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Article 22 1951 Convention
(2024)
This chapter covers the 1951 Convention's Article 22. It explains the provision's aim to grant refugees access to the contracting States' national educational systems. Moreover, Article 22 encompasses learning at all different levels of education in schools, universities, and other educational institutions. However, the provision does not address any issues related to the upbringing of children by their parents. The chapter mentions the relevancy of Article 22 when it comes to durable solutions for refugees in an effort to enable them to integrate into the host country's society. It also discusses the drafting history, declarations, and reservations of Article 22 and the instruments used prior to the 1951 Convention.
This chapter focuses on the features of Article 1's paragraph 1 of the 1951 Convention. The article primarily determines the scope of application of the Convention's ratione personae while outlining the basis of the protection of refugees. Additionally, Article 1 addresses the concerns surrounding the inclusion, cessation, and exclusion of refugees. The chapter then tackles the historical development of the article by considering the instruments used prior to the 1951 Convention. It also cites that the Constitution of the International Refugee Organization appears to contain an ambiguity as to how the refugee notion was perceived, so refugees only became the IRO Constitution's concern when they have valid objections to returning to their home country.
Article 15ter Exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression (Security Council referral)
(2022)
Article 15bis: Exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression (State referal, proprio motu)
(2016)
Would the world be a better place if one were to adopt a European approach to state immunity?
(2021)
This chapter argues not only that there is no European Sonderweg (or ‘special way’) when it comes to the law of state immunity but that there ought not to be one. Debates within The Hague Conference on Private International Law in the late 1990s and those leading to the adoption of the 2002 UN Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States, as well as the development of the EU Brussels Regulation on Jurisdiction and Enforcement, as amended in 2015, all demonstrate that state immunity was not meant to be limited by such treaties but ‘safeguarded’. Likewise, there is no proof that regional European customary law limits state immunity when it comes to ius cogens violations, as Italy and (partly) Greece are the only European states denying state immunity in such cases while the European Court of Human Rights has, time and again, upheld a broad concept of state immunity. It therefore seems unlikely that in the foreseeable future a specific European customary law norm on state immunity will develop, especially given the lack of participation in such practice by those states most concerned by the matter, including Germany. This chapter considers the possible legal implications of the jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court for European military operations (if such operations went beyond peacekeeping). These implications would mainly depend on the question of attribution: if one where to assume that acts undertaken within the framework of military operations led by the EU were to be, at least also, attributable to the troop-contributing member states, the respective troop-contributing state would be entitled to enjoy state immunity exactly to the same degree as in any kind of unilateral military operations. Additionally, some possible perspectives beyond Sentenza 238/2014 are examined, in particular concerning the redress awarded by domestic courts ‘as long as’ neither the German nor the international system grant equivalent protection to the victims of serious violations of international humanitarian law committed during World War II. In the author’s opinion, strengthening the jurisdiction of international courts and tribunals, bringing interstate cases for damages before the International Court of Justice, as well as providing for claims commissions where individual compensation might be sought for violations of international humanitarian law would be more useful and appropriate mechanisms than denying state immunity.
Article 15bis. Exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression (State referral, proprio motu)
(2022)
In this chapter, we conduct bibliometric performance analyses and a co-citation analysis on all articles relating to family firms indexed in Scopus and Web of Science and all articles published in the Family Business Review, Journal of Family Business Management, and the Journal of Family Business Strategy. Based on the literature sample of 4,056 articles published between 1960 and 2020 by 3,600 authors in 783 journals and their 175,163 references, we identify the most productive and most cited journals, the most cited authors, and the 25 most cited articles. Our science mapping reveals the agency theory, definitions, entrepreneurship, internationalization, ownership, resources, socioemotional wealth, and succession as the predominant research themes in family firm research. Whereas entrepreneurship explicitly appears in one of the clusters, innovation does not yet. Based on our findings, we propose a research framework and point to several research gaps to be addressed by future research.
