928 research outputs found

    From abuse to trust and back again

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    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    Influence of the EU on migration and asylum policies of Member States: Case study of Temporary Protection Directive in Czech Republic and Slovakia

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    openThe thesis discusses the influence of European Union on migration and asylum policies of Member States through the case study on activation of Temporary Protection Directive in Czech Republic and Slovakia. After Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tens of thousands of refugees fled from Ukraine to the territory of European Union. Soon after, European Council agreed on activation of the Temporary Protection Directive, for the first time since its adoption in 2001. The triggering of the Directive was an unprecedented step, that helped the Member States to deal with the sudden mass influx of refugees. However, the implementation process was in many cases difficult. The thesis discusses the implementation of the Temporary Protection Directive in Czech Republic and Slovakia and defines the main challenges of the implementation. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on the implications of the activation of this Directive on the migration and asylum policies in Czech Republic and Slovakia. Specifically, work analyses the possible impact of the Temporary Protection Directive on the Europeanization of migration and asylum policies in chosen Member States.TThe thesis discusses the influence of European Union on migration and asylum policies of Member States through the case study on activation of Temporary Protection Directive in Czech Republic and Slovakia. After Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tens of thousands of refugees fled from Ukraine to the territory of European Union. Soon after, European Council agreed on activation of the Temporary Protection Directive, for the first time since its adoption in 2001. The triggering of the Directive was an unprecedented step, that helped the Member States to deal with the sudden mass influx of refugees. However, the implementation process was in many cases difficult. The thesis discusses the implementation of the Temporary Protection Directive in Czech Republic and Slovakia and defines the main challenges of the implementation. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on the implications of the activation of this Directive on the migration and asylum policies in Czech Republic and Slovakia. Specifically, work analyses the possible impact of the Temporary Protection Directive on the Europeanization of migration and asylum policies in chosen Member States

    Optimizing Cybersecurity Risk in Medical Cyber-Physical Devices

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    Medical devices are increasingly connected, both to cyber networks and to sensors collecting data from physical stimuli. These cyber-physical systems pose a new host of deadly security risks that traditional notions of cybersecurity struggle to take into account. Previously, we could predict how algorithms would function as they drew on defined inputs. But cyber-physical systems draw on unbounded inputs from the real world. Moreover, with wide networks of cyber-physical medical devices, a single cybersecurity breach could pose lethal dangers to masses of patients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with regulating medical devices to ensure safety and effectiveness, but its regulatory approach—designed decades ago to regulate traditional medical hardware—is ill-suited to the unique problems of cybersecurity. Because perfect cybersecurity is impossible and every cybersecurity improvement entails costs to affordability and health, designers need standards that balance costs and benefits to inform the optimal level of risk. The FDA, however, conducts limited cost-benefit analyses, believing that its authorizing statute forbids consideration of economic costs. We draw on statutory text and case law to show that this belief is mistaken and that the FDA can and should conduct cost-benefit analyses to ensure safety and effectiveness, especially in the context of cybersecurity. We describe three approaches the FDA could take to implement this analysis as a practical matter. Of these three, we recommend an approach modeled after the Federal Trade Commission’s cost-benefit test. Regardless of the specific approach the FDA chooses, however, the critical point is that the agency must weigh costs and benefits to ensure the right level of cybersecurity. Until then, medical device designers will face continued uncertainty as cybersecurity threats become increasingly dangerous

    The Impossibility of Local Police Reform

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    Intelligence Oversight In Times of Transnational Impunity: Who Will Watch the Watchers?

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    This book adopts a critical lens to look at the workings of Western intelligence and intelligence oversight over time and space. Largely confined to the sub-field of intelligence studies, scholarly engagements with intelligence oversight have typically downplayed the violence carried out by secretive agencies. These studies have often served to justify weak oversight structures and promoted only marginal adaptations of policy frameworks in the wake of intelligence scandals. The essays gathered in this volume challenge the prevailing doxa in the academic field, adopting a critical lens to look at the workings of intelligence oversight in Europe and North America. Through chapters spanning across multiple disciplines–political sociology, history, and law–the book aims to recast intelligence oversight as acting in symbiosis with the legitimisation of the state’s secret violence and the enactment of impunity, showing how intelligence actors practically navigate the legal and political constraints created by oversight frameworks and practices, for instance by developing transnational networks of interdependence. The book also explores inventive legal steps and human rights mechanisms aimed at bridging some of the most serious gaps in existing frameworks, drawing inspiration from recent policy developments in the international struggle against torture. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, sociology, security studies, and international relations

