Measuring Brief (Sylvanergy)

Best Brief – Sylvanerg

Ukraine's Anti-Corruption Front: Helping Ukrainians Win the War and the Peace by Having Their Backs against Oligarchy

Remarkably, while fighting for their lives against Russian invasion, Ukrainians continue to wage their long internal battle against oligarchy and corruption. Ukraine is midway through this generational struggle, which began on the streets of the Maidan in Kyiv nearly a decade ago. In 2014, after deposing a kleptocratic president whose campaigns were bankrolled by agents of the Kremlin, Ukrainians got to work transforming this post-Soviet oligarchy into a modern European state under the rule of law.Continuing to uproot oligarchy—a critical part of winning the war, rebuilding the country, and preparing for EU accession—will require heavy domestic and foreign support. Anti-corruption must be central in that support. This issue drove Ukrainians into the streets a decade ago. It has topped voters' minds in every Ukrainian election since, helped trigger the largest war in Europe since WWII, and is now motivating Ukrainians to win even at enormous cost. Transparency and accountability mechanisms are essential to reassuring Western taxpayers that their wartime aid to Ukraine is safeguarded. They must also be key conditions of the ambitious reconstruction and European modernization that will inspire freedom's cause globally. Countering corruption is as strategically vital today as the policy of containing communism was in the Cold War

The occupation of looking for work: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of an individual job-seeking experience

This qualitative study explored the meaning of job-seeking, as a human experience and occupation, as it is understood by an individual job-seeker within the United Kingdom. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to understand the meaning of job-seeking as a lived experience. A series of three, in-depth interviews were conducted with a single participant at various stages of the job-seeking experience. After individual and cross analyses of interview transcripts, three master themes were developed that demonstrated how the job-seeking experience was understood. These were: (1) understanding the self and identity, (2) understanding relationships, (3) understanding job-seeking as a journey. These results are discussed in the context of previous studies of job-seeking and occupational perspectives that focus on meaning in human occupation. The study concludes that job-seeking is a rich human occupation in which its form, function and meaning are influenced by internal and external sources of resilience related to the person, their occupations and environment. Future research could build on these insights by considering the efficacy of these internal and external supports and how job-seeking varies across different cultural and social contexts

Illusions of gunk

The possibility of gunk has been used to argue against mereological nihilism. This paper explores two responses on the part of the microphysical mereological nihilist: (1) the contingency defence, which maintains that nihilism is true of the actual world; but that at other worlds, composition occurs; (2) the impossibility defence, which maintains that nihilism is necessary true, and so gunk worlds are impossible. The former is argued to be ultimately unstable; the latter faces the explanatorily burden of explaining the illusion that gunk is possible. It is argued that we can discharge this burden by focussing on the contingency of the microphysicalist aspect of microphysical mereological nihilism. The upshot is that gunk-based arguments against microphysical mereological nihilism can be resisted