Cultural Linguistics
(2024)
Without a doubt, not only through numerous landmark publications (e.g., Sharifian 2003, 2011, 2015, 2017a, b), Farzad Sharifian has shaped the field of Cultural Linguistics like no one has. The success of Cultural Linguistics has been due, to a considerable extent, to the integration of previous theoretical concepts, methods, and terminologies into a unified theoretical approach. However, this process of integration, to our minds, has not been completed. In fact, the first author of this chapter, in a couple of his publications (Wolf et al. 2021; Kühmstedt and Wolf 2022) was about to enter into a terminological debate with Farzad Sharifian, when he left us too early. In this chapter, we would like to take up and systematize this debate. Primarily, as regards theory, we will focus on the relation of Cultural Linguistics to Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and as regards terminology, on the central concept of “cultural conceptualization.” By doing so, it is our hope to solidify the paradigm of Cultural Linguistics even more and to provide a further terminological refinement for “cultural conceptualization.”
This chapter presents an overview of Cognitive Sociolinguistic studies of African English. We discuss early applications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the study of English in Cameroon (Wolf 1999, 2001; Wolf and Simo Bobda 2001) as well as the extensive and methodologically diverse body of Cognitive Sociolinguistic research on the cultural model of COMMUNITY expressed in West and East African English (e.g., Wolf 2006, 2008; Wolf and Polzenhagen 2007; Polzenhagen and Wolf 2007; Polzenhagen 2007). Moreover, the chapter illustrates how studies such as Finzel and Wolf (2017), Peters (2021), Finzel (forthcoming) and Peters and Polzenhagen (2021) extend the Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach to further sociocultural issues, such as gender identities and culture-specific strategies of advertising in different anglophone parts of Africa. Finally, we point out possible future applications of the paradigm to socio-pragmatic aspects of African English.
In this paper, we take a cognitive-sociolinguistic perspective on texts from the colonial period. The texts stem from various agents in the colonial enterprise and include documents from missionaries, administrators and politicians, as well as legal and scientific texts. What we find and trace in these texts is a recurrent set of dominant systems of conceptualizations that are characteristic of the colonial mindset and the corresponding discourse at large. However, these conceptualizations were spelled out in quite different ways in discourse, depending on the ideological background and objectives of the authors and on the specific colonial setting they deal with. We will focus on two contexts, India and sub-Saharan Africa, and we will highlight conceptualizations related to the framing of the constellation between colonizers and colonial subjects in terms of, inter alia, a parent-child, an adult-child and a teacher-pupil relationship. We will then look into some examples of cultural practices among the colonized that were “disturbing” to the colonizers. The fact that they were betrays value systems as well as preoccupations and fears on the side of the colonizers. These practices triggered efforts at cultural engineering in the colonies which had lasting effects on the local culture in these settings. However, this impact was far from being one-directional. The experience with the “otherness” of the colonial subjects fueled debates on latent societal issues in the culture of the colonizers. We will consider this impact for the case of the discourse on homosexuality. The empire stroke back also in linguistic terms, most notably by a host of loan words that entered the lexicon of English. The way these loan words were “integrated” into the English language provides ample evidence of a cultural appropriation also in this direction, i.e., the process known as “contextualization” in traditional Kachruvian sociolinguistics is bi-directional as well.
This chapter compares East and West African English as two distinct regional varieties of African English. First, the historical development of English in these two regions is briefly considered. It is argued that British colonial policy contributed significantly to the sociolinguistic and, indirectly, even structural differences these varieties exhibit. Then, the discussion moves on to give a short overview of the national sub-varieties. It is found that, although united by common linguistic features, West African English is far more heterogeneous than East African English, and some explanation is provided for this phenomenon. Focusing specifically on phonetic features, the chapter summarizes and contrasts the main diagnostic and distinctive features of each regional variety, with special reference to the peculiarities of the national varieties of West African English. However, despite their structural differences, West African, East African English and, for that matter, Southern African English are rooted in a shared “African culture.” Recent findings are introduced, in which common conceptual and linguistic patterns pertaining to witchcraft, expressed in the regional varieties in question, are highlighted.
