Environmentally Sustainable Human Space Activities: Can Challenges of Planetary Protection be Reconciled?

Scientists and other experts have long expressed concern about protecting the environments of other planets from human contamination. Their objective is to preserve those environments for the search for indigenous life and other scientific research that human contamination could confound or even preclude. Within the past few years, the United States has embarked on plans to extend human presence to other planets—notably, Mars, where the search for indigenous life is focused at present. Other countries may eventually have this goal as a long-run objective. Current international and national policies to protect other planetary environments are limited almost exclusively to governance of robotic exploration and do not address measures to be taken during activities conducted by humans. This article borrows from the domain of environmental policy to suggest the concept of environmental sustainability as a possible framework to mediate conflicting objectives associated with extending human presence in space. A key conclusion is that defining a balancing test to achieve sustainability requires more systematic and thorough discussion of rationales for an extended human space presence—a difficult but necessary dialog for achieving the stated goals of planetary protection.     

Demobilization of combatants after civil wars in Africa and their reintegration into civilian life

In the past few years, several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa conducted large scale demobilizations. These are positive signs and create opportunities for sustainable peace and human development. However, demobilization appears to be a complex process. It is closely linked to security issues; and the impact of demobilization depends largely on whether the ex-combatants are able to reintegrate. Demobilized soldiers and guerrilla fighters have usually great difficulties re-establishing themselves in civilian life. Frustrated ex-combatants may jeopardize the peace and development process. This paper identifies on the bases of the recent experiences some of the risks that are involved in demobilization and several conditions that have to be met in order for demobilization to attain a lasting positive impact on peace and human development in Africa.     

China's defence spending: new questions

China has rapidly expanded its spending on defence over the past decade, at a pace that has closely mirrored its economic growth. However, a slowdown in growth over the past year has raised new questions over the implications for defence spending.     

转型期高校外语教师基本素质的转变

过去30年间,随着世界经济的迅速国际化,人才,物流的交流也变得日益频繁。在和平与发展的大趋势下,社会对于人才的需求也发生了巨大的变化,对高校外语人才的培养也提出了新的课题。厚基础、宽口径、复合型、应用型人才得到了广阔的发展空间。因此,培养符合社会发展的复合型人才已经成了高校无法回避的问题。而复合型人才培养的关键就在于如何提高外语教师个人素质。新时期对于高校教师提出了更高的要求。知识结构和教学教法面临着升级换代的难题。     

Perfectionist public space: a political philosophy approach

Public spaces are often sites of contention between competing conceptions of the good life. The potential for such conflicts increases in diverse societies where different ethnic, religious and cultural groups compete for space and representation in the public sphere. A paradigmatic example is the conflict between multiculturalism and conservatism towards the function and character of public spaces. A clear criterion is necessarily, in such conflicts, to determine which conception may be legitimately crowded-out, and which may prevail. The paper examines two strategies to justify such a criterion: a liberal approach and a perfectionist approach. According to the liberal approach, public spaces should reflect the pluralism of values in society, by combining multiplicity and coherence of values. Yet pluralism is too ambiguous a concept to determine, in practice, which conceptions of the good can legitimately be crowded-out, both physically and metaphorically, from the public sphere. Perfectionism, an ethical approach grounded in human developmentalism, holds that the good life is a life of developing and exercising our human capacities. This approach yields a substantive account of public space regulation: public spaces should promote the development and exercise of our human capacities. On this account, we can approach the conflict between competing claims on public spaces by asking whether crowding-out might harm the potential development and exercise of our capacities. The perfectionist approach also provides a finer distinction between different types of conservatisms, such that we may differentiate between conservatism that may be legitimately crowded-out from the spatial sphere, and conservatism which may prevail. This paper argues that a perfectionist approach—one which is explicitly committed to a view of the good life—is both necessary and timely.     

Increasing resolution,intensifying ambiguity: an ethnographic account of seeing life in brain scans

This paper argues that current images of the brain are providing a potent way in which human life itself is being constructed. In addition to material conceptions, exemplified by the human genome, scans that claim to illustrate features of the living brain serve to augment these with the idea of life as activity. Drawing from ethnographic research, the paper illustrates how, even among neuroscientists themselves, life is used as an implicit notion to hold together a range of contradictory methodological features of their work. The final section suggests that because this version of life is necessarily restricted, it may have a number of wider social and cultural consequences.     

