A growing number of scholars think "religious liberty" is a bad idea. The unfairness objection is that singling out religion for special protection is unjust to comparable nonreligious conceptions of ...the good. The distraction objection asserts that religious liberty is a misleading lens: oppression sometimes occurs along religious lines, but the underlying conflicts often are not really about religious difference. Both objections are sound, but under certain conditions religious liberty should nonetheless be regarded as a right. Law is inevitably crude. The state cannot possibly recognize each individual’s unique identity-constituting attachments. It can, at best, protect broad classes of ends that many people share.
Across the globe, states have attempted to contain COVID-19 by restricting
movement, closing schools and businesses, and banning large gatherings. Such
measures have expanded the degree of sanctioned ...state intervention into
civilians' lives. But existing theories of preventive and responsive
repression cannot explain why some countries experienced surges in repression
after states in Africa initiated COVID-19-related lockdowns. While responsive
repression occurs when states quell protests or riots, “opportunistic
repression” arises when states use crises to suppress the political
opposition. An examination of the relationship between COVID-19 shutdown
policies and state violence against civilians in Africa tests this theory of
opportunistic repression. Findings reveal a large and statistically significant
relationship between shutdowns and repression, which holds after conditioning
for the spread and lethality of the disease within-country and over time. A
subnational case study of repression in Uganda provides evidence that the
increase in repression appears to be concentrated in opposition areas that
showed less support for Yoweri Museveni in the 2016 elections. Opportunistic
repression provides a better explanation than theories of preventive or
responsive repression for why Uganda experienced a surge in repression in 2020
and in what areas. The results have implications for theories of repression,
authoritarian survival, the politics of emergency, and security.
This article explores the construction of the UK National Health Service as a ‘bordering scape’, and the depiction of pregnant migrants as an especial problem, in policy documents and Parliamentary ...debates around the 2014 Immigration Act. Migrant women’s reproductive practices have long been an object of state anxiety, and a target of state intervention. However, this has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship on the proliferation and multiplication of internal bordering processes. This article addresses this gap and contributes to conceptualisations of bordering processes as situated and intersectional, arguing that discourses and anxieties around the reproduction of the nation-state play an important role in informing the construction of the proliferating internal border. These discourses and anxieties, which are heavily gendered and racialised, interact with the specificities of individual bordering sites in shaping both bordering processes, and the production of different individuals and groups within these processes.
Abstract
Amputation levels in Egypt and the surrounding neighborhood require a state intervention to localize the manufacturing of prosthetic feet. Amputations are mainly due to chronic diseases, ...accidents, and hostilities’ casualties. The prosthetic foot type is traditionally classified according to the number of axial rotational movements, and is recently classified according to the energy activeness of the foot. The localization of this industry needs a preliminary survey of the domestic technological levels with respect to the foot type. Upon the results of this survey, the energy storage response foot has appealing metrics to proceed with its manufacturing. A prototype manufacturing chain is designed and a set of these feet with a certain commercial size of 27 is manufactured. Resin impregnation technology for carbon fiber composites is followed in this work. The feet are tested according to ISO 22,675. Based on the dimensional and mechanical results, a manufacturing value chain is proposed with the prospective resin transfer molding technology. This value chain will guarantee the required localization as well as the natural growth of this value chain with all related activities like accreditation of practices as well as manpower certification.
The present study presents adult education institutions and participants in adult education at the national level, highlighting the Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County. It shows the decrease in the number of ...tasks and the change in the types of maintainers, the decreasing trend of the number of privately maintained institutions and the number of students. Thanks to public interventions, private-run institutions have completely shrunk in the last 7 years due to support for training. Private institutions receive little or no state support for the teaching of the professions listed in the National Training Register, which means that students can only study in private schools for a fee. This decision resulted in the dissolution of most privately maintained institutions, their merging into local Vocational Training Centres or church institutions. The main goal of the research was to get a realistic picture of the causes of institutional change.
How does state censorship shape global creative production? To explore the merger of art and the state in a global context, I adopt a micro-sociological approach to examine the culture of censorship ...and reconceptualize censorship as an ongoing, social process. Based on participant observation within a global film studio and interviews with industry insiders in Beijing and Los Angeles, I investigate how global cultural producers navigate China’s rigid film censorship system. My analysis reveals how China’s state censors use multistage gatekeeping and intermediated censorship to infiltrate the creative process and exert global influence. I then show how informality transforms these organizational procedures into a relational process that is hard to trace. In this, studio executives and filmmakers are induced to engage in complicit creativity, seeking creative negotiations through working with, rather than against, the state; specifically, they practice concession, reconfiguration, and collusion. These processes anchor a culture of censorship characterized by the symbiotic relationship between censors and creators, epitomizing a dynamic dance between everyday state power and everyday resistance. This relational model of censorship provides useful analytic scaffolding, extending our knowledge of the inner workings and consequences of state intervention in the new global cultural economy.
