Ticking Bombs and Interrogations

Torture is like slavery (and unlike murder and genocide) in that it is not inconceivable that torture might be justifiable. But the circumstances that would make it tolerable are unrealistic in philosophically interesting ways. It is unrealistic to think we can predict when torture will be effective and containable; unwarranted to suppose that humane alternatives are impossible; disastrous to remove motivations to create alternatives; unacceptable to be satisfied with available evidence regarding suspects’ identity, knowledge of critical detail, ability to recall it, or reasons for not providing it. Most importantly, the costs of even successful interrogational torture would negate the gains sought. Or so this essay argues.

Going Nordic—Can the Nordic model tackle grand challenges and be a beacon to follow?

Nordic countries are known for having extensive welfare services, a highly compressed wage structure owing to strong social partners, as well as effective regulation and governance in public administration. Various typologies capture aspects of the institutional features of families of nations across various policy areas, showing that there is a specific Nordic variant of political economy. While there is an extensive literature focusing on socio-economic outcomes in the Nordic countries, there is less scholarly focus on the linkages between the regulatory processes, and their policy output, in response to various challenges. This volume examines how exogenous challenges (market liberalization promoted by EU integration and the gig economy, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic) and endogenous challenges in the welfare state (regulation of child-care quality and retirement ages) are tackled in a selection of Nordic countries. After a bibliometric analysis on the state of the literature, features of the Nordic model are presented. Then, the contributions of the articles to the special issue are summarized, after which lessons for other models of political economy are pinpointed. We find that although there is high variation within the Nordics in the studies of the special issue, there is a trend whereby, over time, a broader range of actors involved in the policy and regulatory process. Although not perfect, challenges are solved incrementally and often at an early stage. In other words, the Nordic regulatory model is highly adaptable to different challenges. Thus, the Nordic model does present crucial lessons for other types of political economy.     

Urban governance and multilateral aid organizations: The case of informal water supply systems

This paper explores the different urban governance models proposed by multilateral aid organizations in accessing water through informal supply systems, to assess the rationale and the guiding principles at the basis of their different ‘governance approaches’. There can be no doubt that most developing countries are now experiencing a rapid and unprecedented urban growth, which is bringing about a rising demand for urban services, especially those concerning water supply. To cope with this pressing issue, the response of multilateral aid organizations—such as the World Bank, UN-HABITAT and the European Union––has been represented by the design and implementation of different urban governance and management systems, called to support an equitable and efficient access to urban water supply services. This paper focuses on the different urban governance approaches through which multilateral donors support informal networks and small scale providers to provide water supply in cities of developing countries. It highlights how these different urban governance approaches address the overall issues of poverty reduction whilst in reality, in certain cases, they also aim to affect and regulate domestic public policies of Third World countries. In particular, it argues that the governance model proposed––and imposed––by the World Bank continues to belong to a neo-liberal policy agenda, which considers water and urban services as commodities to be managed through widespread competition and market mechanisms. On the contrary, UN-HABITAT, and the European Union to a certain extent, highlight the need for an urban governance system that promotes the ownership of development strategies by local communities and that rests on the principles of inclusiveness and equity.

我国东北国际河流与东北亚安全

我国东北国际河流主要以界河为主,鸭绿江、图们江、黑龙江等几条界河构成了中朝、朝俄、中俄的共同边界,界河是相互依存的重要物质因素,它与边界安全息息相关,上述重要国际河流的存在也使得俄罗斯远东地区、朝鲜以及我国东北地区水资源非常丰富,但是由于人类活动的频繁,对水资源没有很好地开展国际合作等原因,使该流域的水资源已经存在一定的安全问题。我国目前应借鉴建构主义理论,更新观念、以国际法为指导、以河流自然地理为基础建构友善的睦邻关系,维护东北亚地区安全。     

新形势下的两个市场两种资源分析

利用好两个市场两种资源是当代马克思主义政治经济学的重要内容,是保证我国社会主义市场经济建设顺利推进的关键.在需求方面,国际和国内市场的协同互补式扩张是保证经济可持续发展的关键因素;在供给方面,利用好国内和国际两种资源对我国经济发展来说不可或缺.在当前阶段,国内经济发展阶段的转变、国际经济形势的变化、新冠肺炎疫情的冲击等...     

