This paper advocates a greater emphasis on racialization research, and consists of observations and research questions that could add to our understanding of racialization. Such understanding will be ...useful and perhaps even necessary, as a variety of world events result in continuing population movements as well as economic and political crises that could increase intra and international conflicts. Any of these could lead to the further racialization of refugees, migrants, earlier immigrants and others.
This article examines the effects of economic and political crises on the survival of 7115 tourism-related firms (hotels, restaurants, travel agencies and spas) in the Antalya region between 2000 and ...2016. Using a discrete-time hazards model, we show that tourism-related firms exhibit lower survival rates during times of crisis. We have also found that age, size and legal form increase survival rates. In addition, firms in tourism locations specialized subregions and subregions with higher entry rates have lower chances of survival, whereas firms in tourism destinations with large markets have higher chances to survive. Our empirical analysis suggests that hotels and travel agencies are more sensitive to macroeconomic and political shocks than other tourism-related businesses like restaurants and spas.
Liu Shao's Renwu Zhi is a classic work on the study of human talent in ancient China. Written during the tumultuous period of the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, Liu Shao recognized that the ...political problems of the time were rooted in issues related to human talent. Consequently, one of the primary purposes of his writing Renwu Zhi was to assist feudal dynasties in selecting and training talented individuals to address the political crisis. This paper explores Liu Shao's definition and characteristics of Caixing (talent and nature) in Renwu Zhi, which he accomplishes through the methods of Jiuzheng (nine criteria) and Baguan (eight observations), resulting in a systematic and elaborative classification of talented individuals. Moreover, the paper delves into the deeper meaning of Yingxiong (heroes). Through analysis of Liu Shao’s ideas, this paper concludes that his definitions and training methods for talented individuals have practical significance and provide valuable insights for modern talent selection and training.
The COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the world since the end of 2019 has been felt most immediately both as a health crisis and an economic, social and political crisis. Secondary impacts of social ...distancing and lockdown in many countries have put strains on people’s capacities to provide essential food and medicines for themselves and their families. In response, outside of centralised government and voluntary sector frameworks, local mutual aid groups have emerged around the world as a primary site of community resilience. Given mutual aid’s strong links to the anarchist political tradition, for example in its identification by Kropotkin as a factor in evolution, this article suggests that these new mutual aid groups can be understood best through the related concept of self-organisation. Tying anarchist approaches to mutual aid and self-organisation together, it is argued that cybernetics and Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) offer useful tools in helping both academic analysis and on-the-ground practice assess and improve the effectiveness of mutual aid in and beyond the COVID-19 crisis. The article offers a qualitative thematic analysis of anarchist and related texts published during the pandemic that reflect on mutual aid practice. In doing so, it highlights some of the challenges and tensions such self-organised mutual aid practice might face and proposes a participatory research agenda drawing on Beer’s VSM.
Vladimir Putin seeks to build a modern Russian empire on the post-Soviet space, as confirmed by the invasion of Ukraine. In the present article, the author shows why modern Russia represents a ...geopolitical project called "Putin's Empire," and what the ideological justifications for this empire are. The author also proposes to consider what is happening as a clash of different forms of imperial orders-neoliberal democracy and the concept of the "Russian world." The author concludes that Russia, as an empire, is in a protracted political crisis, but this does not mean the empire will disintegrate.
How do political crises affect the interaction between economic and political outcomes? In this paper, we study one of the consequences of political turmoil by empirically examining whether the Arab ...Spring influenced the relationship between corruption and income inequality. Using panel data from 1996 to 2019 for the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, we find that while corruption is positively associated with income inequality, the interaction term between corruption and the Arab Spring is negatively associated with income inequality. This result is consistent with the view that corruption has become more democratized after the Arab Spring. We use instrumental variable (IV) analysis to address potential endogeneity issues. Our findings suggest that not only studying the direct effects of political crises on economic and institutional variables is important, but studying their effects on shaping the association between economic and institutional variables can be insightful.
The present article focuses on the tension arising from Pavel Katenin’s aesthetic and literary vision for the reception of Antiquity in Russian mythological drama: his avid support of Classical ...purism and his denunciation of dramatists, for whom ancient myths served merely as a resource of historical parallels, is challenging to reconcile with the revolutionary conception of his play Andromache. The paper argues that Katenin regarded antiquity as an idealized universe from which numerous motifs could be drawn for inspiration. Semantic and structural means employed in the tragedy are analyzed as shedding light on the extent of Katenin’s transformation of the ancient myth to reflect the ideology of his time. The paper suggests that Classical antiquity served as a “mask,” allowing contemporary Decembrist circles to apply ancient models and situational resolutions to their own political crises. The dramatist’s conflation of masked political ideology with extreme innovation and intricate intertextual allusion is put forward as a cause of the brevity of the stage life that Katenin’s Andromache was allowed in St. Petersburg’s Bolshoi Theater.
This article offers reinterpretation of the current economic and political crisis through the lens of Gramsci’s concept of “interregnum,” departing from the model of “punctured equilibrium” to ...analyze the specific political dynamics of nonhegemonic periods between the breakdown of one ideological order and the emergence of a new one. Although political science has a range theories about periods of hegemony and paradigmatic stability, the periods between stable hegemonies remain distinctly undertheorized. A theoretical concept describing periods of interregnum is offered and applied to the changes in economic ideology and political alignments that followed the breakdown of the liberal order in the interwar period and the postwar Keynesian consensus of the 1970s. The concept is then applied to the current juncture, in which the hegemony of neoliberalism has been shaken by the 2008 financial crisis but no clear successor has emerged.
Born in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on global health and economies have been and continue to be devastating. In Africa, its countries grieve for ...unprecedented burdens of caseloads and mortality due to COVID-19, the virus responsible for the disease. This narrative review aims to establish the scale of the health and economic crisis wrought by the pandemic in Africa, including its impact on the informal economic sector, projections of the effect on national GDP, as well as its political dimensions.
Documentary evidence issued between January and 8 August 2020 was sought from the Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. Searches of published and unpublished abstracts were also conducted from appropriate websites, government documents, organizational reports, newspaper commentaries, and reports issued by global, regional, and local centers of disease control and prevention.
The COVID-19 pandemic is responsible for a fourfold crisis in Africa: (1) a health crisis: the victimization of frontline healthcare workers and the looming caseload and death tolls with 1.039 million (12%) cases being confirmed and over 22,966 (2.4%) deaths as of 8 August 2020. The highest death toll was recorded in Southern Africa of 11,024 (48%) followed by North Africa with 6,989 (29.2%) deaths; (2) a social crisis: with the violation of human rights, the killing of citizens by security forces and increased crime. This, in turn, exacerbates social inequalities, the breakdown of households, instances of social unrest, and general impoverishment; (3) an economic crisis: manifested by a decline in GDP and mass unemployment; (4) a political crisis: implementation of measures that may not be appropriate for Africa, discrimination of refugees and immigrants, evacuation of citizens to their home countries, resulting in distrust of political leaders and postponement of national elections, and mounting cases of conflicts and unrest.
Lockdown during the COVID-19 outbreak is a prevention mechanism in affluent countries, in contrast to developing regions such as Africa, where it is a race against death and starvation. Policymakers must apply novel and locally relevant prevention and management strategies to cope with this growing disaster.