Introduction revisiting the Argentine crisis a decade on: changes and continuities

This introductory chapter to the book "Argentina Since the 2001 Crisis Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future" analyses crisis and its associated responses and subsequent recovery in the context of Argentina’s multiple implosion of 2001-02 whilst also assessing its legacies for the country’s social, cultural, economic and political realms during the last decade. It recognises that "crisis" is a term that is much used in the post-Lehman Brothers world and that the subsequent responses and associated recoveries (or lack of) have been the subject of a cascade of academic, government, media, and think-tank investigation ever since. The chapter instead seeks to understand the nature of how crisis and its impacts should be investigated and interrogated, by rejecting false dichotomies of ‘old’ and ‘new’ and synthesising understanding to form an analysis that draws both elements of continuity and elements of change. Secondly, it argues that crisis manifests itself in a number of realms, and that heuristic devices employed to investigate them must subsequently also be drawn from across a range of disciplinary perspectives. Thirdly, it examines how the 2001-02 crisis in Argentina led to a series of responses that both rejected the neoliberal model yet also recovered elements of it. Finally it outlines the structure of the rest of the book, briefly summarising the chapters in turn

Urban Biodiversity, City-Dwellers and Conservation: How Does an Outdoor Activity Day Affect the Human-Nature Relationship?

Urban conservation education programs aim to increase knowledge and awareness towards biodiversity and to change attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, to date, few urban conservation education studies have evaluated to what extent these programs have managed to achieve their goals. In this study, we experimentally explored the influence of an urban conservation activity day on individual knowledge, awareness and actions towards biodiversity, in both the short and longer term

Associations, active citizenship, and the quality of democracy in Brazil and Mexico

In many Third Wave democracies large classes of people experience diminished forms of citizenship. The systematic exclusion from mandated public goods and services significantly injures the citizenship and life chances of entire social groups. In democratic theory civil associations have a fundamental role to play in reversing this reality. One strand of theory, known as civic engagement, suggests that associations empower their members to engage in public politics, hold state officials to account, claim public services, and thereby improve the quality of democracy. Empirical demonstration of the argument is surprisingly rare, however, and limited to affluent democracies. In this article, we use original survey data for two large cities in Third Wave democracies-So Paulo and Mexico City-to explore this argument in a novel way. We focus on the extent to which participation in associations (or associationalism) increases "active citizenship"aEuro"the effort to negotiate directly with state agents access to goods and services legally mandated for public provision, such as healthcare, sanitation, and security-rather than civic engagement, which encompasses any voluntary and public spirited activity. We examine separately associationalism's impact on the quality of citizenship, a dimension that varies independently from the level of active citizenship, by assessing differences in the types of citizenship practices individuals use to obtain access to vital goods and services. To interpret the findings, and identify possible causal pathways, the paper moves back-and-forth between two major research traditions that are rarely brought into dialogue: civic engagement and comparative historical studies of democratization

Defending China’s National Image and ‘Defensive Soft Power’: the Case of Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution’

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11366-016-9419-xThis study examines the pro-democracy protests of Hong Kong in 2014 and how the protests became sites for Beijing’s representations of Chinese national image(s). It argues that ‘defensive soft power’ can be used to understand the process through which Beijing made such representations and projections. ‘Defensive soft power’, extending on Nye’s soft power is operationally defined as the reactionary activities taken in response to actions that harm or potentially harm a country’s national image. Based on an analysis of the data drawn from three mainland news media, several perceptions of China emerge - China as a victim; China as ‘reasonable’ power; and China as benign and tolerant leader in the China-Hong Kong relation. This research highlights the ‘Umbrella Revolution’ as an instance where ‘defensive soft power’ was used to (1) fend off negative national images and (2) project positive national images. Mapping out the process of national image defence will enable readers to better understand a sovereign state’s strategies to defend attacks on and promote positive perceptions of its national image