Capital Accumulation,Hegemony and Socio-ecological Struggles: Insights from the ENTITLE Project

This special issue presents findings and reflections of scholars who participated in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE). By mobilising conceptual frameworks from several strands of Marxist and post-structuralist theory—and empirically engaging with a range of historico-geographical processes—the articles in this issue contribute to debates in political ecology in two main ways. First, they critically analyse the political economy and ecology of contemporary capitalism, with an emphasis on accumulation strategies associated with the uneven expansion and crisis of neoliberalism. Specifically, they unpack and critically extend the frameworks of “accumulation by dispossession” and “nature's neoliberalisation” to engage with, among other cases, the political ecology of “austerity” in Southern Europe; historical and contemporary cases of “capital-driven disasters”; and political ecological dynamics taking place around relationships of “rent”. Second, the authors of this special issue analyse new and re-emerging forms of socio-ecological resistance and contestation, including both distributional struggles and movements against “commons' enclosures”. Moreover, they focus on how struggles can (and do) move from contesting capitalist forms of dispossession towards creating alternative “hegemonic” projects and blocs, by critiquing received “common sense” and constructing and performing alternative political ecological imaginaries informed by principles of solidarity and “commoning”. Taken together, the articles in this special issue present new ways of thinking and enacting political and ecological struggles outside established scholarly traditions and conventional disciplines.     

High-quality Digital 3D Reconstruction of Microscopic Findings in Forensic Pathology: The Terminal Pathway of a Heart Stab Wound*

High-quality digital three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of microscopic findings have been used in anatomical and histopathologic research, but their use in forensic pathology may also be of interest. This paper presents an application of these methods to better characterize the pathway of a stab wound of the anterior surface of the heart in a case of suicide. A portion of the heart wall including the stab wound was serially sectioned for microscopic analysis along the full extent of the wound. Histologic sections were digitally acquired, and a 3D reconstruction was created with ImageJ software for 3D computer graphics. This showed a full-thickness wound path extending to the endocardial surface of the left ventricle, curvilinear in appearance. After correction for shrinkage, 3D reconstruction allowed estimation of the dimensions of the myocardial injury and comparison of the appearance of the wound with the suspected knife used. The curvilinear appearance was considered to reflect injury during myocardial contraction. Complete microscopic sectioning and 3D reconstruction may allow virtual sectioning through various orientations and also provide useful forensic information for selected injuries.     

Substitution of human for horse urine disproves an accusation of doping*

In order to detect switching and/or manipulation of samples, the owner of a stallion asked our lab to perform a DNA test on a positive doping urine sample. The objective was to compare the urine DNA profile versus blood and hair DNA profiles from the same stallion. At first, 10 microsatellite markers were investigated to determine the horse identity. No results were obtained when horse specific markers were typed in the urine sample. In order to confirm the species origin of this sample we analyzed the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. This analysis from blood and hair samples produced reproducible and clear PCR-RFLP patterns and DNA sequence match with those expected for horse, while the urine sample results were coincident with human. These results allowed us to exclude the urine sample from the questioned stallion and determine its human species origin, confirming the manipulation of urine sample.     

When Do Countries Recentralize? Ideology and Party Politics in the Age of Austerity

The Spanish executive centralized political power to manage the politics of austerity better in the aftermath of the Great Recession. This article analyzes the reinforcement of the power of the central government and argues that three explanatory variables—economic crisis, ideology, and party politics—account for recentralization, which is defined as fiscal consolidation, concentration of competences, bureaucratic rationalization, and ideological convergence. The debate about the motives and nature of recentralization (de jure vs. de facto) further polarized the center-periphery cleavage. Regional prosovereignty parties interpreted the reversal of decentralization as another sign that accommodation within Spain was not possible and that contestation was the way forward.     

Individual level dynamics of PTV change across the electoral cycle

Propensity-to-vote (PTV) scores are ever more commonly used in electoral research as a measure of electoral utilities. Yet a growing literature employs them as dependent variable in the voting equation in place of the lower information granted by vote recall questions. However, this choice can be seen as problematic because of the very structure of election survey research. To the extent that voters' PTVs are measured in post-election surveys (as it is often the case) these are likely to result endogenously produced by actual voting behavior in the past election – thus partly undermining the validity of the PTV question which, ideally, should not be related to any specific election. In this paper, we try to disentangle the relationship between short-term political attitudes (leader evaluations, issue proximity, economic assessments) and voters' changing patterns of propensities to vote in both an electoral and a non-electoral context. The latter scenario serves as a means to rule out the potentially contaminating effect of voting choices on voters' PTVs. The data comes from two panel surveys of Italian voters conducted by ITANES in occasion of the 2006 general election, and in 2011 (that is, in a non-electoral year) respectively.     

Political and ideological aspects in the measurement of democracy: the Freedom House case

While several studies have dealt with methodological aspects of measuring democracy, little attention has been devoted to the political and ideological issues that affect the construction and structure of these measuring instruments. The aim of this study is twofold: in analysing the cultural and economic dimensions of the Freedom House (FH) organization, it seeks to delineate the political background of FH, thus underlining its neoconservative bias. Secondly, by focusing on the changes over time in the checklists used by FH to measure democracy, this study aims to analyse to what extent these changes are ideologically driven, in particular, to what are they linked to the neoliberal paradigm. Indeed, the hypothesis is that the construction of FH's scales has been affected by the neoliberal climate in which they were conceived. In the first part, the work reconstructs the academic debate about FH's scales and the historical and political context which brought to the affirmation of neoliberal democracy. It also provides a discussion regarding the importance of measurement as a political tool. In the second part, the study provides an analysis of FH through the reconstruction of its political-ideological profile, beginning with the formation of FH to its current internal culture. The third part provides an analysis of the checklists used by FH for measuring democracy. Our findings show that because of the changes in methodology and the strict interconnection between methodological and political aspects, FH data do not offer an unbroken and politically neutral time series, such that their use for cross-time analyses both for research and policy is questionable.     

On the use of IRMS in forensic science: proposals for a methodological approach

The flourishing number of publications on the use of isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) in forensic science denotes the enthusiasm and the attraction generated by this technology. IRMS has demonstrated its potential to distinguish chemically identical compounds coming from different sources. Despite the numerous applications of IRMS to a wide range of forensic materials, its implementation in a forensic framework is less straightforward than it appears. In addition, each laboratory has developed its own strategy of analysis on calibration, sequence design, standards utilisation and data treatment without a clear consensus. Through the experience acquired from research undertaken in different forensic fields, we propose a methodological framework of the whole process using IRMS methods. We emphasize the importance of considering isotopic results as part of a whole approach, when applying this technology to a particular forensic issue. The process is divided into six different steps, which should be considered for a thoughtful and relevant application. The dissection of this process into fundamental steps, further detailed, enables a better understanding of the essential, though not exhaustive, factors that have to be considered in order to obtain results of quality and sufficiently robust to proceed to retrospective analyses or interlaboratory comparisons.