Theme of Trust Between Epistemology and Ethics

The article aims to clarify the philosophical path around the theme of trust; the relevance of this philosophical category is linked to both the epistemological and ethical dimensions. The problem of the risk of trust is the ethical philosophy of our time, above all because of the phenomenon of migration, the recent pandemic, the economic and political question. Returning to the work of David Hume we try to explain the empirical analysis of this theme in a perspective of a new era of trust. The epistemological foundation of trust clarifies the relationship with justice and pluralism, a source of positive resources but also of important problems.

Ensuring Uncertainty? The International Political Economy of Over-The-Counter Derivatives Trading

<p>Over-the-counter (OTC) financial derivatives are increasingly used in a globalising financial market as tools for risk management. However, the advent of large financial crises as a result of their use raises issue as to the risks derivatives themselves might pose to the players who use them, as well as to the international financial system as a whole. It is, therefore, a key question to ask what regulation might be apt for trade in OTC derivatives. This thesis considers how a post-structuralist account might offer important insight into how this question is understood. Post-structuralist, as well as broader social constructivist and non-rationalist critiques help illustrate some of the limits to objectivist rationalism in practices of financial risk management. This thesis argues that the danger of ignoring such critiques include a continued “illusion” of individual and state-actor control over macro-economic processes, such as the phenomenal volume of trade in OTC derivatives contracts today. In this light, therefore, the regulation of OTC derivatives is not just a political question of who does and should have explicit policy control over economic and regulatory processes; but it is also a political question over knowledge constructs, and how particular technologies and specialist discourses are developed that enable “experts” legitimacy and power where it is not necessarily justified.</p>

Ensuring Uncertainty? The International Political Economy of Over-The-Counter Derivatives Trading

<p>Over-the-counter (OTC) financial derivatives are increasingly used in a globalising financial market as tools for risk management. However, the advent of large financial crises as a result of their use raises issue as to the risks derivatives themselves might pose to the players who use them, as well as to the international financial system as a whole. It is, therefore, a key question to ask what regulation might be apt for trade in OTC derivatives. This thesis considers how a post-structuralist account might offer important insight into how this question is understood. Post-structuralist, as well as broader social constructivist and non-rationalist critiques help illustrate some of the limits to objectivist rationalism in practices of financial risk management. This thesis argues that the danger of ignoring such critiques include a continued “illusion” of individual and state-actor control over macro-economic processes, such as the phenomenal volume of trade in OTC derivatives contracts today. In this light, therefore, the regulation of OTC derivatives is not just a political question of who does and should have explicit policy control over economic and regulatory processes; but it is also a political question over knowledge constructs, and how particular technologies and specialist discourses are developed that enable “experts” legitimacy and power where it is not necessarily justified.</p>

The case for creative folklore in pedagogical practice

The political question of who can produce knowledge and how we delineate epistemological standards without reproducing epistemic marginalization is central to critical pedagogy in international relations (IR) scholarship. While critical pedagogies often attempt to enact an emancipatory agenda, they largely rely on the educator as knowledge (re)producer and student as passive consumer, with little to say on what it means to be emancipated, the oppressions at stake or the means of enacting this project. Drawing on Simon Bronner’s definition of folklore, this article explores folklore as a creative practice allowing us to explore who the ‘folk’ are in the process of teaching and how we constitute disciplinary ‘lore’ to incite students to revise and reflect on disciplinary boundaries. The article focuses on IR pedagogy as a creative practice, arguing that deploying a folklore lens allows us to challenge the uncritical reproduction of disciplinary boundaries.

Imposed volunteering: Gender and caring responsibilities during the COVID-19 lockdown

This article contributes to the sociology of care-relational justice by identifying, conceptualising and unpacking ‘imposed volunteering’ as a mechanism that shapes societal caring arrangements. Contemporary societies allocate care work disproportionately to women, ethnic minorities and working-class citizens, which exacerbates social inequalities. Distribution of caring responsibilities is a political question but often not recognised as such, because it is deeply immersed in everyday routines. Our study uses the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to dissect the distribution mechanisms that became unusually palpable when the lockdown of public welfare provision in Denmark relocated some forms of care work from professionals to volunteers. With the term imposed volunteering, we conceptualise the feeling of being coerced into taking on new caring responsibilities, which some women – and men – experienced during the lockdown. Drawing on a national, representative survey, we document that, compared to men, women carried out significantly more voluntary care work and organised voluntary work through informal personal networks rather than through formal civil society organisations to a significantly higher degree. We unpack the experience of imposed volunteering as it unfolded during the lockdown through qualitative case studies, and clarify how relational and institutional factors, such as gendered expectations and the sense of personal obligation, imposed volunteering. Our study illuminates the importance of public care, reciprocal caring relationships and care for carers, and demonstrates why the mobilisation of care work volunteers must take gendered implications into account if it is to be consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom for all.

