Covid-19 and the Social Construction of Reality in Jordan

Almost all nations are struggling to slow down the transmission of Covid-19 by restricting large gatherings and close social interactions. However, it is not expected that people will stop all social gatherings and interactions voluntarily. This situation requires the construction of a new social reality that compels people to abandon their traditional practices, particularly in countries such as Jordan that have a traditional social order and strong bonding social capital. Nevertheless, Jordan had the lowest rates of Covid-19 in the Middle East during the first four months of the pandemic, because its government used its power to impose restrictions and new regulations. However, the situation has become one of the worst cases in the entire world after the government eased its restrictions. The example of Jordan provides strong evidence that the social construction of reality sometimes requires coercive intervention. Thus, this article reconsiders and extends Berger and Luckmann’s theory of social construction by examining it in the realm of social power. The theory includes three significant processes of social construction: externalization, objectivation, and internalization that should consider the concept of social power to extend the range of its powerful explanation.

Uneasy partnerships: Prisoner re-entry, family problems and state coercion in the era of neoliberalism

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.

Principles of Monetary & Financial Sustainability and Wellbeing in a Post-COVID-19 World: The Crisis and Its Management

This paper analyses the COVID-19 crisis and its management from the perspective of Austrian Economics. The attention focuses on the State’s coercive intervention according to the principles of political economy, capital theory and Austrian business economic cycles. The paper examines the specific case of massive intervention by governments and, especially, central banks in monetary and financial markets to deal with the pandemic trying to mitigate its negative effects. The paper offers a critical analysis of government tax policies and the increase in public spending, considered as the panacea and universal remedy for the social troubles. This review concludes with a proposal to change the mainstream paradigm, thereby proposing a more sustainable and wellbeing economics.

Principles of Monetary and Financial Sustainability and Wellbeing in a post-COVID-19 World: the crisis and its management review

This paper analyses the COVID-19 crisis and its management, under the Austrian Economics. The attention is focused in the States’ coercive intervention, to evaluate the positive or negative effects of pandemic, according to the Principles of Political Economy and the theory of capital and economic cycles. The paper examines the specific case of massive intervention by governments and, especially, central banks in monetary and financial markets to deal with the pandemic by seeking to lessen its effects. Also, it is offered a critical analysis on simultaneous government policies involving taxes and an increase in public spending which are presented as the panacea and universal remedy for the evils that afflict the society, instead of promoting the transit to Wellbeing Economics. To conclude the review, there is a proposal of paradigm review, in the way to offer a sustainable model.

The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870

What were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.

Right-Wing Populism and Noncoercive Injustice

John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples makes several assumptions that, in the years since that book’s writing, have been shown to be potentially flawed. The first is that democratic societies can be predicted to inculcate citizens with democratic values, such that democratic peoples have no realistic worry about backsliding into tyranny. The second is that there is a sharp conceptual distinction between coercive intervention, on the one hand, and mere conversation and speech on the other. The emergence of right-wing populism—and the related phenomenon of troll farms, intended to inflame disagreement and anger within democratic political communities abroad—have raised the issue of antidemocratic societies using speech to undermine support for democratic self-government abroad. Rawls’s Law of Peoples, I argue, is poorly suited for the task of responding to these circumstances. Rawls’s Law of Peoples might have been better situated for this task, the chapter concludes, had Rawls included robust respect for democratic governance within that law. This Democratic Law of Peoples might have been the basis of a global society in which democracies held each other to account for their deviations from democratic self-government—while still expressing tolerance and modesty about the extent to which we might coercively intervene in favor of democracy.

Introduction

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, traditional notions of absolute state sovereignty seemed no longer defensible. States could no longer claim that the worst atrocities must be tolerated as long as they remained confined within their own borders. Sometimes, at least, an injustice can be so severe that states lose their claim to legitimacy and sovereign immunity, and they become subject to coercive intervention of one kind or another. But whether all injustices properly subject a country to potential intervention is far less clear. Are there principled grounds, for example, to tolerate certain nonliberal societies? Rawls holds that there are. Such societies are unjust according to the principles that Rawls himself endorses. Yet he holds that in some cases, there are principled—not only pragmatic—grounds for toleration. One of his main goals, first in “The Law of Peoples” (the 1993 article)...

Supplier Engagement in Sustainability Programs: A Field Experiment of Enabling Versus Coercive Formalization

Formal, compliance-focused governance for supply chain sustainability initiatives has a mixed empirical track record. We build on classic research on bureaucracy to examine how “enabling” and “coercive” formalization at the buyer–supplier interface affect attitudes, an important precursor to behavioral engagement. We conduct a randomized field experiment with the supplier community of a South African insurance company to directly compare treatment effects of enabling and coercive interventions. We report and discuss the enabling intervention’s positive attitudinal effects and the moderation of these effects by supplier characteristics. Our findings also reveal some notable null effects, especially from the coercive intervention. We believe this work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of formal governance choices in supply chains and their impact on supplier engagement.

China and Russia in R2P debates at the UN Security Council

While China and Russia's general policies towards the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are similar, the two reveal nuanced differences in addressing specific emergencies. Both express support for the first two pillars of R2P while resisting coercive intervention under its aegis, as they share anxieties of domestic political security and concerns about their international image. Nonetheless, addressing cases like the Syrian crisis, Russian statements are more assertive and even aggressive while Chinese ones are usually vague and reactive. This article highlights the two states’ different tones through computer-assisted text analyses. It argues that diplomatic styles reflect Russian and Chinese perceptions of their own place in the evolving international order. Experiences in past decades create divergent reference points and status prospects for them, which leads to their different strategies in signalling Great Power status. As Beijing is optimistic about its status-rising prospects, it exercises more self-restraint in order to avoid external containments and is reluctant to act as an independent ‘spoiler’. Meanwhile, Moscow interprets its Great Power status more from a frame of ‘loss’ and therefore is inclined to adopt a sterner approach to signal its status. Although their policies complement each other on many occasions, there is nothing akin to a Sino–Russian ‘bloc’.

Might Makes Right or Right Makes Might? Two Systemic Democratic Peace Tales

In a path-breaking article, Wade Huntley (1996) reinterpreted Immanuel Kant’s pacific union as a systemic phenomenon. Huntley’s argument spawned a new wave of inquiry into the evolutionary expansion of the democratic peace, with several empirical studies finding a positive relationship between global democracy and systemic peace (e.g. Crescenzi and Enterline 1999; Gleditsch and Hegre 1997; Kadera, Crescenzi, and Shannon 2003; Mitchell, Gates, and Hegre 1999). Yet, there are many possible theoretical explanations of this aggregate relationship. In this paper, we compare two broad theoretical tales of the systemic democratic peace. The first approach, “might makes right”, emphasizes the importance of authority for creating liberal peace, especially the role played by a democratic hegemon and liberal major powers. The second approach, “right makes might”, traces the evolution of the systemic democratic peace to shifts in morality and liberal norms, drawing from work by Rawls (1999) and Wendt (1999). We compare and contrast these two broad theoretical tales, and argue that both “might” and “right” are important to the dynamic spread of the democratic peace. We then consider possible tensions between “might” and “right” based arguments highlighted by the recent Iraq War. We argue that it is grossly over-simplistic to equate the theoretical arguments being put forward by systemic democratic peace theory with the policy prescriptions put forward by the current US administration. As an alternative to both the assertion of a general right to coercive intervention by liberal states and blanket opposition to democracy as a universal project, we present the case for a middle ground, advocating the prudent use of material levers of power by liberal states to promote democracy overseas.