Monitoring elections in post-Soviet States: diverse paths and similar strategies of pro-democratic movements

This study is devoted to the in-depth investigation and comparison of election monitoring organisations in post-Soviet states. Election observation has become one of the core activities of civil society throughout the world, while in the post-Soviet region it became an indispensable part of the political process since the early 1990s. Particularly relevance for this task appears to be found in hybrid regimes: on the one hand, there exist grievances related to the quality of elections; on the other hand, political context is more open than in autocracies, allowing for certain activities of civil society. Relying on the versatile social movement and civil society scholarship, this project investigates monitoring organisations in three states that are often labelled hybrid regimes, namely Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Careful investigation of election monitoring organizations suggests that they predominantly rely on transactional activism, emphasising cooperation with different actors rather than contention. In turn, very little is known about how this type of activism develops in the post-Soviet region, which resources and strategies it encompasses and how different contextual factors lead to the devel- opment of transactional activism. Hence, the project contributes to the development of the transactional activism concept by presenting evidence from new case studies. In so doing it focuses on the different paths that the most visible political NGOs take in adopting transactional activism. The study attempts to explain how similar modes of activism developed and which factors or combination of factors have led to the adop- tion of certain strategies. This careful investigation shows how transactional activism is shaped in three countries by the number of external and internal factors, particu- larly, by the political contexts and resources. Furthermore, the interactional approach adopted in this study considers outcomes of the election monitoring as conditions for the further development of the monitoring organisations. This project relies on the activists’ own understanding of these contextual factors and limitations in resource; it voices activists’ views on strategies and discusses their motivations behind certain strategic choices. Methodologically, the study predominantly relies on a qualitative research design in which three case studies are complemented by the comparative investigation. The project draws its conclusions from a variety of data sources and presents rich empirical evidence on the internal development of organisations that have not yet been investigated. The study concludes that, while internal features of election monitoring NGOs closely resemble each other, differences in external political context account for the diverse paths of transactional activism development. In general, this project contributes to a further expansion of our knowledge of post-Soviet civil society

A novel facet of tumor suppression by p53: Induction of tumor immunogenicity

Pharmacological reactivation of the p53 tumor suppressor is a promising strategy for anti-cancer therapy due to its high potential to elicit apoptosis or growth arrest in cancer cells. Recently we uncovered the mechanism of activation of the innate immune response by p53 upon its activation by small molecules

Integrins and Mutant p53 on the Road to Metastasis

Understanding how tumor cells invade tissues is key to developing drugs to block metastasis. In this issue, Muller et al. (2009) report that a mutant form of the tumor suppressor p53 in cancer cells boosts the endocytic recycling of the adhesion molecule integrin α5β1 and of epidermal growth factor receptor, promoting invasion and metastasis

Nuclear envelope-limited chromatin sheets are part of mitotic death

Nuclear envelope-limited chromatin sheets (ELCS) are enigmatic membranous structures of uncertain function. This study describes the induction of ELCS in p53 mutated Burkitt's lymphoma cell lines after treatment with irradiation or the microtubule inhibitor, SK&F 96365. Both treatments evoked similar mitotic death, involving metaphase arrest followed by extensive endopolyploidisation and delayed apoptosis, although the kinetics were different. We found that induction of ELCS and nuclear segmentation correlated with the amount and kinetics of M-phase arrest, mitosis restitution and delayed apoptosis of endopolyploid cells. In metaphases undergoing restitution, ELCS are seen participating in the restoration of the nuclear envelope, mediating the attachment of peripheral chromatin to it. In interphase cells, ELCS join nuclear segments, ectopically linking and fusing with heterochromatin regions. In cells with segmented nuclei, continued DNA replication was observed, along with activation and redistribution of Ku70, suggestive of non-homologous DNA end-joining. Induction of ELCS also parallels the induction of cytoplasmic stacked membrane structures, such as confronting cisternae and annulate lamellae, which participate in the turnover and degeneration of ELCS. The results suggest that arrest at a spindle checkpoint and the uncoupling of mitosis from DNA replication lead to the emergence of ELCS in the resulting endopolyploid cells

Zur organisierten Philanthropie der Gegenwart

Goeke P, Moser E, Bahrami R, Burgold J, Mölders M, Selivanova G. Stiftungen der Gesellschaft. Global Studies & Theory of Society. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag; 2024.Gemeinnützige Stiftungen operieren im 21. Jahrhundert gesellschaftsweit und begegnen ihren Umwelten mit sehr ambitionierten Wirkungsansprüchen. Auf den Wegen zu ihren Zielen sind sie an ihre Eigenschaften als Organisation gebunden und mit der Komplexität einer funktional differenzierten Weltgesellschaft konfrontiert. Zur wissenschaftlichen Analyse dieser Einrichtungen eignen sich daher besonders organisations- und gesellschaftstheoretische Ansätze. Die Autor*innen nehmen diesen doppelten Zugriff auf und leisten eine systematisch-soziologische Einordnung von Stiftungen und ihren Strukturen - Einsichten, die auch für Praktiker*innen aus dem Stiftungswesen höchst relevant sind

Prediction of response to anti-cancer drugs becomes robust via network integration of molecular data

Abstract Despite the widening range of high-throughput platforms and exponential growth of generated data volume, the validation of biomarkers discovered from large-scale data remains a challenging field. In order to tackle cancer heterogeneity and comply with the data dimensionality, a number of network and pathway approaches were invented but rarely systematically applied to this task. We propose a new method, called NEAmarker, for finding sensitive and robust biomarkers at the pathway level. scores from network enrichment analysis transform the original space of altered genes into a lower-dimensional space of pathways. These dimensions are then correlated with phenotype variables. The method was first tested using in vitro data from three anti-cancer drug screens and then on clinical data of The Cancer Genome Atlas. It proved superior to the single-gene and alternative enrichment analyses in terms of (1) universal applicability to different data types with a possibility of cross-platform integration, (2) consistency of the discovered correlates between independent drug screens, and (3) ability to explain differential survival of treated patients. Our new screen of anti-cancer compounds validated the performance of multivariate models of drug sensitivity. The previously proposed methods of enrichment analysis could achieve comparable levels of performance in certain tests. However, only our method could discover predictors of both in vitro response and patient survival given administration of the same drug