SDG Collection for social science libraries
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SDG Collection for social science libraries
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Rates of anxiety have been steadily increasing over the past 20 years, prompting commentators to warn that we are in the throes of a global mental health crisis that is ruining well-being, threatening lives and damaging the economy. By highlighting how a person’s mental health, while nuanced and distinct, is always situated in a larger socio-emotional context or ‘structure of feeling’, this article argues that the issue of rising anxiety is a direct consequence of a biomedical model of treatment and care beholden to a neoliberal economic system that objectifies and isolates people. Through a framework termed ‘liberation health modelling’, it explores the progressive potential of ‘anxious solidarities’ as a way to reframe the problem of anxiety by connecting personal struggles to wider social and economic injustices. At a time when it is becoming impossible to deny the collective and widespread nature of people’s anxieties, the point of anxious solidarity is not simply to recount pain and suffering but to ‘make sense’ of it in relation to overarching structures of social oppression – calling into question the status quo in solidarity with other subjugated groups. Since struggles with anxiety have the advantage of being familiar to most, anyone can be a potential provocateur so long as they disavow an entirely personalised framing of their mental health.
We use public choice theory to examine the calculus of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. We hypothesize that Putin’s regime acts as a tinpot dictatorship, using political loyalty and repression to stay in office. During Putin’s first two-term presidency, an improvement in Russia’s economic performance increased the supply of political loyalty and resulted in a slow fall in political repression. The global financial crisis deteriorated Russians’ living standards between Putin’s second and third terms in office. The deterioration in the country’s economic performance unambiguously resulted in a fall in the supply of loyalty and increased repression. Consistent with our hypothesis, we argue that Putin’s regime pursued military conquest to increase the aggregate supply of political loyalty.
This article introduces the concept of dialectic icons: public figures who feature in contentious and polarising political discourse. The inflammatory quality of dialectic icons and their role as highly mediated symbols of conflict creates long-lasting emotional energy among audiences, who cluster in ideological camps as a response. However, these audiences can also actively and directly engage in and shape these discourses, particularly through social media. Examples of the public discourse about quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests illustrate how the controversiality, newsworthiness, interactivity and visibility of dialectic icons ultimately contribute to social polarisation. By focusing on dialectic icons as proxy battlegrounds for public audiences, this article establishes a useful concept for gaining fresh insights into collective meaning- and truth-making processes.
In this article, we present empirical evidence on the cognitive processes underlying racist beliefs and judgement. We draw on 47 life history interviews with former members of White supremacist groups to better understand how social interactions and stimuli from the wider environment inform cognitive pathways or how people think. While we examine both deliberate and intuitive pathways to racist belief, we focus on the intuitive ways that extreme racist beliefs are cognitively processed before, during and after an individual is involved in the White supremacist movement. In doing so, we fill a critical gap in the literature by providing an empirical analysis of intuition. We illustrate the analytic contributions of our approach, and we conclude by drawing on our evidence to elucidate three puzzles, including: (1) why racist beliefs persist; (2) how people draw on implicit beliefs to make explicit judgements; and (3) how explicit beliefs become encoded in intuitive pathways.
The aim is to show how digital financial services are used to perpetrate digitally facilitated economic abuse. The article is based on interviews with women in Sweden who are survivors of intimate partner violence and economic abuse.
The use of digital financial services is rapidly expanding and in Sweden they are used by the majority of the population. They are available on smart devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops and have become a part of everyday life. Research on technology facilitated abuse and research on economic abuse have not addressed the risks for economic abuse via digital financial services. To bridge this gap, we suggest a merging of these fields to focus on what we call digitally facilitated economic abuse.
Findings show that digital financial services constitute risks for economic abuse and facilitate abusive behaviours. Smart devices serve as digital bank books, wallets and identity cards, all rolled into one neat little package, opening up for new methods for economic abuse. Abusers use digital financial services to limit and restrict the woman’s access to money, to monitor and control her use of money by breaching her financial privacy, to economically exploit her and to put her in debt.
