Making the ‘empowered woman’: exploring contradictions in gender and development programming in Kyrgyzstan

This article examines the complexities of women’s increasing participation in international development programming for gender equality. Taking a specific setting in rural Kyrgyzstan where one such project has been operating, the researchers discover adverse effects on the local women’s livelihoods, status and health. Women’s contradictions are attributed to the women’s own failures and lacks, creating confusion and frustration among them. Adopting Smith’s institutional-ethnography approach, we explicate and map out the hidden processes which must be held accountable for these reactionary outcomes, taking women’s experiences as entry points to inquiry. We find that the reactionary effects are not accidental but organized, powerfully, systematically but invisibly, by taken-for-granted institutional practices serving the purposes of global development institutions, where women are seen as instruments of global economic growth. The analysis provokes critical discussion of ‘how’ and ‘what’ it takes to transform Central Asian women into ‘empowered’ people.     

Italian Politics in an Era of Recession: The End of Bipolarism?

Abstract

Italian politics have undergone momentous change in the 2007–2017 decade under the impact of the eurozone crisis, whose peak in 2011–2013 could be equated to the earlier watershed years of 1992–1994. The lasting impact of the upheaval in Italian politics in the early 1990s could still be felt in the decade of economic recession, but there were also new challenges prompted by a crisis that had its roots in international financial contagion and which unravelled under the shadow of both recession and austerity. The changes were of an economic, social, cultural, institutional, policy-oriented and political nature. If one central quintessentially political theme stands out by the end of this decade it is the apparent exhaustion of the quest for bipolarisation that was initiated in the early 1990s.     

Challenging Institutional Denial: Psychological Discourse,Therapeutic Culture and Public Inquiries

ABSTRACT

The damaging effects of abuse in childhood were repeatedly emphasised in public hearings and in media coverage of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Testimony from earlier Australian inquiries, which documented widespread experiences of child maltreatment, particularly in institutions, also underscored the ongoing and often intergenerational impact of abuse. Taking institutional child abuse inquiries as a case study, this article examines how psychological and therapeutic concepts have been mobilised politically. It argues that therapeutically oriented and psychologically informed cultural narratives of childhood trauma and its ongoing effects have provided a framework for making sense of long-term experiences of adversity and suffering and have enriched attention to “the question of justice” for survivors of historical institutional child abuse.     

From the workplace to the household: migrant labor and accumulation without dispossession

Working class studies on China commonly use the lens of proletarianization to understand class formation among peasant workers who move into cities to work in China’s manufacturing sector. However, in the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, proletarianization is an increasingly fading possibility for the Chinese peasantry, as urban labor markets remain saturated. Instead of peasants being transformed into proletariats, new patterns of class formation have emerged, where the interconnections between agrarian and urban remain central to peasant-workers living without dispossession. The Marxist feminist centering of practices and social arrangements of social reproduction, i.e. workforce maintenance, provides a welcome point of departure for redrawing some of our class maps in the shadow of the 2008 global economic crisis. This contribution draws on multi-sited ethnographic research among migrant workers toiling in the petty-commodity workplaces of Kunming, and in the adjacent countryside of Yunnan Province, to document the fluid class formation among families living on labor’s frontier. Through examining different experiences of workforce reproduction for families and migrant laborers as they move in and out of the workforce and household self-provisioning for subsistence, alternative imaginations for the possibilities of subsistence autonomy emerge.     

Controlling the unruly agents – linkages between accountability and corruption within the executive structures of Botswana

ABSTRACT

Representative democracy entails delegation of power to representatives and other actors within the political system. Oftentimes, the delegating party has little insight into the actions of the person(s) to whom power is delegated. Ensuring that the power-holder does not misuse his/her powers is, therefore, a challenge. This article analyses accountability mechanisms through which the delegating party can prevent and detect misuse of power in the form of corruption. The article argues that political institutions contribute towards such mechanisms being available/unavailable to the delegating party. The analysis focuses on the case of Botswana, where executive structures stipulate the accountability mechanisms available to principals. As shown by the analysis, principals have formal access to many such mechanisms. Oftentimes, however, these mechanisms are not applied. The analysis shows that accountability alone cannot explain levels of corruption within executive structures of Botswana but that informal rules also explain the presence/absence of corrupt practices.     

The institutionalization of relative advantage: formal institutions,subconstitutional presidential powers,and the rise of authoritarian politics in Russia, 1994–2012

What role do formal institutions play in the consolidation of authoritarian regimes such as the Russian Federation? Oftentimes, it is assumed that autocrats, usually potent presidents, wield informal powers and control far-flung patron–client networks that undermine formal institutions and bolster their rule. After the institutional turn in authoritarianism studies, elections, parties, legislatures, or courts have taken center stage, yet presidencies and public law are still on the margins of this research paradigm. This paper proposes a method for measuring subconstitutional presidential power and its change by federal law, decrees, and Constitutional Court rulings as well as a theoretical framework for explaining when and under which conditions subconstitutional presidential power expands. It is argued that as a result of a gradual, small-scale, and slow-moving process of layering, presidential powers have been accumulated over time. This furthers the institutionalization of presidential advantage toward other federal and regional institutions, which in turn contributes to the consolidation of authoritarianism.     

论当代大学生管理工作的着力点——基于大学生心理发展的思考

本文通过对大学生心理发展的一般特点、不同发展阶段、心理发展过程中的矛盾与冲突的分析,提出大学生管理工作的着力点--制度管理与人本管理的和谐统一,旨在为当代大学生管理工作提供一些借鉴.     

新型毒品5-甲氧基-α-甲基色胺油状物的GC-MS定性检验

目的通过分析未知检材样本提取后的质谱碎裂峰,建立了5-甲氧基-α-甲基色胺(5-MeO-AMT)的气相色谱-质谱(GC-MS)定性分析方法,并阐述其在EI离子源轰击下的分子裂解机制。方法未知样品油状物用氢氧化钠溶液溶解后加入适量乙酸乙酯,充分振荡后吸取上清液采用气相色谱-质谱(GC-MS)检测。结果测得未知组分(RT=12.754min)的质谱特征碎片峰(m/z)信息为161.1(基峰)、204.2、146.1、130.1、117.1和89.0。经与NIST谱库和DEA报告质谱图比对,确定为5-MeO-AMT;通过查阅文献资料,对上述质谱特征碎片峰的产生机制进行了推断。结论该方法操作简单、结论可靠,可用于5-MeO-AMT的检验。     

Examining the Salience of Marriage to Offending for Black and Hispanic Men

Despite a considerable body of research demonstrating the beneficial effects of marriage for criminal desistance, data limitations have resulted in much of this work being based on predominantly white, male samples. In light of the rapidly changing demographic landscape of the US—and particularly the tremendous growth in the Hispanic population—the question of whether the benefits of marriage are generalizable to racial and ethnic minorities is an important one. This research extends prior work on the relationship between marriage and offending by assessing whether the benefits of marriage for criminal offending extend to today’s racial and ethnic minority populations. Using a contemporary sample of 3,560 young adult Hispanic, black and white males followed annually for 13?years spanning the transition to adulthood, we find that while marriage is a potent predictor of desistance for all groups, the benefits of marriage vary substantially across both race and ethnicity.