scholarly journals Genocide in Sudan as Colonial Ecology

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-155
Author(s):  
Louise Wise
Keyword(s):  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Master Plan ◽  
Internal Colonialism ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Heterogeneous Process ◽  
Genocide Studies ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article presents a novel theoretical and empirical account of the genesis and constitution of genocide in Sudan. To do so, it brings developments in critical genocide studies, notably the colonial and international “turns” and renewed attention to the scholarship of Lemkin, into dialogue with theoretical arguments about processual ontologies, complexity theory, and assemblage thinking. The latter provide a conceptual vocabulary to rethink the kind of ontological phenomenon that genocide constitutes. Rather than a discrete outcome or temporally and geographically bounded “event,” genocide in Sudan is seen as a heterogeneous, process-based, systemic entity. Challenging conventional genocide models generally and dominant narratives about Sudan specifically, the article argues that genocide in Sudan should be conceptualized as an historical internal frontier-based pattern that is constituted by three intersecting colonial forms: postcolonialism, internal colonialism, and neocolonialism. In doing so, it suggests a new way of thinking about the genocide-colonialism nexus. Tracing these three colonialisms, genocide appears not as an aberrant breakdown, violent outburst, or top-down ideological “master plan.” Neither is it a single, linearly unfolding process. Rather, it is emergent from a colonial ecology, its logic and potentiality imbricated with, and incipient within, a temporally and geographically expansive web of actors, processes, structures, relations, discourses, practices, and global forces.

Legislating for a Market Economy in China

2007 ◽  
Vol 191 ◽  
pp. 567-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
Top Down ◽  
National Legislation ◽  
Chinese Law ◽  
Legal Structure ◽  
Secured Transactions ◽  
Do So

AbstractSince the early 1990s, China has come a long way in legislating the foundational rules for its reformed economy. Virtually all of the important areas – contracts, business organizations, securities, bankruptcy and secured transactions, to name a few – are now covered by national legislation as well as lower-level regulations. Yet an important feature of a legal structure suited to a market economy is missing: the ability of the system to generate from below solutions to problems not adequately dealt with by existing legislation. The top-down model that has dominated Chinese law reform efforts to date can only do so much. What is needed now is a more welcoming attitude to market-generated solutions to the gaps and other problems that will invariably exist in legislation. The state's distrust of civil-society institutions and other bottom-up initiatives suggests, however, that this different approach will not come easily.

Transforming Campus Rape Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Diane Crocker ◽  
Marcus A. Sibley
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Institutional Responses ◽  
Dominant Narratives

This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence. While rape culture is not simple, institutional responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause–effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Susan B Marine ◽  
Ruth Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Dominant Narratives

This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence and how people’s understanding of rape culture has limited their ability to change it. Although rape culture is not simple, individuals’ responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause-effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and share how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally, it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

Imprinting Beyond the Founding Phase: How Sedimented Imprints Develop over Time

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 1579-1600
Author(s):  
Lien De Cuyper ◽  
Bart Clarysse ◽  
Nelson Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Process Model ◽  
External Environment ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Social Venture ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Do So

In this study, we build on the foundational observations of Selznick and Stinchcombe that organizations bear the lasting imprint of their founding context and explore how characteristics shaped during founding are coherently carried forward through time. To do so, we draw on an ethnography of a social venture where the entrepreneurs left soon after founding. In examining how an initial organizational imprint evolves beyond a venture’s founding phase, we focus on the actions and interactions of organizational members, the founders’ imprint, the venture’s new leadership, and the external environment. The process model we develop shows how the organizational imprint evolves as a consequence of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up forces. We first find that the initial imprint is transmitted through a bottom-up mechanism of imprint reinforcement, and second, that the venture is reimprinted after the founding period through two processes which we call imprint reforming and imprint coupling. The result of this is the formation of a sedimented imprint. Our findings further illuminate that, although the initial imprint sticks, its function and manifestation changes over time.

scholarly journals Worlding cities through transportation infrastructure

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Creighton Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Transportation Infrastructure ◽  
Master Plan ◽  
City Managers ◽  
Local Stakeholders ◽  
Urban Modelling ◽  
Global North ◽  
Do So

This paper engages with emerging literature on worlding cities in analysing the contested ways in which mid-sized cities attempt to ‘globalize’ through the redevelopment of urban infrastructure, and in particular, transportation infrastructure. The paper focuses specifically on the World Heritage City of Penang, Malaysia and critically examines controversies over the extensive urban redevelopment and regeneration projects that have emerged since 2012. In particular, it examines the ambitious Penang Transport Master Plan (PTMP), which has posed considerable implications for the city’s heritage landscapes, but also several socio-environmental impacts. The paper analyses the state government’s vision for the PTMP, before turning to an alternative strategy and critique of this plan put forth by local civil society organizations. As I demonstrate, both plans make use of worlding strategies in ‘selling’ their particular vision for the city’s future, but the ways they do so are markedly different. In reviewing this case, the paper challenges the conceptualization of inter-referencing and urban modelling practices as it is currently documented in the literature on worlding cities. What is novel in Penang is the way local stakeholders identify comparable cities outside of the Global North as models to follow, rather than established mega- or ‘world’ cities, which act as more realistic reference points. In doing so, the paper highlights key technologies of governance that are being used to counter the neoliberal worlding strategies put forth by city managers.