The relationship between children's material circumstances and child abuse and neglect raises a series of questions for policy, practice, and practitioners. Children and families in poverty are ...significantly more likely to be the subject of state intervention. This article, based on a unique mixed‐methods study of social work interventions and the influence of poverty, highlights a narrative from practitioners that argues that, as many poor families do not harm their children, it is stigmatizing to discuss a link between poverty and child abuse and neglect. The data reveal that poverty has become invisible in practice, in part justified by avoiding stigma but also because of a lack of up‐to‐date research knowledge and investment by some social workers in an “underclass” discourse. We argue, in light of the evidence that poverty is a contributory factor in the risk of harm, that it is vital that social work engages with the evidence and in critical reflection about intervening in the context of poverty. We identify the need for fresh approaches to the harms children and families face in order to support practices that engage confidently with the consequences of poverty and deprivation.
Staten har de siste årene skjerpet lovverket som regulerer nasjonal sikkerhet, blant annet for å bedre situasjonsforståelse og krisehåndtering i møte med hybride trusler fra Russland og Kina. ...Artikkelen er en samtidshistorisk undersøkelse av norsk forebyggende sikkerhet i tiårene siden den kalde krigen og viser hvordan graden av statlig inngripen er blitt moderert i spennet mellom skiftende trusselforståelser og hensynet til effektiv statsforvaltning, økonomisk liberalisering og internasjonalisering. Frem til 2014 veide dette hensynet ofte tyngre enn sikkerhet, mens forholdet gradvis dreide motsatt vei med fornyet stormaktsrivalisering og Russlands anneksjon av Krym i 2014. Artikkelen konkluderer med at motsetningen mellom sikkerhetsbegrunnet inngripen og økonomisk handlefrihet ikke er en floke som kan løses, men en vedvarende balansegang. Dermed kan ikke den sårbare randsonen i lovverkets ytterkant fjernes, bare flyttes. Abstract in EnglishNational Security or Economic Efficiency? Norway’s Ability to Detect Hybrid Threats in a Contemporary History PerspectiveIn recent years several parts of Norwegian national security legislation has been strengthened. A key goal has been to improve the capacity for situational awareness and crisis management in the face of Russian or Chinese hybrid threats. This article takes a contemporary history approach to the development of Norwegian protective security in the decades since the end of the cold war. It shows how the reach of the state has been modified by competing pressures from changing threat assessments and the ambition of government reforms, economic liberalisation and internationalisation. Until 2014 security tended to take the back seat. The balance began to change following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and a renewed emphasis on great power rivalry. The article concludes that the juxtaposition of security-motivated state intervention and economic freedoms is not a puzzle to be solved, but rather a permanent balancing act. Consequently, the vulnerable edges of legislation, where state regulation ends, may be moved but not abolished.
In this paper, we investigate how the promotion incentive of politicians affects the pay gap between executives and employees in local firms. We find that the promotion incentive of local politicians ...significantly reduces the within-firm pay gap. This effect is more pronounced for large firms, firms in regions subject to more government intervention, state-owned-enterprises, private firms with political connections, and firms with more geographically concentrated operations. Our findings are robust to the use of the loss of top-rank political connections and economics loss due to earthquakes as instrumental variables for the promotion incentive. Furthermore, a reduction in pay gap is mainly driven by an increase in employee pay, instead of a decrease in executive pay. Overall, this study sheds light on the determinants of within-firm pay gaps from the perspective of the career concerns of local politicians.
Theories of frontier expansion in the last four decades have been mostly shaped by studies of state-driven smallholder colonization. Modern-day agricultural frontiers, however, are increasingly ...driven by capitalized corporate agriculture operating with little direct government intervention. The expansion of contemporary frontiers has been explained by the existence of spatially heterogeneous "abnormal" rents, which can be caused by cheap land and labor, technological innovation, lack of regulations, and a variety of other incentives. Here, we argue that understanding the dynamics of these frontiers requires considering the differential ability of actors to capture such rents, which depends on their access to production factors and their information, preferences, and agency. We propose a new conceptual framework drawing on neoclassical economics and political economy, which we apply to the South American Gran Chaco, a hot spot of deforestation for soy and cattle production. We divide the region into a set of distinct frontiers based on satellite data, field interviews, and expert knowledge, to review the drivers and actors of agricultural expansion in these frontiers. We show that frontier expansion in the Chaco responded to the rents created by new agricultural technologies, infrastructure, and rising producer prices but that the frontier dynamics were strongly influenced by actors' abilities to capture or influence these rents. Our findings thus highlight that understanding contemporary commodity frontiers requires analyzing the novel ways by which the agency of particular groups of actors shapes land-use outcomes.
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