Motivations Behind Interstellar Exploration and Colonization

This article analyzes the main motivations behind manned interstellar exploration. There is a wide range of justifications for manned interstellar exploration. Some observers contend that the main reasons are the survival of the human species and the spreading of life in the universe. I argue that the survival of the human species is a very long-term threat and, as such, it is not the main driver for interstellar exploration within a reasonable time horizon. The discovery of habitable planets within 5 to 15 light years from Earth and the possibility that Earth will no longer define the limit of growth constitute stronger motivations. I argue that manned interstellar exploration will be achieved through the mobilization of both public and private resources, as in the past opening of new frontiers, with governments providing initial support in exploration and science, in advancing critical technologies, and in building space infrastructure. The private sector would then take the lead in creating new markets and in expanding humanity’s presence in space.     

“巴黎手稿”的存在主义马克思主义解读

1932年马克思的“巴黎手稿”（以《1844年经济学哲学手稿》为题名）首次公开出版，遂及在正在兴起的“西方马克思主义”学界引发了解读热潮。其中，以法国存在主义马克思主义学者列斐伏尔、梅洛-庞蒂的解读，构成了对“巴黎手稿”之存在主义马克思主义解读之主要蓝图。本文认为，其基本特点包括：在具体-总体中，强调“总体的人”（total man）的“自然”与“历史”的“生成”过程，也即人的“存在的”属性，这种存在的属性，换言之，就是行动的哲学或曰立足于“日常生活批判”的“存在的哲学”（existential philosophy）。     

Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion

What if we viewed the history of human spaceflight somewhat less through the lens of Cold War politics, which admittedly was central to the race to the Moon, but more as an expression of what might be called a religion of spaceflight? There seems to be a deeply religious quality to advocacy for the investment in and support for human space exploration, lending to the endeavor of a “higher purpose” that helps to explain both the generous nature of the actual investment and the ultimate unwillingness of Americans to eviscerate space budgets despite less than full support for space exploration. This article examines religious conceptions as a means of analyzing what might be termed a “space gospel.” I lay out here the proposition that human spaceflight may be viewed as a religion with similar attributes to those present in mainstream religious denominations. This approach to exploring the history of human spaceflight offers a different and useful frame of understanding that broadens basic conceptions about this aspect of the human past.     

State of the Art: Addressing the INGO 'Legitimacy Deficit'

While the numbers and competencies of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have increased dramatically in the past few decades, questions have been raised about the legitimacy of their new activities. A number of scholars have identified significant tensions between INGOs' legitimacy claims and the realities of their working practices. We examine the current state of the debate on INGO legitimacy in two contrasting literatures: normative work on global governance and its implications for the role of INGOs, and policy-oriented work on INGOs' legitimacy. The first shows how INGO involvement in global governance opens the door to a range of alternative conceptions of world order, rooted in notions of universal human rights, democracy, and theories of redistributive justice. The latter set of voices is concerned less with locating INGOs' roles as agents in global normative structures than with analysing concrete problems arising from increased INGO participation in the development process. Future research might take into account key questions concerning the sources and the scope and nature of INGO legitimacy.     

The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital

Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education. Where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital, we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators. In addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth, we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies. We conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30-year panel of 128 countries. We find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth. Rather, we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in non poor countries.     

Flat affect? Revisiting emotion in the historiography of human rights

Across the preceding 15 years, the study of the post-1945 human rights project has emerged as one of most rapidly developing fields of transnational and international history. This article surveys the current state of the art of emotionalist historiography in the sphere of human rights and humanitarianism. It identifies the value of histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social movements, which have successfully begun to incorporate emotion into their analyses. The historiography of the deeper humanitarian past may well serve as the road to more nuanced histories of contemporary human rights struggles and means for integrating grand-scale political and intellectual history with the interior sentiment of individuals. Through a brief survey of emotion at various moments of the postwar rights story, the article argues that the study of shifting sentiment can substantially enrich accounts of human rights history, as it already has done in other fields.     

