Discussion: Should the Dams Be Removed to Save the Pacific Northwestern Salmon Population?

From 1885 till now, dams keep played an important role in Pacific Northwest. However, despite providing transportation convenience and electricity affecting the salmon population, they greatly impacted the salmon population. Nowadays, people standing for different parties are arguing whether the dams should be removed to restore the salmon population. Currently, a solid plan for dam removal has been proposed by Congressman Simpson. And it’s barely a start, further discussions will become more intensified and require an urgent environmental political response.

Liberal Prepping as Apocalyptic Eco-Religion

The term “prepper” or “survivalist” has long been associated with more conservative or politically right-leaning communities who have operated at the fringe of society for decades. Since the new millennium, this hobby of preparedness has increased and, most recently, shown a rise among liberal or left-leaning communities. This essay addresses the rise in liberal prepper culture not only as a political response to right-wing politics, but as a fear heightened by the realities of climate change and its impact on humanity, thus creating an eco-religion centred on ethical and moral responsibilities, with an overall apocalyptic hue.

The Politics of Pain in Immigration Detention

In this paper I draw on qualitative material from the first complete data set of the ‘ Measure of the Quality of Life in Detention’ (MQLD) survey in the UK to reflect on its implication for understanding and challenging these sites. While similarities between immigration detention centres and prisons make it tempting to place the testimonies from people in detention within the framework of the ‘pains of imprisonment’, I propose an alternative reading of these first-hand accounts. Rather than approaching them as sociological statements of suffering, caused by the loss of liberty, I interpret them as political statements which, in turn, demand a political response. Immigration removal centres (IRCs), these people assert, are fundamentally at odds with key values of a liberal democracy. Those detained within them are not considered to be equal members of a shared community of value; rather, their incarceration marks them out symbolically and, quite practically, as outsiders to these ideas. The pain people describe illuminates the need for a new politics of detention.

POSTMODERN AND NIHILISM (STRATEGIES OF CRITICISM OF NIHILISM IN THE PHILOSPHY OF J.-F. LYOTARD)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the theme of nihilism in postmodern philosophy on the example of one of its main representatives J.-F. Lyotard. Since F. Nietzsche, the term «nihilism» has been used by various theorists to describe the intellectual and spiritual situation of Western civilization in the era of modernity. The last decades of the twentieth century marked by the transition to a new cultural paradigm of postmodernity. But even in postmodernist theories, the topic of nihilism did not disappear, but gave rise to new strategies of comprehension and criticism. J.-F. Lyotard, a key theorist of postmodernity, at all stages of his work tried to understand how the nihilistic logic of the development of civilization in the «postmodern condition» has changed. The article reveals the philosophical and political response proposed by Lyotard to the challenge of the nihilistic suppression of life by the systems of capital, technoscience and repressive rationality.

Ethnoreligious Conflict and Populism: Emotive Political Response in the Rohingya Conflict

The rise of populism in the twenty-first century has been marked by the use of religion and national identity as emotive mobilizing forces to increase in-group solidarity and demarcate the notional boundaries of communities. The process often leads to the exclusion of vulnerable ethnoreligious minorities and to increased violence against them. This article analyses the role of fear as a principal emotion in the context of ethnoreligious conflict with reference to the Rohingya conflict in Myanmar. The article is divided in three parts. Part one explores notions of collective fear with reference to religious and ethnic conflict. Part two illustrates how collective existential fear has fuelled populist religious infused responses to the Rohignya conflict leading to the latest mass exodus of 2017. The final part considers whether fear can be an instrument of construction rather than destruction, to help build bridges than destroy, to connect people than isolate them.

