1,430 research outputs found

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Panacea or producer? Analysing the relationship between international Law and disaster risk

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    This thesis seeks to critically analyse the relationship between international law and disaster risk. Despite the increasing global threat that disasters present, international law’s engagement with their prevention remains at a relatively nascent stage compared to the development of other areas of the law. However, the progress that has been made since the United Nation’s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the 1990s suggests that international law is widely viewed as a valuable tool in addressing the issue and reducing the risk of disasters. In contrast to this, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways that international law itself may also play a role in the creation of disaster risk. It is here that the project makes an important and original contribution, by interrogating this presupposition and analysing the ways that international law itself may be culpable in the creation and exacerbation of risk. Through a novel, compound theoretical lens combining Marxist and Third World approaches to international law and insights from disaster theory, the thesis highlights the longstanding complicity of international law in the production of disaster risk. The thesis draws on understandings of disasters as processes that reach back through time, and thus begins its analysis with an examination of the early history of international law and the role of its colonial doctrines in the historic construction of vulnerability and hazards. It then turns to modern international law, particularly within the realm of international economic law, to examine the continuing legacies of these early developments and the ongoing role of international law in disaster risk creation. Overall, the thesis offers an original contribution to conversations on the connection between international law and disaster risk. Rather than focusing only on the positive role that international law can have in the reduction of disaster risk found in the majority of the literature, it seeks to highlight more pathological aspects of the relationship between the two and the implications of this. It ultimately concludes that unless the burgeoning field of international disaster law engages more with such critical accounts of international law and their understandings of the harm the law produces, then it will remain blind to a major source of disaster risk creation and be unsuccessful in achieving its normative aims

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Planetary Hinterlands:Extraction, Abandonment and Care

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    This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water

    The Individual And Their World

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    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2022-2023

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    Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories

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    Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access

    The Socio-Technical Dynamics of Renewable Energy Policies in Germany

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    Growing environmental concerns and human-caused climate change increase the pressure on policymakers for rapid action to transform how societies convert energy, produce goods, or transport freight. Innovation and technological progress may contribute to such transitions. However, technological change is hard to predict, requires time, and may be laden with political conflicts. Although more sustainable technologies are available, incentivizing demand and deployment are crucial to accelerate transitions. As transformations develop over decades, understanding the temporal dynamics of policies is critical for governance. In Germany, the renewable energy act incentivizes the deployment of renewable energy technologies by remunerating electricity fed into the common grid. This dissertation assesses how socio-technical developments of solar and wind energy conversion technologies and the renewable energy act interactively shaped each other. Drawing on frameworks such as technological innovation systems, legitimacy, framing, and policy feedback, the contents of 16,485 newspaper articles and additional empirical studies were scrutinized. Combining methods from natural language processing, machine learning, and statistics, this thesis develops text models to assess changes in content and sentiment in large corpora over time. Three studies focus on the shifts in media framing of the German renewable energy act, the underlying co-evolution of technological and policy processes, and the development of the legitimacy of wind power. The results confirm that renewable energy deployment and policy are contested with varying intensity over time. Where change ought to occur, non-linear dynamics of innovation and technology uptake, growing policy costs, economic interests of incumbents, and technology side effects increasingly complicate policymaking over time. The early phases of the renewable energy act were shaped by positive expectations toward renewable energy technologies, which later shifted towards an emphasis on policy costs. The findings highlight the importance of the prosperity of underlying innovation systems as supporters of policy ambition and maintenance over time. However, policy costs and side effects must be managed effectively to withstand increasing contestation. These results may contribute to advancing the successful governance of sectoral transitions likely to unfold over several decades

    Twilight of the American State

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    The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian. How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today. Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit
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