"No Path Homeis an extremely interesting, engaging, and well-written book. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn's fluid and clear prose paints a very evocative picture of life for internally displaced persons as ...well as presenting a clear theoretical account."-Laura Hammond, SOAS University of London, author ofThis Place Will Become Home
For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition.No Path Homedescribes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart.After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. InNo Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.
Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy ...bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. InFault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.
Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.
InFault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
We study a Chinese policy that awards substantial tax cuts to firms with R&D investment over a threshold or “notch.” Quasi-experimental variation and administrative tax data show a significant ...increase in reported R&D that is partly driven by firms relabeling expenses as R&D. Structural estimates show relabeling accounts for 24.2 percent of reported R&D and that doubling R&D would increase productivity by 9 percent. Policy simulations show that firm selection and relabeling determine the cost-effectiveness of stimulating R&D, that notch-based policies are more effective than tax credits when relabeling is prevalent, and that modest spillovers justify the program from a welfare perspective.
We investigated the magnitude–frequency relationship and decay pattern of an aftershock sequence using data from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. We analyzed the spatial variations in aftershock ...activity parameters b and p. The calculated b-value of the aftershock sequence is 0.89 ± 0.02, which is relatively small, probably owing to the absence of small earthquakes in the aftershock catalog. The p-value, indicating the decay rate of aftershock activity, is 1.05 ± 0.02, which is normal. The decay pattern of the Wenchuan aftershock sequence agrees well with the modified Omori law. The b-value of the aftershock sequence mainly spatially varies between 0.6 and 1.2, and the p-value varies between 0.6 and 1.8. Although the physical significance of the spatial variations in b- and p-values has not been clearly defined, in this study, the physical significance of the b-value is mainly related to changes in stress, P-wave velocity, and the density of media in the earthquake area, and that in the p-value is associated with the fault slip amount during the mainshock; the b- and p-values show a strong linear correlation. After the mainshock, stress decreased and increased in areas with large and small b-values, respectively; the regions with large and small b-values were associated with low and high P-wave velocities, respectively. The subsurface media experienced relatively high and low apparent velocities in areas with small and large b-values, respectively. The amount of fault slip was small and large in regions with small and large p-values, respectively, exhibiting a linear correlation between the fault slip amount and p-value. The results indicate that the spatial variations in the b- and p-values were related to the physical properties of the media in the earthquake area and focal earthquake mechanism.
This book presents the previously untold history of the use of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning over the last decade. Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than fifty political ...staffers, fieldwork during the 2008 electoral cycle, and archival research, the book follows a group of technically skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama’s historic bid for the presidency. The book contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship from communication, sociology, and political science. The book theorizes processes of innovation in online electoral politics. It shows how the innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between industries, organizational structures that provided a space for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. The book also analyzes how Dean’s former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns. The book shows how organizational contexts shaped the use of tools by the Obama campaign, analyzes the emergence of data systems that facilitate electoral coordination, and reveals how cultural work mobilizes supporters to participate in collective action.
InShaken Authority, Christian P. Sorace examines the political mechanisms at work in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the broader ideological energies that drove them. Sorace takes ...Communist Party ideas and discourse as central to how that organization formulates policies, defines legitimacy, and exerts its power. Sorace argues that the Communist Party has never abandoned its conviction that discourse can shape the world and the people who inhabit it. Sorace also demonstrates how the Communist Party's planning apparatus continues to play a crucial role in engineering China's economy and market construction, especially in the countryside.
Sorace takes a distinctive and original interpretive approach to understanding Chinese politics, andShaken Authoritydemonstrates how Communist Party discourse and ideology influenced the official decisions and responses to the Sichuan earthquake. Sorace provides a clear view of the lived outcomes of Communist Party plans, rationalities, and discourses in the earthquake zone. The three case studies he presents each demonstrate a different type of reconstruction and model of development: urban-rural integration, tourism, and ecological civilization. Sorace's work emphasizes the need for a grounded literacy in the political concepts, discourses, and vocabularies of the Communist Party itself. To dismiss China's official discourse as "empty propaganda," Sorace argues, makes China and Chinese realities harder to understand, not easier.