Duck Eats Rabbit: Exactly which type of relational phrase can disambiguate the perception of identical side by side ambiguous figures?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Elliott Mathewson
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Position ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Ambiguous Figures ◽  
Large Sample ◽  
Do So

Many individuals cannot at first see two ambiguous figures as different interpretations simultaneously, even with effort. Here in a large sample replication we find that the phrase “duck eats rabbit” allows those who could not see a duck and rabbit side by side to do so. In a second experiment we show that a relational phrase “next to” that does not disambiguate the spatial position interpretation, does not similarly allow the duck to be seen next to the rabbit, supporting the proposal that top-down semantic-framing can influence perception of ambiguous figures.

Russian Minorities and Intimidation Tactics

2020 ◽  
pp. 197-211
Author(s):  
Judas Everett
Keyword(s):  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Master Plan ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Do So

Rather than seeing recent Russian actions as part of a grand strategy or master plan, it is worth taking a moment to consider the opposite – that such actions may be reactive measures from a regime more lacking grand strategies than is generally supposed. Focusing on the issue of Russian minorities in Ukraine, it is clear that while Putin has been most assertive in his utilisation of Russian minorities as a pretext to interfere with Ukraine, the threat to do so is nothing new. Ever since the prospect of an independent Ukraine arose, during the rule of Gorbachev, Russian elites have made implicit and explicit threats which utilised the Russian minority in Ukraine. The fact that Ukrainian compliance had been achieved without having to resort to such measures, which are likely to prove destructive in the long term, should not be taken as part of a grand master plan. Rather, they should be seen as desperate reactive measures of a regime that must have seen less and less available options.

Runaway

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Maxwell A. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Train Derailment ◽  
Institutional Failure ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Do So

Institutions often fail, sometimes spectacularly. A tragic train derailment provides an example of an institutional failure that can be analyzed through the prism of three schools of ethics: Bentham’s utilitarianism, Kant’s deontological or rights-based approach, and Aristotle’s virtue ethics. By stressing the importance of the wise practitioner, a virtue-ethics approach offers a way of thinking about what makes an institution good or bad. Institutional failures are often due less to the absence of well-specified rules and incentives than the erosion of the capacity of practitioners to perform the activities associated with their roles and offices. Good institutions enable practitioners to focus on the aims of these activities. To do so, however, competitive utility-maximizing must be restrained.

Self-organizing moral systems

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Gaus
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Agent Based Models ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Moral Systems ◽  
Individual Mode ◽  
The Social ◽  
Central Plan ◽  
Do So ◽  
Self Organizing

This essay examines two different modes of reasoning about justice: an individual mode in which each individual judges what we all ought to do and a social mode in which we seek to reconcile our judgments of justice so that we can share common rules of justice. Social contract theory has traditionally emphasized the second, reconciliation mode, devising a central plan (the contract) to do so. However, I argue that because we disagree not only in our judgments of justice but also about the degree of reconciliation justice calls for, the social contract presupposes a single, controversial, answer to the proper degree of reconciliation. In place of the social contract’s ‘top-down’ approach, this article explores the idea of self-organizing moral systems, in which each individual, acting on her own views of justice (including the importance of reconciliation), responds to the decisions of others, forming systems of shared justice. Several basic agent-based models are explored to begin to understand the dynamics under which individuals with diverse views of justice may come to share common rules. It is found that, surprisingly, by increasing the diversity in a system, we can sometimes increase the possibility of agreement.

scholarly journals EXPRESS: The Role of Contingency and Correlation in the Stroop Task

2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110325
Author(s):  
Nabil Hasshim ◽  
Benjamin A Parris
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Stroop Task ◽  
Contingency Learning ◽  
Interference Control ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Response Contingency ◽  
Typical Design ◽  
Do So

Facilitation (faster responses to Congruent trials compared to Neutral trials) in the Stroop task has been a difficult effect for models of cognitive control to explain. The current research investigated the role of word-response contingency, word-colour correlation, and proportion congruency in producing Stroop effects. Contingency and correlation refers to the probability of specific word-response and word-colour pairings that are implicitly learnt while performing the task. Pairs that have a higher probability of occurring are responded to faster, a finding that challenges top-down attention control accounts of Stroop task performance. However studies that try to experimentally control for contingency and correlation typically do so by increasing the proportion of incongruent trials in the task, which cognitive control accounts posit affects interference control via the top-down biasing of attention. The present research focused on whether facilitation is also affected by contingency and correlation while additionally looking at the effect of proportion congruency. This was done in two experiments that compared the typical design of Stroop task experiments (i.e., having equal proportions of Congruent and Incongruent trials but also contingency and correlational biases) to: a) a design that had unequal congruency proportions but no contingency or correlation (Experiment 1), and b) a design where the correlation is biased but proportion congruency and contingency were not (Experiment 2). Results did not support the hypotheses that contingency or correlation affected facilitation. Interference was almost halved in the alternative design of Experiment 2, demonstrating an effect of contingency learning in typical measures of Stroop interference.

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