Marx,Engels, and Ecology*

The following is a brief survey of Marx and Engels’ views on ecology, from the viewpoint of their relevance for 21th-century ecosocialism. While there are some serious limitations in the way both consider the “development of productive forces,” there are powerful insights in their discussion of the destructive consequences of capitalist expansion for the environment—an expansion that generates a disastrous metabolic rift in the exchanges between human societies and nature. Some ecological Marxists distinguish between “first stage ecosocialists”—who believe that Marx analyses on ecological issues are too incomplete and dated to be of real relevance today—and “second stage ecosocialists,” who emphasize the contemporary methodological significance of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism. This paper tries to argue for a third position (which probably could be accepted by several people of the two groups above): Marx and Engels’ discussion on ecological issues is incomplete and dated but despite these shortcomings it does have real relevance and methodological significance today.     

Cultural Penetration and Punctuated Policy Change: Explaining the Evolution of U.S. Energy Policy

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) suggests that the policy process is characterized by long periods of incremental change and short periods of punctuated change. The impetus for the latter is usually a focusing event that breaks open policy monopolies, allowing for major changes in legislative decision making. While a burgeoning body of literature, a shortcoming in the PET literature is that it has yet to explain why focusing events and subsequent breakdowns in policy monopolies sometimes fail to result in punctuated policy. We integrate theories on cultural change with punctuated equilibrium to explain why focusing events do not always result in the dramatic policy changes that we might expect. Specifically, we use the context of national energy policy and the lexical database, Google Ngram Viewer, to trace punctuating energy‐related events and the occurrence or lack thereof subsequent policy change from 1952 to 2000.     

Just the Two of Us? Civil Conflicts,Pro-State Militants,and the Violence Premium

Quantitative literature discussing violence in civil conflicts tends towards a typical model of engagement between governments and revolutionaries. Whilst recent work has shown the significant impact of multiple anti-government groups, a further feature remains understudied—the role of pro-state militants. This article theorizes a “violence premium” when such groups arise, which leads to all connected groups devoting greater energy to conflict than they would in isolation. Employing duration analysis and data from The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where Republicans act as revolutionary insurgents, Loyalists as pro-state militants, and the British Army as government forces, the violence premium is empirically confirmed. Both Loyalists and Republicans deviate from their underlying strategies to attack more frequently when violence by their rivals increases, with Republicans and the British Army engaging in the same way. An extended analysis, accounting for the status of the victim, shows that the violence premium resulting from interaction between Loyalists and Republicans targeted only the civilian population of Northern Ireland, elucidating the sectarian component of The Troubles. These results show that including all conflict parties and considering how they are linked are important features in studies that aim to determine the net level of violence in civil conflicts.     

Whole-person health and development: two South Indian initiatives

ABSTRACT

In responding to the 2016 reformulation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, the development community’s efforts are focused on a sweep of initiatives aiming to promote whole-society, sustainable development. The ambition of the SDGs is inspiring, but also daunting, and does not always sit easily within national models of economic development. This viewpoint profiles two organisations in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, that have decades of experience in whole-person development among scheduled tribes and disability communities. Both organisations serve as timely examples of ongoing holistic, whole-person health and development in the context of new ideals and economic realities.     

How Americans Think About Trade: Reconciling Conflicts Among Money, Power, and Principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know little about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By combining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of problem content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite Americans and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice. We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical economists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsian lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in practice they favor exploiting America's advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideological divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to identify how distinctive mentaal models—mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic—sensitize or desensitize people to particular aspects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionism.     

Political Consequences of the New Inequality

This article proposes agendas for teaching and research about shifting global patterns of equality and inequality, a very different agenda than was appropriate when the last undergraduate professor was president of ISA, almost forty years ago. Today, unlike in that Cold War world, formal democracy is flourishing, state power is diminishing, gender inequality has diminished, and income inequality has risen. Consequences of these new patterns that demand our attention as teachers and scholars include: (1) more frequent protracted social conflicts, (2) a newly politicized sphere of international public health, (3) the new global gender politics, (4) the new global politics of the super-rich, and (5) the new politics and ethics of the world's privileged, a group that includes most ISA members and most of our students. Our responsibilities as teachers have grown, in part, because popular media present a decreasingly coherent picture of each of these patterns; and that incoherence, itself, may help sustain global inequalities.     

The collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan: An analysis of its roots and its prospects for revival

The disintegration of the Soviet Union had profound economic and social effects on many of the newly independent transition economies. Nowhere was this more so than in the fisheries sector – with one of the biggest production shortfalls occurring in Kyrgyzstan, following the collapse of lake capture and pond-culture production. In 2005, aggregate landings were just 48 tonnes – barely 3 per cent of the catch level recorded in 1989. This article has two objectives. First it analyses the extent to which the dissolution of the Soviet Union can explain the collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan. Second, in the light of these findings, it considers what practical steps, if any, might be taken to revitalize the sector.     

Critical Hopefulness Among Urban High School Students

Psychological empowerment encompasses several key aspects of youth civic and sociopolitical development. Most research has focused on psychological empowerment’s emotional component, which entails learned hopefulness about one’s own ability to participate in and lead community change efforts. Fewer studies have assessed critical awareness of how social power operates—psychological empowerment’s cognitive component. The confluence of these two components has been termed critical hopefulness. A complex relationship exists between these two components, and previous research has found relatively small proportions of participants reporting both high levels of critical awareness and simultaneously high levels of hopefulness about their ability to exert influence in the sociopolitical domain. The current study of urban high school students in the Northeastern U.S. (n?=?389; 53.5% female) investigates heterogeneity according to these two components of psychological empowerment. Latent class cluster analyses were conducted and seven distinct groups of participants emerged. Students identifying as Hispanic/Latinx were more likely to be classified into a profile group exhibiting critical hopefulness. Differences were observed between psychological empowerment profile groups on self-reported levels of psychological sense of community, civic engagement, and social justice orientation. Furthermore, a larger proportion of this overall sample was classified into groups that exhibited critical hopefulness than in a previous study of adults. These findings provide useful insights for efforts to engage young people in civic life and to promote sociopolitical development.