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Global Legitimacy Crises
(2022)
Global Legitimacy Crises addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative analysis of mass media data on challenges of a sample of 32 IOs. It shows that some, but not all organizations have experienced legitimacy crises, spread over several decades from 1985 to 2020. Following this, the book presents a qualitative study to further examine legitimacy crises of two selected case studies: the WTO and the UNFCCC. Whereas earlier research assumed that legitimacy crises have negative consequences, the book introduces a theoretical framework that privileges the activation inherent in a legitimacy crisis. It holds that this activation may not only harm an IO, but could also strengthen it, in terms of its material, institutional, and decision-making capacity. The following statistical analysis shows that whether a crisis has predominantly negative or positive effects depends on a variety of factors. These include the specific audience whose challenges define a certain crisis, and several institutional properties of the targeted organization. The ensuing in-depth analysis of the WTO and the UNFCCC further reveals how legitimacy crises and both positive and negative consequences are interlinked, and that effects of crises are sometimes even visible beyond the organizational borders.
The volume provides a field-analytical methodology for researching knowledge based sociopolitical processes of transnationalization. Drawing on the seminal work by Pierre Bourdieu, we apply concepts of practice, habitus, and field to phenomena such as cross-national social trajectories, international procedures of evaluation, standardization and certification or supranational political structures. These transnational phenomena form part of general political struggles that legitimate social relationships in and beyond the nation state. Part 1 on "Methodological Foundations" discusses the consequences of Bourdieu's epistemology and methodology for theorizing and investigating transnational phenomena. The contributions show the import of field-theoretical concepts for post-national insights. Part 2 on "Investigating Political Fields" presents exemplary case studies in diverse research areas such as colonial imperialism, international academic rankings, European policy fields, and local school policy. While focusing on their research objects, the contributions also give an insight into the mechanisms involved in processes of transnationalization. The volume is an invitation for sociologists, political scientists and scholars in adjacent research areas to engage with reflexive and relational research practice and to further develop field-theoretical thought.
Culture and law
(2022)
Die Beantwortung der rechtlichen Fragen, die mit dem Lebensende zusammenhängen, unterliegt starken kulturellen und religiösen Einflüssen. Zu berücksichtigen sind zudem medizinische, philosophische und historische Aspekte. Wegen der engen Verbindung von Recht und Kultur wurden Länder mit unterschiedlichen kulturellen und religiösen Hintergründen für eine vergleichende Studie zu Fragen des Lebensendes ausgewählt. In Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz mit einem kontinentalen Rechtssystem, in Großbritannien mit einem common law System, in Indien und Japan üben die verschiedenen Religionen und Kulturen einen wichtigen Einfluss auf die Modernisierung der einschlägigen Rechtsvorschriften aus. Das Buch behandelt die jüngsten Gesetzesänderungen und die Entwicklungen in den in die Untersuchung einbezogenen Länder.
Nonlinear data assimilation
(2015)
This book contains two review articles on nonlinear data assimilation that deal with closely related topics but were written and can be read independently. Both contributions focus on so-called particle filters.
The first contribution by Jan van Leeuwen focuses on the potential of proposal densities. It discusses the issues with present-day particle filters and explorers new ideas for proposal densities to solve them, converging to particle filters that work well in systems of any dimension, closing the contribution with a high-dimensional example. The second contribution by Cheng and Reich discusses a unified framework for ensemble-transform particle filters. This allows one to bridge successful ensemble Kalman filters with fully nonlinear particle filters, and allows a proper introduction of localization in particle filters, which has been lacking up to now.
Empire of destruction
(2021)
The first comparative, comprehensive history of Nazi mass killing – showing how genocidal policies were crucial to the regime’s strategy to win the war. Nazi Germany killed approximately 13 million civilians and other non-combatants in deliberate policies of mass murder, mostly during the war years. Almost half the victims were Jewish, systematically destroyed in the Holocaust, the core of the Nazis’ pan-European racial purification programme. Alex Kay argues that the genocide of European Jewry can be examined in the wider context of Nazi mass killing. For the first time, Empire of Destruction considers Europe’s Jews alongside all the other major victim groups: captive Red Army soldiers, the Soviet urban population, unarmed civilian victims of preventive terror and reprisals, the mentally and physically disabled, the European Roma and the Polish intelligentsia. Kay shows how each of these groups was regarded by the Nazi regime as a potential threat to Germany’s ability to successfully wage a war for hegemony in Europe. Combining the full quantitative scale of the killings with the individual horror, this is a vital and groundbreaking work.
In a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not. The book defends this thesis and explores ‘semi-parliamentary government’ as an alternative to presidential government. Semi-parliamentarism avoids power concentration in one person by shifting the separation of powers into the democratic assembly. The executive becomes fused with only one part of the assembly, even though the other part has at least equal democratic legitimacy and robust veto power on ordinary legislation. The book identifies the Australian Commonwealth and Japan, as well as the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, as semi-parliamentary systems. Using data from 23 countries and 6 Australian states, it maps how parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems balance competing visions of democracy; it analyzes patterns of electoral and party systems, cabinet formation, legislative coalition-building, and constitutional reforms; it systematically compares the semi-parliamentary and presidential separation of powers; and it develops new and innovative semi-parliamentary designs, some of which do not require two separate chambers.
"In spite of ever-increasing research into natural hazards, the reported damage from natural disasters continues to rise, increasingly disrupting human activities. We, as scientists who study the way in which the part of Earth most relevant to society- the surface-behaves, are disturbed and frustrated by this trend. It appears that the large amounts of funding devoted each year to research into reducing the impacts of natural disasters could be much more effective in producing useful results. At the same time we are aware that society, as represented by its decision makers, while increasingly concerned at the impacts of natural disasters on lives and economies, is reluctant to acknowledge the intrinsic activity of Earth's surface and to take steps to adapt societal behaviour to minimise the impacts of natural disasters. Understanding and managing natural hazards and disasters are beyond matters of applied earth science, and also involve considering human societal, economic and political decisions"
Classical liberal democratic theory has provided crucial ideas for a still dominant and hegemonic discourse that rests on ideological conceptions of freedom, equality, peacefulness, inclusive democratic participation, and tolerance. While this may have held some truth for citizens in Western liberal-capitalist societies, such liberal ideals have never been realized in colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. Liberal democracies are not simply forms of rule in domestic national contexts but also geo-political actors. As such, they have been the drivers of processes of global oppression, colonizing and occupying countries and people, appropriating indigenous land, annihilating people with eliminatory politics right up to genocides. There can be no doubt that the West – with its civilizational Judeo-Christian idea and divine mission ‘to subdue the world’ – has destroyed other civilizations, countries, trading systems, and traditional ways of life and is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of human beings in the course of colonizing the world from its Empires of trade through colonialism to settler colonialism and today’s politics of regime change. The book discusses the settler colonial regime that Israel has established in Palestine while still claiming to be a democracy. It discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.