Landslide size controls the destructive power of landslides and is related to the frequency of occurrence, with larger landslides being less frequent than smaller ones. For this reason, the analysis ...of landslide size is essential for landslide hazard assessment. We analyse six earthquake-induced landslide inventories with earthquake magnitude ranging between 6.6 and 7.9 Mw (Papua New Guinea, 1993; ChiChi 1999; Northridge, 1994; Niigata–Chuetsu, 2004; Iwate–Miyagi Nairiku, 2008; Wenchuan, 2008). For each inventory, we developed magnitude–frequency curves to analyse the size distribution of landslides as a function of ground motion, distance from the seismic source (both fault trace and epicentre), local relief, and lithology. For three earthquakes, we observed a clear relationship between the landslide size and ground motion, with larger landslides associated with higher ground motion. We investigate different possible causes for such observation, and propose that the main mechanical reason is that stronger shaking induces higher stresses that may overcome the strength, which increases with depth, triggering larger landslides. We also show that landslide size decreases with distance from the fault trace, whereas, this trend is not clear for distance from the epicentre. Local relief does not seem a first order control on landslide size for the earthquake-induced landslides considered here. Some lithologies do influence landslide size, but we were unable to identify a general behaviour for different lithologies.
•Ground motion modulates landslide size on a given landscape, with a tendency of larger landslides with stronger ground motion.•The relative abundance of larger landslides decreases moving away from the seismic faults trace.•The influence of ground motion on landslide size may be affected by local morphological and lithological conditions.
The May 12, 2008 Wenchuan earthquake of China (Mw 7.9 or Ms 8.0) triggered hundreds of thousands of landslides. Mapping such a large number of landslides is a major task, considering the large size ...of the affected area and the availability of pre- and post-earthquake remote sensing images. This paper compares three (nearly) complete landslide inventories that were compiled from visual image interpretation. The three inventories differ in the manner in which the landslides are represented, either as polygons, centroid points, or top points. Landslides in the three inventories use one-to-one correspondence. Each of the three inventories includes a large proportion of the 197,481 landslides triggered by the earthquake. These landslides were delineated as individual solid polygons and points using visual interpretation of high-resolution aerial photographs and satellite images acquired following the earthquake and verified by selected field checking throughout a broad area of approximately 110,000 km
2
. These landslides cover a total area of approximately 1,160 km
2
. Based on the inventories of landslide polygons and landslide centroid points, two types of density maps were constructed. Correlations of landslide occurrence with seismic, geologic, and topographic parameters were analyzed using the three landslide inventories. Statistical analysis of their spatial distribution was performed using both the landslide area percentage (LAP), defined as the percentage of the area affected by the landslides and the landslide number density (LND), defined as the number of landslides per square kilometer. There are two types of LNDs: the LND-centroid (based on the centroid point of the landslide) and the LND-top (based on the top point of the landslide). We used the three indexes to determine how the occurrence of the landslides correlates with elevation, slope angle, slope aspect, slope position, slope curvature, lithology, distance from the epicenter, seismic intensity, distance from the Yingxiu-Beichuan surface fault rupture, peak ground acceleration (PGA), and coseismic surface displacements (including horizontal, vertical, and total displacements). Both the LAP and the two types of LND values were observed to have continuous positive or negative correlations with the slope angle, slope curvature, distance from the epicenter and from the Yingxiu-Beichuan surface fault rupture, seismic intensity, and coseismic surface displacement. In addition, the highest values of the LAP and LND values appear at ranges from 1,200 to 3,000 m in elevation. Moreover, the landslides have preferred orientations, dominated by the eastern, southeastern, and southern directions. In addition, the sandstone, siltstone (Z), and granitic rocks experienced more concentrated landslides. No obvious correlations were observed between the LAP and LND values and slope position. Finally, we studied the orders of eight earthquake-triggered landslide impact factor effect on landslide occurrence.
Highlights
The 197,481 landslides triggered by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake were delineated.
Three landslide inventories were constructed: polygon, centroid, and top point inventories.
The landslides were spatially analyzed with topographic, lithology, and seismic parameters.
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