Addressing growth challenges in developing countries requires mobilising domestic resources in the face of declining external financing. This paper explores the effects of financial inclusion on tax efforts in sub-Saharan Africa, conditioned by institutional quality. To do this, a finite mixture model that takes into account the potential presence of unobserved heterogeneity was estimated based on a sample taken from 43 countries over the 1996–2019 period. Tax effort scores were constructed using several stochastic frontier models. The results show that the impact of financial inclusion on tax efforts differs across country groups. For example, financial inclusion stimulates tax effort in sub-Saharan Africa in 93.8 per cent of cases and inhibits tax effort in only 6.2 per cent of cases. These results are robust to several sensitivity tests. This paper highlights the need for countries in sub-Saharan Africa to improve access to financial systems by increasing mobile banking coverage and accessibility and reducing financial services costs. These countries should also look to capitalise on the benefits of financial inclusion by protecting political rights and fighting corruption.
Governments worldwide are increasingly engaging service users to reform public policies and services and enhance public value. Survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) are one group seeking to be heard by governments and gradually being engaged to improve policy outcomes. However, the history of the victims’ rights movement and feminist scholarship on political institutions indicate significant risks for survivors in these engagements with the state. This article examines the nature of these risks and how they are experienced and challenged, through a case study analysis of the implementation of the Australian state of Victoria’s Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council. Analysing government reports and interviews with survivors and policymakers, the article investigates how the state asserts control over survivors under the guise of co-production, inadvertently compromising public value creation. Informed by a feminist institutionalist lens, our analysis finds that efforts to address the power imbalances and gendered norms reflected in the informal rules of co-production are likely to better realise public value in terms of improved outcomes for all members of society, especially those experiencing GBV. The co-production risks we highlight and the ways to mitigate them we suggest are also relevant to other areas of co-production with other marginalised service users.
Achieving prosperity for all within planetary boundaries requires that governments take wide-ranging transformative action, but achieving ‘triple-wins’ by joining up policies across economic, social and environmental realms can be challenging. A companion analysis undertaken under the ODI Nexus project (Diwakar, 2022) analysed key indicators in these realms in lower income countries and identified the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka and Thailand as front-runners in achieving more holistic development outcomes. Looking deeper at these case studies, we sought to identify national policy interventions that struck a balance between the different realms of development and explored the policy development, legislation and implementation processes required for integrated transformational policy to succeed.
In each we found national-scale, triple-win policies led from the president’s or prime minister’s office. These policies can usually be traced to specific political moments that forced a reckoning with the failures of previous development policy, often resulting in radical change of direction in development planning. Yet, despite the existence of triple-win policies, as of 2019, there was limited evidence of triple-win outcomes being achieved. Instead, the case study countries typically performed well in one or two realms, often to the detriment of progress in the other(s).
We present potential reasons for the lacklustre impact of these policies and conclude with suggestions for future work to outline where in the policy landscape it may be possible to enact transformational nexus policies and how to support them to achieve their outcomes in the timeframes required to ensure equitable prosperity within planetary boundaries.
The historical evolution of social and legal conceptions of gender based domestic violence in France are the dynamic traces of how social practice, as well as social representations, formed and transformed. However, numerous studies show that the current incident-based conceptions of domestic violence are far from the victims’ experiences, and only partially effective in detecting, criminalising and preventing domestic violence. Understanding the global process by which perpetrators subordinate the victims, mostly women and children, by progressively depriving them of their human rights and liberties, led to a contemporary conceptualisation of domestic violence as coercive control (Stark, 2007). Recognising the roots of domestic violence in gender inequality, far from reducing it to some individual, psychological issues, this human-rights based conception of domestic violence is much closer to the victims’ experiences, has led to legal innovation in the ways in which several countries understand, criminalise and prevent domestic violence, and could be at the core of emerging social representations of domestic violence.
The new rural development in Vietnam is a large-scale, nationwide programme that involves many stakeholders. The perspectives of these stakeholders, whether they exhibit differences or homogeneity, will significantly shape the programme’s outcomes and results. This study assessed the perspectives of stakeholders and classified them into four categories: (1) the significance of the new rural programme, (2) the role of stakeholders, (3) levels of stakeholders’ participation, and (4) stakeholders’ expectations. The findings indicate that the stakeholders strongly agreed on and appreciated the significance of the new rural programme in improving people’s livelihoods. However, the distinguishing viewpoints focused mainly on the roles and the levels of participation of the stakeholders. Bridging the perceived gap among stakeholders and strengthening the key role of the people are the decisive factors of the programme’s success, contribute to poverty reduction, social justice, and the long-term sustainability of the national target programme for new rural development in Vietnam.