Most, if not all, of the studies in Cultural Linguistics have (a) taken a synchronic perspective or (b) focused on specific, intracultural conceptualizations. In my chapter, I will look at a cluster of conceptualizations that have been found to exist in different historical periods, in different languages and varieties, and on different continents. The case in point is conceptualizations of magical practices based on menstrual blood. The existence of these conceptualizations across time and space raises the challenging questions of their motivation, and, more generally, the “flow of conceptualizations.” While these questions will be pursued in my chapter, the main focus will be on an elaboration of the conceptual network of conceptualizations pertaining to menstrual blood magic.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
"Writing with my professors”
(2023)
Kollaboratives Forschen quer zu hegemonialen Wissensordnungen gilt als wichtiger Baustein dekolonialer Wissenspraxis. Gemeinsame Schreibprozesse von Wissenschaftler*innen und ihren nicht-wissenschaftlichen Forschungspartner*innen sind allerdings selten und eine methodologische und forschungspraktische Reflexion fehlt. Die Beiträger*innen widmen sich diesen Lücken, indem sie erfolgreiche, aber auch gescheiterte Projekte kollaborativer Textproduktion zwischen Universität und Feld vorstellen und auf ihr Potenzial als transformative und dekoloniale Wissenspraxis befragen. So entsteht eine praktische Orientierungshilfe, die gleichzeitig die interdisziplinäre Diskussion anregt.
Back in 1949, and thus only one year after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the four Geneva Conventions were adopted, providing a strong signal for a new world order created after 1945 with the United Nations at their centre and combining as their goals both the maintenance of peace and security and the protection of human rights, but also recognising, realistically, that succeeding generations had so far not yet been saved from the scourge of war. Hence, the continued need for rules governing, and limiting, the means and methods of warfare once an armed conflict has erupted. At the same time, the international community has unfortunately not been able so far to fully safeguard individual human rights, its efforts to that effect and the continuous development of international human rights law over the years notwithstanding.
Human rights can be understood as a multi-faceted concept which needs a strong legal basis, namely, a set of legal guarantees in human rights treaties and an increasing number of monitoring mechanisms. Following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of December 10, 1948, various multi-lateral treaties for the protection of human rights have been negotiated and entered into force. They are not restricted to civil and political rights and take a much broader approach. All have monitoring mechanisms acting on a legal basis. The important European system with its strong, judicial monitoring mechanism is providing an effective human rights protection focused on civil and political rights. In the Görgülü case (2004), the German Federal Constitutional Court underlined the importance of the European Court’s judgments and of the ECHR as a legally binding instrument for the protection of human rights.
Despite the high hopes associated with public sector digitalization, especially in times of crisis, it does not yet hold up to its potential. Both the negotiation and implementation of digitalization policy presents a challenge for all levels of government, requiring extensive coordination efforts. In general, there are conflicting views if more centralized or decentralized policy processes are more effective for coordination—a tension further exacerbated in the context of digitalization policy within multilevel systems, where the imperative of standardization collides with decentralization forces inherent in federalism.
Based on the analysis of expert interviews (n = 29), this chapter examines how digitalization policy in the context of the German federal intergovernmental relations context is located and negotiated, and how this relates to local policy implementation. Focusing on the decentralized German tax administration as a case study, the analysis reveals a shift from a conflicted to a multi-layered policy process, underpinned by a mechanism of “concentration without centralization.” Strategic and operational competencies are bundled in an institutionalized and legally regulated network for digitalization to achieve necessary standardization of digital infrastructure. Furthermore, the research emphasizes the influence of intergovernmental relations on local implementation and the associated challenges and opportunities.
