Generating non-conspiratorial executions

Avoiding conspiratorial executions is useful for debugging, model checking or refinement, and helps implement several wellknown problems in faulty environments; furthermore, avoiding non-equivalence robust executions prevents conflicting observations in a distributed setting from occurring. Our results prove that scheduling pairs of states and transitions in a strongly fair manner suf-fices to prevent conspiratorial executions; we then establish a formal connection between conspiracies and equivalence robustness; finally, we present a transformation scheme to implement our results and show how to build them into a well-known distributed scheduler. Previous results were applicable to a subset of systems only, just attempted to characterise potential conspiracies, or were tightly bound up with a particular interaction model.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2003-02737-C0

Radical Islam in Central Asia: Responding to Hizb ut-Tahrir

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The War of the Spanish Succession in the Catalan-speaking Lands

The War of the Spanish Succession affected the entire continent of Europe directly or indirectly. Within the Spanish monarchy, most of the states in the Crown of Aragon sided with Archduke Charles of Austria (Charles III), while Crown of Castile lent its support to Duke Philip of Anjou (Philip V). After the Treaty of Utrecht, Catalonia prolonged its resistance for 14 more months under a republican government. At the end of the war, the victors imposed repression, exile and the end to the Catalan constitutions

Faith Down the Rabbit Hole: A Critical Rhetorical Interrogation of Q-Anon and Parasitic Christianity

Over the course of the last six years, the conspiracy theory community known as Q-Anon has risen to prominence across the internet, coming to encapsulate a significant portion of the United States’ conservative and protestant populations. This study applies the act of Critical Rhetoric as proposed by McKerrow (1989) to the Q-Anon “drops”; message board posts wherein Q, the enigmatic leader of Q-Anon, preached conspiratorial ideology and misinformation to his followers. A pattern of Christian theology being usurped and retooled by Q as a method of faith-based political radicalization emerged throughout the texts, and this phenomenon was named “Parasitic Christianity.” Using this concept of Parasitic Christianity as a guiding framework for analysis, this study explores the four main thematic areas of theology which are present overtly and latently in the texts. In building the scholarly community’s understanding of Q-Anon as both conspiracy theory and theology, I aim to assist in working towards processes of deradicalization for conspiracy movement members

For the health of the nation: comparing healthy lifestyle promotion strategies in Russia

The negative demographic trends that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and continue to create uncertainty about Russia’s future have pushed the Russian state towards more direct involvement in the promotion of healthy lifestyle practices with the aim of increasing the population’s longevity and well-being. These efforts have intensified over the past decade as the state has begun to more actively intervene into the bodily habits of Russian citizens on many other fronts, including reproductive behavior and sexual orientation, in order to craft the “ideal” Russian subject and establish the boundaries of “normal” Russian behavior. Meanwhile, other actors throughout society, motivated by their own ideas about what constitutes proper conduct, have been developing alternative strategies to encourage Russians to pursue healthy lifestyles. This thesis examines the content of the official healthy lifestyle promotion strategy, deconstructing how it envisions the ideal Russian body and frames the necessity of leading a healthy lifestyle. It also analyzes some of the strategies that contest the official one, with the aim of finding out which aspects are contested and how, as well as discerning the common discursive threads that run through all of the strategies. The study draws on a broad base of materials, from official policy documents to social media communities, and seeks to understand how various actors throughout Russian society attempt to transform the bodily conduct of their fellow citizens. In doing so, it relies heavily on the insights of Michel Foucault and others about power, biopolitics, discipline, and resistance, which allow for a nuanced understanding of how official discourses about the body and the nation in Russia are contested and how they are reproduced. The analysis revealed the prevalence of several themes across all of the strategies, including the ruinous impact of non-Russian values, the corrupting effects of capitalism and consumerism, the hostility of the outside world towards Russia, the glory of Russia’s past, and the importance of maintaining traditional gender roles.http://www.ester.ee/record=b5147575*es

