Mitleids- und hilfsmüdigkeit bei humanitären krisen: Zum effekt übermäßigen medienkonsums

Drawing on social psychological theories of compassion fatigue, this paper develops a new research perspective that looks at the connection between excessive consumption of political media content on the one hand and compassion and aid fatigue on the other. The thesis is that media consumption that goes hand in hand with excessive confrontation with human suffering of others can lead to emotional deadening. Therefore, a less intensive but at the same time frequent media consumption contributes to the fact that citizens only feel limited compassion for and readiness to help the victims in humanitarian crises, among other things. They support their state's humanitarian aid and intervention measures to alleviate human suffering much less than citizens whose media consumption is less frequent or more intensive. This thesis of media-induced compassion and aid fatigue in humanitarian crises is developed theoretically in this article and empirically plausibilised based on data from a survey. This opens a new research perspective for the analysis of humanitarian aid policies of modern democracies (as well as their foreign policy in general). ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Auf sozialpsychologische Theorien der Compassion Fatigue zurückgreifend wird im vorliegenden Beitrag eine neue Forschungsperspektive entwickelt, die den Zusammenhang zwischen übermäßigem Konsum politischer Medieninhalte einerseits und Mitleids- und Hilfsmüdigkeit andererseits in den Blick nimmt. Die These ist, dass ein Medienkonsum, der mit einer übermäßigen Konfrontation mit menschlichen Leiderfahrungen einhergeht, zu emotionaler Abstumpfung führen kann. Deshalb trägt insbesondere ein wenig intensiver, zugleich aber häufiger Medienkonsum dazu bei, dass Bürger*innen unter anderem bei humanitären Krisen nur noch begrenzt Mitleid mit und Hilfsbereitschaft für die Opfer empfinden. Sie unterstützen humanitäre Hilfs- und Interventionsmaßnahmen ihres Staates zur Linderung des menschlichen Leids viel weniger als Bürger*innen deren Medienkonsum weniger häufig oder aber intensiver erfolgt. Diese These der medienbedingten Mitleids- und Hilfsmüdigkeit bei humanitären Krisen wird im vorliegenden Beitrag theoretisch entwickelt und gestützt auf Daten einer Umfrage empirisch plausibilisiert. Damit wird eine neue Forschungsperspektive für die Analyse humanitärer Hilfspolitiken moderner Demokratien (sowie ihrer Außenpolitik ganz allgemein) eröffnet.Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviou

Corporate Security Responsibility: Towards a Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Research Agenda

The political debate about the role of business in armed conflicts has increasingly raised expectations as to governance contributions by private corporations in the fields of conflict prevention, peace-keeping and postconflict peace-building. This political agenda seems far ahead of the research agenda, in which the negative image of business in conflicts, seen as fuelling, prolonging and taking commercial advantage of violent conflicts,still prevails. So far the scientific community has been reluctant to extend the scope of research on ‘corporate social responsibility’ to the area of security in general and to intra-state armed conflicts in particular. As a consequence, there is no basis from which systematic knowledge can be generated about the conditions and the extent to which private corporations can fulfil the role expected of them in the political discourse. The research on positive contributions of private corporations to security amounts to unconnected in-depth case studies of specific corporations in specific conflict settings. Given this state of research, we develop a framework for a comparative research agenda to address the question: Under which circumstances and to what extent can private corporations be expected to contribute to public security

Time-resolved single-crystal X-ray crystallography

In this chapter the development of time-resolved crystallography is traced from its beginnings more than 30 years ago. The importance of being able to “watch” chemical processes as they occur rather than just being limited to three-dimensional pictures of the reactant and final product is emphasised, and time-resolved crystallography provides the opportunity to bring the dimension of time into the crystallographic experiment. The technique has evolved in time with developments in technology: synchrotron radiation, cryoscopic techniques, tuneable lasers, increased computing power and vastly improved X-ray detectors. The shorter the lifetime of the species being studied, the more complex is the experiment. The chapter focusses on the results of solid-state reactions that are activated by light, since this process does not require the addition of a reagent to the crystalline material and the single-crystalline nature of the solid may be preserved. Because of this photoactivation, time-resolved crystallography is often described as “photocrystallography”. The initial photocrystallographic studies were carried out on molecular complexes that either underwent irreversible photoactivated processes where the conversion took hours or days. Structural snapshots were taken during the process. Materials that achieved a metastable state under photoactivation and the excited (metastable) state had a long enough lifetime for the data from the crystal to be collected and the structure solved. For systems with shorter lifetimes, the first time-resolved results were obtained for macromolecular structures, where pulsed lasers were used to pump up the short lifetime excited state species and their structures were probed by using synchronised X-ray pulses from a high-intensity source. Developments in molecular crystallography soon followed, initially with monochromatic X-ray radiation, and pump-probe techniques were used to establish the structures of photoactivated molecules with lifetimes in the micro- to millisecond range. For molecules with even shorter lifetimes in the sub-microsecond range, Laue diffraction methods (rather than using monochromatic radiation) were employed to speed up the data collections and reduce crystal damage. Future developments in time-resolved crystallography are likely to involve the use of XFELs to complete “single-shot” time-resolved diffraction studies that are already proving successful in the macromolecular crystallographic field.</p

Competence versus control: the governor's dilemma

Most governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. Principal–agent theory views indirect governance primarily as a problem of information: the agent has an informational advantage over the principal, which it can exploit to evade principal control. But indirect governance creates a more fundamental problem of power. Competent intermediaries with needed expertise, credibility, legitimacy, and/or operational capacity are inherently difficult to control because the policy benefits they can create (or the trouble they can cause) give them leverage. Conversely, tight governor control constrains intermediaries. The governor thus faces a dilemma: emphasizing control limits intermediary competence and risks policy failure; emphasizing intermediary competence risks control failure. This “governor's dilemma” helps to explain puzzling features of indirect governance: why it is not limited to principal–agent delegation but takes multiple forms; why governors choose forms that appear counterproductive in an informational perspective; and why arrangements are frequently unstable

Beyond opportunism: intermediary loyalty in regulation and governance

Regulators and other governors rely on intermediaries to set and implement policies and to regulate targets. Existing literatures focus heavily on intermediaries of a single type – Opportunists, motivated solely by self-interest. But intermediaries can also be motivated by different types of loyalty: to leaders (Vassals), to policies (Zealots), or to institutions (Mandarins). While all three types of loyalists are resistant to the traditional problems of opportunism (slacking and capture), each brings pathologies of its own. We explain the behavioral logic of each type of loyalty and analyze the risks and rewards of different intermediary loyalties – both for governors and for the public interest. We illustrate our claims with examples drawn from many different realms of regulation and governance