The body as a wonderland
(2024)
Vienna's resilience
(2022)
This chapter provides a synthesis of the volume, bringing together the aspects that characterise each of the single policy domains analysed throughout and highlighting their synergic effects on the output. In particular, it addresses the dualisation tendencies between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Vienna’s urban transformation in the changing dimensions of social stratification, on the one hand; and the mechanisms of institutional resilience, on the other hand. Despite the inclusive welfare system, emerging vulnerabilities currently pose new challenges for Vienna’s redistributive capacity in the key policy areas. Existing institutional arrangements and their regulatory capacities are a good starting point to answer the question: is Vienna still a just city?
Urban climate strategies have become central tools for steering climate policy in cities. Local policymakers must coordinate a wide range of actors, among them sub-municipal administrative units and neighbouring administrations, in order to ensure legitimate, socially accepted and effective policy. The study examines, from a comparative perspective, how intergovernmental relations (IGR) play out in the formulation and implementation of climate strategies in the metropolitan areas of Berlin and Paris. Embedded in different institutional contexts, both cities followed a trajectory initiated by relatively centralized strategy formulation with an ongoing shift towards more decentralized and coordinated intergovernmental approaches with their respective district administrations. In terms of horizontal IGR, Berlin took a decoupled approach with limited coordination with the state of Brandenburg, whereas Paris was much more closely integrated with its surrounding areas through the inter-municipal metropolis of Greater Paris. Institutional capacity, multilevel coordination and participation demands are identified as three challenges for the existing IGR structures. Addressing these challenges places significant strains on local administrative capacity. The findings highlight the limitations of centralized approaches to IGR at the local level and the importance of aligning the distribution of functional responsibilities with the rights of consultation and participation in climate policy formulation processes.
When does life end?
(2019)
If you look at the question of the end-of-life legislation, one – or rather THE basic question – is particularly interesting: What is the "end of life"? What is death? Ofcourse, one can approach this question theologically or philosophically, but alsolegally and especially medically. Since the 1960 s, medical progress has made itpossible to distinguish between different individual points of time within the na-tural dying process. However, this raises the question as to which of these pointsof time is relevant for criminal law. This question, which is usually onsideredvery emotionally, will be examined in more detail in the paper.
Time to change
(2020)
Industry 4.0 leads to a radical change that is progressing incrementally. The new information and communication technologies provide many conceivable opportunities for their application in the context of sustainable corporate management. The combination of new digital technologies with the ecological and social goals of companies offers a multitude of unimagined potentials and challenges. Although companies already see the need for action, there was in the past and currently still is a lack of concrete measures that lever the potential of Industry 4.0 for sustainability management. During the course of this position paper we develop six theses (two from each sustainability perspective) against the background of the current situation in research and practice, and policy.
Introduction
(2019)
In 2022, there were 4.62 billion social media users worldwide. Social media generates a wealth of data which migration scholars have recently started to explore in pursuit of a variety of methodological and thematic research questions. Scholars use social media data to estimate migration stocks, forecast migration flows, or recruit migrants for targeted online surveys. Social media has also been used to understand how migrants get information about their planned journeys and destination countries, how they organize and mobilize online, how migration issues are politicized online, and how migrants integrate culturally into destination countries by sharing common interests. While social media data drives innovative research, it also poses severe challenges regarding data privacy, data protection, and methodological questions relating to external validity. In this chapter, I briefly introduce various strands of migration research using social media data and discuss the advantages, disadvantages, and opportunities.
In the shadow of Valerian
(2023)
As AI technology is increasingly used in production systems, different approaches have emerged from highly decentralized small-scale AI at the edge level to centralized, cloud-based services used for higher-order optimizations. Each direction has disadvantages ranging from the lack of computational power at the edge level to the reliance on stable network connections with the centralized approach. Thus, a hybrid approach with centralized and decentralized components that possess specific abilities and interact is preferred. However, the distribution of AI capabilities leads to problems in self-adapting learning systems, as knowledgebases can diverge when no central coordination is present. Edge components will specialize in distinctive patterns (overlearn), which hampers their adaptability for different cases. Therefore, this paper aims to present a concept for a distributed interchangeable knowledge base in CPPS. The approach is based on various AI components and concepts for each participating node. A service-oriented infrastructure allows a decentralized, loosely coupled architecture of the CPPS. By exchanging knowledge bases between nodes, the overall system should become more adaptive, as each node can “forget” their present specialization.
