still thinks that being transgender is a substance of choice. In fact, conflicts related to ethical milieu hinder a free and normal living for a transgender. Keeping ethical milieu in the backdrop, this paper describes the life of selected transgenders starting from coming out of the closet to adapting to the unpredictable societal reaction. For the purpose, in-depth interviews among selected transgenders from Bhubaneswar are conducted for ascertaining their feelings as they came out from the closet and presence of ethics while dealing with personal and professional sides of their living. It has been found that they have never been sailed in a straight line; instead, they have been destined to an oscillating life path.

Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological change on societal reaction

Answering calls for deeper consideration of the relationship between moral panics and emergent media systems, this exploratory article assesses the effects of social media – web-based venues that enable and encourage the production and exchange of user-generated content. Contra claims of their empowering and deflationary consequences, it finds that, on balance, recent technological transformations unleash and intensify collective alarm. Whether generating fear about social change, sharpening social distance, or offering new opportunities for vilifying outsiders, distorting communications, manipulating public opinion, and mobilizing embittered individuals, digital platforms and communications constitute significant targets, facilitators, and instruments of panic production. The conceptual implications of these findings are considered.

What are people talking about in moral outrage? Communication processes of online firestorms in Japan

In the age of the Internet, anonymous online users can form a societal reaction by posting large quantities of critique and insulting comments against (perceived) norm violations on social media. These so-called online firestorms, or Enjō in Japanese, tend to include aggressive behavior against the target. This research aims to reveal the dynamics of Enjō and explores how people communicate with each other in the formation process of Enjō by conducting a comparative case study. This study collects tweets posted in five Enjō cases and compares each case to create conceptual categories of the communication process of Enjō. Results show that the participants of Enjō interact with each other to define the problem of concern through exchange of information. Moreover, it is revealed that there are two types of process in the escalation of Enjō, “social problematization” and “villainization.” In the conclusion, the implications of these findings are discussed.

Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentinian soy boom of the 2000s, identifying forms of market extension, redistribution, reciprocity and householding that facilitated this process. We argue for a multi-scalar approach that balances attention to national and extra-local dynamics shaping the combination of these forms, identified through the lens of the “fictitious commodities” of the soy boom: money (credit, currency and cross-border capital flows), land (in the agricultural heartland and frontier regions), labor (transformed and excluded in a “farming without farmers” model) and, we add, knowledge (biotech). Our analysis identifies internal tensions as well as overt resistance and “overflow” that ultimately led to the collapse of postneoliberal regulation of the soy complex, ushering in a wider, market-radical counter-movement. Refracting double-movement-type dynamics through the prism of heterodox institutional forms, we argue, allows for a better grasp of processes that underlie institutional recalibrations of progressive and regressive kinds.