Canada - A Long Way To Go: The Designated Country of Origin Policy and Refugee Protection

The Designated Country of Origin (DCO) policy was a political response to unwanted migration in Canada. Adapted from Europe, Harper took a liking to the EU’s SCO policy after Canada received a large influx of Middle Eastern and Balkan refugees seeking asylum. He adapted it in Canada, renaming it Designated Country of Origin (DCO). Under the DCO, the government of Canada would decide if a refugee's country of origin was dangerous enough to be considered for asylum. If the asylum seekers country is determined as safe, that person would be disregarded and sent back to their country of origin. Many refugees who had already settled in Canada had their files reopened and were told to return to their country of origin. The DCO policy became an integral part of the refugee status determination process in Canada to which some regarded as faulty, inefficient, and unjust. In 2019, the SCO was deemed unconstitutional and violated The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Immigration, wanted to create an asylum system that was considered fair and efficient. While it is important for an asylum seeker to prove they are truthful about the facts of their case, the DCO policy represents a climate of hostility towards migrants in Canada. In this piece, it will be argued that the DCO policy is a discriminatory migration tool used to “weed out” what the government deems as fake migrants. This policy could deny international protection to those who are genuinely in need. The DCO proves that the nation has a misleading reputation of being welcoming to all who come. The DCO threatened the human rights of asylum seekers who sought refuge in Canada.

“A Dumping Ground for the South”: Race, Place, and Poverty in Newburgh, New York (1945-1961)

This article explores the urban politics that led to the outbreak of the Newburgh, New York, welfare controversy in 1961. It uncovers the intricate interplay between race, place, and poverty that led to the early backlash against social welfare from the immediate postwar years to the early 1960s. Newburgh officials engineered their welfare reform as a political response to the economic, demographic, and urban transformations the city underwent in the 1950s. Race was central to their concerns as they scapegoated newly arrived African American migrants and blamed them for the city’s population loss and slowing economy. Welfare reform served at once as a tool for migratory, demographic, and racial regulation. The Newburgh story demonstrates that welfare regulation was used by city officials to enforce racial hierarchies in the Jim Crow North and suggests that city politics should be taken into greater account in the history of the American welfare state.

Education Inequalities and Political Behaviour of the Young in Greece in the 2010s 1

In this paper we briefly address two issues related to the living conditions of youth in Greece and the way these conditions have changed during the 2010s. The first is about the educational trajectories of young Greeks which are leading to less promising prospects in the labour market and become increasingly unequal and socially selective during the crisis. The second issue is the political response of young Greeks to the crisis. There is evidence that they have been actively mobilized against austerity measures and, at the same time, they have increased their participation in the political system, both in confrontational and institutional politics. Inequalities are increasing and social mobility prospects for the young people are deteriorating. Their political response, however, is an outcome depending on many other factors with the politics of parties attractive to youngsters’ aspirations during the crisis being among the most important.

The concept of collaboration windows on the example of world cases

The article presents the concept of the collaborative windows as a tool for establishing cooperation between the maximum number of stakeholders to solve problems of different hierarchical levels. Through the synthesis of theoretical developments by B. Gray, J. Kingdon, and D. Lobster, the author proposes an integrative model of the collaborative window by crossing four relatively independent flows, namely: problem, procedural, political response, and organizational-structured ones. The researcher notes that except for the outlined components, external triggers and the figure of the collaborationist politician with a developed network of contacts play an important role in maintaining the potential of the collaboration window to further unite all stakeholders on a single collaboration platform. The latter serves as a space to facilitate the establishment of communications and the trust formation between the participants of the collaboration. But even the presence of all these elements does not guarantee the longevity of joint cross-sectoral projects due to the lack of adaptive capabilities of temporal and spatial factors because of their dynamic nature. The researcher also outlines some issues with the creation of collaborative platforms such as liquidity traps, power distribution, common accountability standards, and monitoring of participants’ actions. The article presents not only a schematic model of the collaboration window, but also examples from the world practice of cooperation between public, private, and civil sectors. The author also analyzes the transformation of urban infrastructure within the EU on an integrative model, highlighting the relevant flows and platforms of joint interaction. The collaborative window technique can be applied to a different range of common practices, as the outlined flows take place in virtually every policy area.