    Beyond Quantity: Research with Subsymbolic AI

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    How do artificial neural networks and other forms of artificial intelligence interfere with methods and practices in the sciences? Which interdisciplinary epistemological challenges arise when we think about the use of AI beyond its dependency on big data? Not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and the humanities seem to be increasingly affected by current approaches of subsymbolic AI, which master problems of quality (fuzziness, uncertainty) in a hitherto unknown way. But what are the conditions, implications, and effects of these (potential) epistemic transformations and how must research on AI be configured to address them adequately

    The great moving countering violent extremism show: An ethnography of CVE in the Canadian context

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    My dissertation critically examines through ethnographic fieldwork the rise of countering violent extremism [CVE] programs in Canada. CVE is an offshoot of counter-terrorism, with programs first taking hold in the mid-2000s following ‘homegrown terrorism’ incidents in Madrid and London. CVE is based on the premise that a ‘radicalization process’ precedes terrorism. This allows for security and civil society-based interventions in the ‘pre-crime’ space to interrupt terrorism before it happens. The most thorough and controversial example of this is the UK’s Prevent strategy, which legally mandates human services professionals to refer individuals showing signs of ‘radicalization’. In Canada, no such duty exists, though its national strategy nonetheless aims to harness ‘all of society’ toward preventing violent extremism, enlisting the cooperation of teachers, artists, psychologists, social workers along with actors in the private sector. My study is not about how individuals turn to ‘violent extremism’ or ‘radicalization’ but rather about examining that edifices that have created to respond to these perceived problems The implications of CVE as an ‘all of society’ endeavour are manifold, particularly as the scope of CVE expands beyond ‘Islamism’ toward preventing ‘all types’ of violent extremism, most recently on right-wing groups and violence against racial, ethnic, and gender minorities. Broadly, my research attempts to conceive of the implications of this expansion. What drives CVE’s growth in the face of sustained criticism over its deleterious impacts on Muslim communities? How do practitioners in CVE align their interests with the cause? What social functions does CVE take on? Moreover, can boundaries even be drawn around what constitutes CVE? My study draws on interviews with 46 CVE practitioners and participant observation over a three-year period (2018-2020) with CVE entities operating in Canada. My findings indicate how an absence of knowledge over how to conduct CVE propels its encroachment into ever more diverse areas of social life. The paradigm operationalizes ‘uncertainty’ to enroll actors with diverse interests and foster partnerships with communities including those (racialized, Indigenous, LGBTQ) that have had fraught relationships with security institutions. In Chapter 1 - Searching for the CVE space I discuss my immersion in CVE and the type of fieldwork activities conducted. I also attempt to define my research object, outlining how CVE comprises a field of practice, a paradigm, a moral-social imperative, and lastly a space. Chapters 2 and 3 historicize CVE’s contemporary presence and disturb common understandings of its origins. I critique the explanation of CVE’s rise as a necessary and spontaneous reaction to evolving security threats to understand it as an outcome of performative security knowledge, where new security threats are discursively created rather than responded to. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on my fieldwork experience, examining how actors ‘enroll’ in the CVE cause through the open-ended, speculative quality of its activities. A distinction emerged with Muslim-identifying CVE practitioners, whose motivations to represent their communities in often hostile institutions and reduce the harm of CVE practices were typified by the repeated phrase “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”. In the conclusion chapter I connect the varying threads of preceding analysis and what they portend for CVE’s effects on societies. This includes examining how CVE’s efforts to redirect political grievances toward ‘pro-social’ ends potentially disempowers social justice movements, reinforcing state hegemony and existing power inequities

    Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law

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    Making Endless War is built on the premise that any attempt to understand how the content and function of the laws of war changed in the second half of the twentieth century should consider two major armed conflicts, fought on opposite edges of Asia, and the legal pathways that link them together across time and space. The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli conflicts have been particularly significant in the shaping and attempted remaking of international law from 1945 right through to the present day. This carefully curated collection of essays by lawyers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political geographers of war explores the significance of these two conflicts, including their impact on the politics and culture of the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America. The volume foregrounds attempts to develop legal rationales for the continued waging of war after 1945 by moving beyond explaining the end of war as a legal institution, and toward understanding the attempted institutionalization of endless war
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