Business processes are regularly modified either to capture requirements from the organization’s environment or due to internal optimization and restructuring. Implementing the changes into the individual work routines is aided by change management tools. These tools aim at the acceptance of the process by and empowerment of the process executor. They cover a wide range of general factors and seldom accurately address the changes in task execution and sequence. Furthermore, change is only framed as a learning activity, while most obstacles to change arise from the inability to unlearn or forget behavioural patterns one is acquainted with. Therefore, this paper aims to develop and demonstrate a notation to capture changes in business processes and identify elements that are likely to present obstacles during change. It connects existing research from changes in work routines and psychological insights from unlearning and intentional forgetting to the BPM domain. The results contribute to more transparency in business process models regarding knowledge changes. They provide better means to understand the dynamics and barriers of change processes.
To ensure political survival, autocrats must prevent popular rebellion, and political repression is a means to that end. However, autocrats face threats from both the inside and the outside of the center of power. They must avoid popular rebellion and at the same time share power with strategic actors who enjoy incentive to challenge established power-sharing arrangements whenever repression is ordered. Can autocrats turn repression in a way that allows trading one threat off against the other? This chapter first argues that prior research offers scant insight on that question because it relies on umbrella concepts and questionable measurements of repression. Next, the chapter disaggregates repression into restrictions and violence and reflects on their drawbacks. Citizens adapt to the restriction of political civil liberties, and violence backfires against its originators. Hence, restrictions require enforcement, and violence requires moderation. When interpreted as complements, it becomes clear that restrictions and violence have the potential to compensate for their respective weaknesses. The complementarity between violence and restrictions turns political repression into a valuable addition to the authoritarian toolkit. The chapter concludes with an application of these ideas to the twin problems of authoritarian control and power-sharing.
Conclusion
(2020)
Does political repression work for authoritarian rule? On the one hand, repression is a hallmark of authoritarian governance. It denotes any action governments take to increase the costs of collective action. Autocrats consciously apply repression to curb popular opposition within their territorial jurisdiction. They repress in order to protect their policies, personnel, or other interests against challenges from below. Repression is, thus, a means to the end of political survival in non-democratic contexts. A useful means lives up to its promises. Does repression do that? This project started on the suspicion that we do not yet know the answer. This concluding chapter recalls the key theoretical ideas developed along the way, highlights the main findings of the book, and concludes with opportunities for future research.
From laggards to leaders
(2021)
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change embraces the participation of non-state actors in a separate governance track – the ‘Non-state actor zone for global action’ (nazca) – that runs alongside the formal track of unfccc negotiations and the implementation of the Paris Agreement by State Parties through ‘nationally determined contributions’. unfccc Secretariat is entrusted with orchestrating non-state global and transnational initiatives, partnerships and networks. The involvement of non-state actors in the implementation of the Paris Agreement helps to address an action gap by countries that are unable or unwilling to implement ambitious ndcs.
However, the increased prominence of initiatives driven by non-state actors also increases their direct and indirect influence on processes and rules which raises a number of questions with regards to the legitimacy of action and the democratic deficit of the global climate regime. Balancing legitimacy with effectiveness requires non-state initiatives to ensure transparent and inclusive governance, and accountability towards progress against their goals and pledges.
Despite its encouragement towards private initiatives, the Paris Agreement creates surprisingly little regulatory space for non-state actors to gain hold. Neither are there measures that would link ndcs to nazca initiatives, nor are functional requirements such as transparency or reporting extended to non-state initiatives. While the Paris Agreement marks an important step towards harnessing private sector ability and ambition for climate action, more remains to be done to create a truly enabling framework for private action to strive and complement public efforts to address climate change.