RISE OF THE REACTIONARIES: COMPARING THE IDEOLOGIES OF SALAFI-JIHADISM AND WHITE SUPREMACIST EXTREMISM

Executive Summary Salafi-jihadism and right-wing white supremacist extremism are two of the most visible, active, and threatening violent extremist movements operating in the West today, responsible for dozens of attacks throughout North America and Western Europe. With the increased threat of white supremacist terrorism in the West have also come questions about its relationship to jihadist terrorism. This study provides an assessment of the ideological similarities between the two movements, concluding that they share key traits and political outlooks, some of which have become increasingly widespread over recent years in the Western world and beyond. Firstly, these forms of extremism are the most violent iterations of their respective movements. Jihadists are the ideological fringe of the wider Islamist movement, while white supremacist extremists emerge from more mainstream, right-wing white identity and supremacist politics. They are both reactionary political movements. They treat any form of social or political progress, reform, or liberalization with great suspicion, viewing these chiefly as a threat to their respective ‘in-groups’. In this sense, jihadists too are extreme right-wing actors even if they are rarely referred to in such terms. Both movements share a similar underlying diagnosis for the ills of their respective societies, placing blame primarily on the forces of liberal progress, pluralism, and tolerance. Connected to this are white supremacist and jihadist constructions of chauvinist and hyper-masculine collective identities and their dehumanization of ‘out-groups’. Both movements have developed a strong, historically grounded collective identity coupled with a sense of superiority and a requirement that the in-group view those on the outside as both inferior and inherently threatening. While these identities differ in their content, there are similarities in their underlying structure. What is on offer in both cases is not only a strong sense of identity and belonging which is rooted in a glorious past, but also new meaning derived from seeing oneself as a historic project to save or cure humanity. Thus, while the term ‘supremacist’ is generally reserved for the extreme right in popular discourse, it too is an accurate description of how jihadists view their position in the world. As both movements share an ultra-conservative reactionary outlook, they also hold similar views on the traditional gender roles of men and women in society. Both movements rely heavily on reinforcing these roles, with a particular interest in supposedly recapturing ‘true’ masculinity through hyper-masculine portrayals of their most heroic members. Jihadists and white supremacist extremists also share similar ways of thinking about the threats they perceive their respective in-groups as facing. In both cases, the threat is viewed as a wide-ranging conspiracy which seeks to annihilate them. For jihadists, Muslims face a “war on Islam,” while white supremacist extremists warn of a “white genocide” or “great replacement” of white populations. While different in context and language, the content of both conspiracy theories is similar, including the virulent antisemitism which undergirds them. Both existential threat conspiracy narratives are also concerned with the preservation of purity, which is seen as under threat due to the deliberate actions of the enemy. These extremist movements have also made significant efforts to prove both the legitimacy and necessity of violence for the protection of their in-group and its interests. Both seek to either take part in, or be the catalyst of, a violent conflict, be it a race or holy war. Not only must fighting be used to save and protect those under threat, but it also serves as a means to a glorious end in which humanity will live in peace and prosperity Thus, through their activism and acts of terrorism, they both hope to achieve the establishment of utopian societies in which their in-group reigns supreme at the cost of most, if not all, others. Due to their reactionary tendencies, they also share a belief that the blueprint for this idealized society can be found in a past civilization or society that was destroyed or dismantled at the hands of nefarious forces pursuing a conspiracy to weaken and subjugate them. The imagined white ethnostate and the Islamic state to which the movements are respectively committed are, in most cases, totalitarian in nature. In order to function as intended, both require strict control over many aspects of citizens’ lives to maintain both the order and purity they desir

Norm violations and punishments across human societies

Punishments for norm violations are hypothesized to be a crucial component of the maintenance of cooperation in humans but are rarely studied from a comparative perspective. We investigated the degree to which punishment systems were correlated with socioecology and cultural history. We took data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database and coded ethnographic documents from a sample of 131 largely nonindustrial societies. We recorded whether punishment for norm violations concerned adultery, religion, food, rape, or war cowardice and whether sanctions were reputational, physical, material, or execution. We used Bayesian phylogenetic regression modeling to test for culture-level covariation. We found little evidence of phylogenetic signals in evidence for punishment types, suggesting punishment systems change relatively quickly over cultural evolutionary history. We found evidence that reputational punishment was associated with egalitarianism and the absence of food storage; material punishment was associated with the presence of food storage; physical punishment was moderately associated with greater dependence on hunting; and execution punishment was moderately associated with social stratification. Taken together, our results suggest that the role and kind of punishment vary both by the severity of the norm violation, but also by the specific socio-economic system of the society

Targeting Co-Belligerents

One of the central controversies of the targeted killing debate is the question of who can be targeted for a summary killing. The following chapter employs a novel normative framework: how to link an individual terrorist with a non-state group that threatens a nation-state. Six linking principles are catalogued and analyzed, including direct participation, co-belligerency, membership, control, complicity and conspiracy. The analysis produces counter-intuitive results, especially for civil libertarians who usually eschew status principles in favor of conduct principles. The concept of membership, a status concept central to international humanitarian law, is ideally suited to situations, like targeted killings, that involve summary killing on the battlefield. This chapter defends one version of the concept, called ‘functional membership’, which takes into account the uniqueness of irregular terrorist organizations. The defense relies on the fact that the alleged dichotomy between status and conduct is partially illusory. Second, functional membership is a hybrid between status and conduct and preserves the best elements of the law of war paradigm with the criminal law enforcement paradigm. Third, functional membership is necessary for applying the pre-existing international humanitarian law standards of ‘directly participating in hostilities’ and engaging in a ‘continuous combat function.

Targeting Co-Belligerents

One of the central controversies of the targeted killing debate is the question of who can be targeted for a summary killing. The following chapter employs a novel normative framework: how to link an individual terrorist with a non-state group that threatens a nation-state. Six linking principles are catalogued and analyzed, including direct participation, co-belligerency, membership, control, complicity and conspiracy. The analysis produces counter-intuitive results, especially for civil libertarians who usually eschew status principles in favor of conduct principles. The concept of membership, a status concept central to international humanitarian law, is ideally suited to situations, like targeted killings, that involve summary killing on the battlefield. This chapter defends one version of the concept, called ‘functional membership’, which takes into account the uniqueness of irregular terrorist organizations. The defense relies on the fact that the alleged dichotomy between status and conduct is partially illusory. Second, functional membership is a hybrid between status and conduct and preserves the best elements of the law of war paradigm with the criminal law enforcement paradigm. Third, functional membership is necessary for applying the pre-existing international humanitarian law standards of ‘directly participating in hostilities’ and engaging in a ‘continuous combat function.