Claims to the Past. A Critical View of the Arguments Driving Repatriation of Cultural Heritage and Their Role in Contemporary Identity Politics

Abstract

This article explores the role that the worldwide movement of repatriation of human remains and cultural heritage—from museums and other institutions to minorities and indigenous populations—plays in contemporary identity politics. Beyond the obvious positive outcomes of this process, including a significant democratization of the field of archaeology, the repatriation movement poses challenges, mainly because it relies on concepts such as past–present continuity that are sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly, problematic for legitimizing group identities and group claims to cultural heritage and human remains. It is argued that while archaeologists and anthropologists must continue to support the idea of increasing democratization of interpreting the past, they must also maintain the right to remain critical to all claims of the past by any particular group.     

Mixing God's Work and the Public Business: A Framework for the Analysis of Faith‐Based Service Delivery

Over the past thirty years, there has been a dramatic transformation in the way the American political process operates. There has been a growing public perception that traditional political institutions lack the capacity to meet existing challenges. This has led many observers to call for a rethinking of how government does its work. Numerous alternatives, including the use of faith‐based organizations, have been suggested. The current popular debate on the appropriate role of faith‐based organizations in public service delivery has shed little light on a number of important issues raised by engaging such actors in governance issues. The impact of using faith‐based institutions to design and implement public policy must be considered not only in terms of traditional evaluation standards, but also regarding potential long‐term impacts on the political process itself. This article outlines a theoretical framework for the evaluation of faith‐based organizations as “alternatives” to conventional governance structures. It identifies key practical and theoretical issues raised by such substitution, in both short and long range systemic terms.     

Does neighborhood matter? Assessing recent evidence

Abstract

This article synthesizes findings from a wide range of empirical research into how neighborhoods affect families and children. It lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how neighborhoods may affect people at different life stages. It then identifies methodological challenges, summarizes past research findings, and suggests priorities for future work.

Despite a growing body of evidence that neighborhood conditions play a role in shaping individual outcomes, serious methodological challenges remain that suggest some caution in interpreting this evidence. Moreover, no consensus emerges about which neighborhood characteristics affect which outcomes, or about what types of families may be most influenced by neighborhood conditions. Finally, existing studies provide little empirical evidence about the causal mechanisms through which neighborhood environment influences individual outcomes. To be useful to policy makers, future empirical research should tackle the critical question of how and for whom neighborhood matters.     

Policy Area as a Potential Moderator of Transparency Effects: An Experiment

Building on the counterintuitive findings of recent empirical studies that transparency in political decision making may have a negative effect on public legitimacy beliefs, this article suggests that transparency has different effects depending on the policy area. Specifically, it argues that transparency is less effective in policy decisions that involve trade‐offs related to questions of human life and death or well‐being. Using an experiment that involved 1,032 participants, the effect of transparency is tested in two policy areas that represent routine priority setting (culture and leisure) and policy decisions implicitly related to human life and well‐being (traffic security). Results indicate that transparency can increase public acceptance of political decisions, but this effect is moderated by the type of policy area. Furthermore, a limited type of transparency in which decision makers provide justifications for their decisions can result in benefits while avoiding potential costs.     

Obama's second term: a new liberal era?

The re-election of Barack Obama in the November 2012 US presidential election meant that the Democratic candidate had won the popular vote in five of the past six national elections, spanning almost a quarter of a century. It raised the possibility that the conservative realignment that took hold from Richard Nixon's narrow victory in 1968, through the two terms of Ronald Reagan, and the single term of George H.W. Bush, had been superseded by a new, more liberal era in American politics.     

Politics and the life sciences: an unfinished revolution

Politics and the life sciences--also referred to as biopolitics--is a field of study that seeks to advance knowledge of politics and promote better policymaking through multidisciplinary analysis that draws on the life sciences. While the intellectual origins of the field may be traced at least into the 1960s, a broadly organized movement appeared only with the founding of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) in 1980 and the establishment of its journal, Politics and the Life Sciences ( PLS ), in 1982. This essay--contributed by a past journal editor and association executive director--concludes a celebration of the association's thirtieth anniversary. It reviews the founding of the field and the association, as well as the contributions of the founders. It also discusses the nature of the empirical work that will advance the field, makes recommendations regarding the identity and future of the association, and assesses the status of the revolution of which the association is a part. It argues that there is progress to celebrate, but that this revolution--the last of three great scientific revolutions--is still in its early stages. The revolution is well-started, but remains unfinished.