This chapter aims to analyse whether and how democracy is actually threatened by big-data-based operations and what role international law can play to respond to this possible threat. It shows how big-data-based operations challenge democracy and how international law can help in defending it. The chapter focuses on both state and non-state actors may undermine democracy through big data operations; although democracy as such is a rather underdeveloped concept in international law, which is often more concerned with effectivity than legitimacy – international law protects against these challenges via a democracy-based approach rooted in international human rights law on the one hand, and the principle of non-intervention on the other hand. Thus, although democracy does not play a major role in international law, international law nevertheless is able to protect democracy against challenges from the inside as well as outside.
Effectiveness
(2021)
Long-term environmental policy remains a vexing puzzle of environmental policy. Following its definition, the author reviews the methods suitable for the study of long-term environmental policy and develops a typology of policy instruments to cope with these challenges. The concluding section offers five central research challenges to advance the study of long-term environmental policy.
Strategic management is the deliberate engagement of an administration with the challenges of fulfilling its mission and ensuring and improving its ability to act by clarifying measures of success, an understanding of how to influence patterns of action, and organiza-tional learning. In this respect, it is not just about planning, but about an understanding of the emerging strategies of the administration in fulfilling its tasks and the use of opportunities for performance improvement, taking into account stakeholder expectations, resource base and organizational capabilities.
Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) offers flexible and decarbonised power generation and is one of the few switchable renewable technologies that can generate renewable power on demand. Today (2018), CSP only contributes 5 TWh to European electricity generation but has the potential to become an important generation asset for decarbonising the electricity sector within Europe as well as globally. This chapter examines how factors and key political decisions lead to different futures and the associated CSP use in Europe in the years up to 2050. In a second step, we characterise the scenarios with the associated system costs and the costs of the support policy. We show that the role of CSP in Europe depends crucially on political decisions and the success or failure of policies outside of renewable energies. In particular, the introduction of CSP depends on the general ambitions for decarbonisation, the level of cross-border trade in electricity from renewable sources and is made possible by the existence of a strong grid connection between the southern and northern European Member States and by future growth in electricity demand. The presence of other baseload technologies, particularly nuclear energy in France, diminishes the role and need for CSP. Assuming a favourable technological development, we find a strong role for CSP in Europe in all modelled scenarios: Contribution of 100 TWh to 300 TWh of electricity to a future European electricity system. The current European CSP fleet would have to be increased by a factor of 20 to 60 over the next 30 years. To achieve this, stable financial support for CSP would be required. Depending on framework conditions and assumptions, the amount of support ranges at the EU level from € 0.4 to 2 billion per year, which represents only a small proportion of the total support requirement for the energy system transformation. Cooperation between the Member States could further help reduce these costs.
Lawyers, economists and citizens: the impact of neo-liberal European governance on citizenship
(2017)
This introductory essay is structured as follows: First of all, several forms of urbanisation (I.) are introduced and the processes of urbanisation and dis-urbanisation (II.) are defined. Then four fields of law which are deeply affected by urbanisation are put into the focus. These are, local government law (III.), but also public building law (IV.), civil service law (V.) and public finance law (VI.). Afterwards the effects of the corona pandemic on these fields of law are contemplated, taking account of the process of urbanisation (VII.). Finally, the main results are summarised (VIII.).
Preface
(2017)
While academic mobility has generally been positioned in the literature as a ready, at-will movement of people and ideas, this chapter demonstrates how the conditions of mobility and immobility “all at once” impact knowledge production and exchange. By offering a more nuanced window into the experiences of scholars in exile, this chapter challenges dominant discourses of academic mobility and draws on lessons learned from within liminal spaces of knowledge production to elicit more response within higher education communities. Context-rich examples reveal the interpersonal tensions and cultural shifts—including gender, ethnic and race-based stereotypes and discrimination—that affect intellectual outputs, further problematizing the conceptualization of knowledge production in human capital terms. Lessons gleaned from Scholars at Risk (SAR) and related programmes suggest support structures that amplify scholars’ agency; more broadly, higher education should consider ways of adapting to its diverse knowledge producers, rather than supporting the acclimation to its current environment.