Collective Action for Smallholder Market Access: Evidence and Implications for Africa

It is widely acknowledged that the involvement of small farmers into markets can contribute to higher productivity and income growth, which in turn can enhance food security, poverty reduction efforts, and overall economic growth. In Africa, as in other parts of the developing world, agricultural production systems and their participants face significant challenges as a result of changing economic, environmental, and sociopolitical context. New dynamics in the global agricultural economy, such as the growth of supermarkets, are providing smallholders with both the new opportunities and new constraints to participate in and benefit from market exchanges. Collective action in the form of producer groups can enable African smallholders to take advantage of the new value chains and deal with existing market imperfections. However, certain conditions must be in place to create and sustain incentives for farmers to organize around marketing. Experiences from collective action in natural resource management (NRM) have shown that the types of markets and products, characteristics of user groups, institutional arrangements, and external environment need to be considered in order to determine the effectiveness and sustainability of collective marketing for smallholders. This paper applies the lessons from collective action in NRM to marketing, using existing case studies of producer groups in Africa, and offers policy recommendations on the factors that contribute to the success of collective marketing efforts.     

Pacifying uncooperative carbon: examining the materiality of the carbon market

This paper scrutinizes how greenhouse gases are ‘pacified’ so that they can become tradable in the carbon markets. To advance the economization programme and other materialist frameworks, I argue that the existing literature does not pay enough attention to the diverse modes of carbon accounting and, in particular, carbon measurement – the most basic step – is overlooked and undertheorized. Drawing from the ‘critical metrology’ approach, I suggest that we need to take carbon’s diverse materialities seriously in the study of marketization processes. Some carbons are more cooperative than others. I, therefore, argue that it is important to conceptualize ‘pacification’ as a dynamic process that is mediated through materials of varying capacities as well as standards and technologies. The empirical case examined here concerns carbon measurement standards at coal-fired power plants – an ‘extreme case’ in the sense that coal is well-understood and relatively easy to measure. My findings indicate that, even for one of the most ‘cooperative’ carbons, measurement uncertainties are significant and pose challenges for the marketization of carbon emissions. While human actors work to cope with these uncertainties, the contours of the market are ultimately constrained by carbon’s materiality.     

Blogs and the Attention Market for Public Intellectuals

Public intellectuals are successful suppliers of commentary in the attention market for serious thought. Blogs are a relatively new technology that substantially alters this market. More people can now nurse aspirations to be public intellectuals, but blogs also make plain the difficulties of actually reaching a public in ways that books do not. Blogs also vitiate other romantic ideas about the public intellectual as transcendent figure. Even so, blogs may well provide the services for which transcendent public intellectuals are often lauded better than these figures ever did.

黄连水煎液微粒体系对大鼠小肠上皮细胞紧密连接结构与紧密连接蛋白ZO-1表达的影响

目的 观察黄连水煎液微粒体系对大鼠小肠上皮细胞紧密连接结构与紧密连接蛋白-1（zonula occludens-1,ZO-1）表达的影响。方法 通过常规煎煮获得黄连水煎液,经高速离心得黄连水煎液微粒及去微粒水煎液。采用大鼠肠循环灌注模型,分别用空白Kreb-Ringers（K-R）液、黄连水煎液、微粒重悬液和去微粒水煎液对大鼠空肠段进行循环灌注。2 h后取下肠段,以透射电子显微镜观察细胞紧密连接结构的变化,采用免疫组织化学法检测空肠黏膜中ZO-1的表达水平。结果 空白K-R液组与去微粒水煎液组小肠上皮细胞间连接紧密无明显间隙,ZO-1蛋白呈蜂窝或点状聚集于上皮细胞周围;黄连水煎液组与微粒重悬液组小肠上皮细胞间隙增大,且ZO-1表达水平显著降低（P<0.05）。结论 黄连汤剂中活性成分肠吸收与黄连水煎液微粒体系调节小肠紧密连接结构和ZO-1表达水平有关。     

Is an exemption from US groundwater regulations a loophole or a noose?

In the United States, the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulates most groundwater used for drinking water. The Act covers most urban areas but because it does not cover small water systems, it implicitly exempts nearly half of those living in rural America. In large measure, monitoring required by the SDWA has illustrated the prevalence of naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater in concentrated areas throughout the country. Even though many in Congress seem aware of this threat and have, indeed, supported more stringent arsenic standards, Congress, on the whole, has failed to update the SDWA to cover those water systems left unprotected by the Act. Conventional political science theory suggests that effective congressional oversight depends on Congress creating both active (e.g., hearings and commissioned studies) and passive oversight mechanisms (i.e., citizen suits and opportunities for constituent feedback). In this case, Congress had, in fact, created sufficient tools to detect a serious problem but, having identified it, nevertheless failed to respond. Why? In exploring Congress’s inaction, we find something unexpected: the structure of the SDWA has created perverse incentives not only for unregulated water systems but also for regulated systems to push to keep exempted water systems unregulated. The outcome is that those outside of the SDWA’s protections remain outside and continue to drink contaminated water by the glass full. So, while Congress created a loophole, it may have inadvertently tied a noose.