Calculated Discrimination: Exposing Racial Gerrymandering Using Computational Methods

In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that challenges to partisan gerrymanders presented a nonjusticiable political question. This decision threatened to discard decades of work by political scientists and other experts, who had developed a myriad of techniques designed to help the courts objectively and unambiguously identify excessively partisan district maps. Simulated redistricting promised to be one of the most effective of these techniques. Simulated redistricting algorithms are computer programs capable of generating thousands of election-district maps, each of which conforms to a set of permissible criteria determined by the relevant state legislature. By measuring the partisan lean of both the automatically generated maps and the map put forth by the state legislature, a court could determine how much of this partisan bias was attributable to the deliberate actions of the legislature, rather than the natural distribution of the state’s population.Rucho ended partisan gerrymandering challenges brought under the U.S. Constitution—but it need not close the book on simulated redistricting. Although originally developed to combat partisan gerrymanders, simulated redistricting algorithms can be repurposed to help courts identify intentional racial gerrymanders. Instead of measuring the partisan bias of automatically generated maps, these programs can gauge improper racial considerations evident in the legislature’s plan and demonstrate the discriminatory intent that produced such an outcome. As long as the redistricting process remains in the hands of state legislatures, there is a threat that constitutionally impermissible considerations will be employed when drawing district plans. Simulated redistricting provides a powerful tool with which courts can detect a hidden unconstitutional motive in the redistricting process.

The Value and Risks of Hope

This chapter considers the value and risks of hope. It defends the priority of first-personal assessments of the value of hope, suggesting that it is often hopeful people themselves who are best positioned to understand the value of their hopes. But since hope can lead us astray, an evaluative framework for hope is needed. While most philosophers who theorize hope’s value tend to focus on assessments of epistemic and prudential rationality, this chapter argues that hope can also be evaluated as fitting and morally appropriate. Recognizing the full range of evaluative dimensions of hope is important for answering the all-things-considered practical question of whether and for what one should hope. This chapter defends Victoria McGeer’s framework for what it means to hope well to capture how the evaluative measures for hope work in practice, while orienting the rationality-of-hope question as a social and political question about the value of hope in community with others.

Binding Force and Remedies

This chapter is dedicated entirely to what may be regarded as the most fundamental political question of contract law, i.e. what justifies the legally binding force of contract law? What business do public institutions have in recognizing and enforcing private agreements? Could a society decide not to enforce contracts and still be sufficiently just? And if indeed a society ought to publicly recognize and enforce contracts, then which remedies should it make available? Leading contemporary political theories differ not only in the answers provided to this most fundamental political question of contract law but also in their respective understandings of the question, in particular on which aspects of it they consider particularly relevant.

Apocalypticism as Radical Realism? On the Dangers and Benefits of Wishful Thinking in Prefigurative Politics

In this article, I aim to bring apocalypticism and radical realism into conversation, with a view to their mutual interest in prefigurative politics. On one hand, radical realists may worry that an apocalyptic approach to prefigurative politics may be marred by wishful thinking. On the other hand, radical realists can (and sometimes do) acknowledge that wishful thinking is sometimes desirable. I argue that an apocalyptic approach to prefigurative politics suggests one way of guarding against the dangers of wishful thinking, while allowing space for its potential benefits; prefigurativists have reason to pay at least some attention to what Bernard Williams calls ‘The First Political Question’. I will argue for this claim with reference to the case of Omar Aziz, a Syrian activist who played a pivotal role in the construction of local councils in the aftermath of the 2011 protests.

Pedagogies of Feminist Resistance: Agrarian Movements in Africa

In the historical course of agrarian transformation in Africa, the reconstitution and fragmentation of the peasantry along the lines of gender, ethnic, class, and racial divisions which facilitate their exploitation remains a central concern in the analysis of the peasant path, of which the exploitation of gendered labor has been a particularly important concern for feminist agrarian theorizations. In contribution to these debates, this article examines the ways in which feminist concerns have shaped, driven, and defined the social and political parameters of agrarian movements in Africa. Even though agrarian movements articulating gender questions are not generalizable as feminist, their concern with social, political, and economic structures of oppression and their approach to gendered oppression as a political question lends them to characterization as being feminist. Through an examination of the changing forms of women-led agrarian struggles, the article shows how women’s responses to the dominant structures and conditions of colonial and post-colonial capitalist accumulation could be characterized as feminist due to their social and political imperatives behind women’s resistance.