In the following pages I discuss how,and to what extent, the eminent Zionist thinker Max Nordau, himself of Sephardic ancestry, viewed the history of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula in the context of his general critique of assimilation not only in regard to Jews,but in a more comprehensive understanding as well. My focus here is on the significance of assimilation in the history of the Jews on the Iberian Peninsula as reflected in Nordau’s writings, with an additional emphasis on his two visits to Spain, thefirst in 1875 and again between 1914 and 1920. In so doing, I attempt to integrate Ashkenazic and Sephardic history into one field of Jewish Studies. The relationship between the two has not yet been researched comprehensively, particularly in the context of the historical study of Zionism.
Modern laser technology and ultrafast spectroscopies have pushed the timescales for detecting and manipulating dynamical processes in molecules from the picosecond over femtosecond domains, to the attosecond regime (1 as = 10(-18) s). This way, real-time dynamics of electrons after their photoexcitation can be probed and manipulated. In particular, experiments are moving more and more from atomic and solid state systems to molecules, opening the fields of "molecular electron dynamics" and "attosecond chemistry." Also on the theory side, powerful quantum dynamical tools have been developed to rationalize experiments on ultrafast electron dynamics in molecular species. <br /> In this contribution, we concentrate on theoretical aspects of ultrafast electron dynamics in molecules, mostly driven by lasers. The dynamics will be described with the help of wavefunction-based ab initio methods such as time-dependent configuration interaction (TD-CI) or the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree-Fock (MCTDHF) methods. Besides a survey of the methods and their extensions toward, e.g., treatment of ionization, laser pulse optimization, and open quantum systems, two specific examples of applications will be considered: The creation and/or dynamical fate of electronic wavepackets, and the nonlinear optical response to laser pulse excitation in molecules by high harmonic generation (HHG).
Over the last few decades, a network of misogynist blogs, websites, wikis, and forums has developed, where users share their bigoted, sexist, and toxic views of society in general and masculinity and femininity in particular. This chapter outlines conceptual framework of hegemonic and hybrid masculinity. It provides a brief overview of the historical development of the manosphere and its various configurations and present our analysis of the masculinities performed by the five groups of the manosphere. The concept of hegemonic masculinity was articulated by Connell and colleagues in the 1980s as “the pattern of practice that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue.” Prior to the advent of the manosphere, an online iteration of male supremacist mobilizations, both Men’s Rights Activists and Pick-up artists developed as offline movements in the 1970s. MRAs perceive their respective societies as inherently stacked against men. This chapter analyses the masculinities of the manosphere and how they “repudiat[e] and reif[y]” hegemonic masculinity and male supremacism.
Gender at the crossroads
(2023)
Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) global counterterrorism architecture has seen significant changes towards increased multilateralism, a focus on prevention, and inter-institutional coordination across the UN’s three pillars of work. Throughout this reform process, gender aspects have increasingly become presented as a “cross-cutting” theme. In this article, I investigate the role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reform process at the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, or “triple nexus”, from a feminist institutionalist perspective. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the counterterrorism discourses of three UN entities, which represent the different UN pillars of peace and security (DPO), development (UNDP), and humanitarianism and human rights (OHCHR). The article examines the role of gender in the inter-institutional reform process by focusing on the changes, overlaps and differences in the discursive production of gender in the entities’ counterterrorism agendas over time and in two recent UN counterterrorism conferences. I find that gendered dynamics of nested newness and institutional layering have played an essential role both as a justification for the involvement of individual entities in counterterrorism and as a vehicle for inter-institutional cooperation and struggle for discursive power.
Connecting worlds
(2020)
This chapter considers the benefits of working with linguistic landscapes for language education curriculum. It shows how introducing linguistic landscape exploration into the curriculum can support learners to read beyond words and to build critical understandings of intersections between words and worlds. The chapter explores data from two case studies in different educational contexts. The first study shows the effects of scaffolding in-service languages teachers to learn to read their worlds from multiple perspectives. The second study illustrates the types of insights that can emerge from school EFL learners when they explore the linguistic landscapes of worlds beyond their classrooms.
Process mining (PM) has established itself in recent years as a main method for visualizing and analyzing processes. However, the identification of knowledge has not been addressed adequately because PM aims solely at data-driven discovering, monitoring, and improving real-world processes from event logs available in various information systems. The following paper, therefore, outlines a novel systematic analysis view on tools for data-driven and machine learning (ML)-based identification of knowledge-intensive target processes. To support the effectiveness of the identification process, the main contributions of this study are (1) to design a procedure for a systematic review and analysis for the selection of relevant dimensions, (2) to identify different categories of dimensions as evaluation metrics to select source systems, algorithms, and tools for PM and ML as well as include them in a multi-dimensional grid box model, (3) to select and assess the most relevant dimensions of the model, (4) to identify and assess source systems, algorithms, and tools in order to find evidence for the selected dimensions, and (5) to assess the relevance and applicability of the conceptualization and design procedure for tool selection in data-driven and ML-based process mining research.
Singles in the city
(2021)
More people than ever are living in cities, and in these cities, more and more people are living alone. Using the example of Vienna, this paper investigates the subjective well-being of single households in the city. Previous research has identified positive and negative aspects of living alone (e.g., increased freedom vs. missing social embeddedness). We compare single households with other household types using data from the Viennese Quality of Life Survey (1995–2018). In our analysis, we consider overall life satisfaction as well as selected dimensions of subjective wellbeing (i.e., housing, financial situation, main activity, family, social contacts, leisure time). Our findings show that the subjective well-being of single households in Vienna is high and quite stable over time. While single households are found to have lower life satisfaction than two-adult households, this result is mainly explained by singles reporting lower satisfaction with family life. Compared to households with children, singles are more satisfied with their financial situation, leisure time and housing, which helps to offset the negative consequences of missing family ties (in particular with regard to single parents).
Carvajal and the Franciscans
(2022)
Luis de Carvajal the Younger (1567–1596) is without doubt one of the most famous victims of the Mexican Inquisition. In 1595, Luis and his family were found guilty of “Judaizing” and sentenced to death. Due to his autobiography and letters which survived in the dossiers of his trials, scholars have been able to trace important aspects of Carvajal’s life, his religious thought, and his self-fashioning as a Jewish martyr. However, one question that has not yet been entirely discussed is Carvajal’s messianism in the context of New World geographies and influences.
This chapter uses Carvajal’s autobiography, his letters, and his declarations during the trials to analyze the meaning of “the Americas” in Carvajal’s eschatological thought and to reflect upon possible influences from Mexican Franciscans and Christian millenarians with whom Carvajal was in contact between 1590 and 1595. It places Carvajal’s case in the broader context of recent studies of “converso messianism” and Jewish-Christian interactions in early modern eschatological and millenarian settings. It thus contributes to the exploration of entanglements between Jewish and Christian eschatological expectations in the early modern Atlantic World.
Green recovery
(2023)
This chapter reviews how the European Union has fared in enabling a green recovery in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, drawing comparisons to developments after the financial crisis. The chapter focuses on the European Commission and its evolving role in promoting decarbonisation efforts in its Member States, paying particular attention to its role in financing investments in low-carbon assets. It considers both the direct effects of green stimulus policies on decarbonisation in the EU and how these actions have shaped the capacities of the Commission as an actor in the field of climate and energy policy. The analysis reveals a significant expansion of the Commission’s role compared to the period following the financial crisis. EU-level measures have provided incentives for Member States to direct large volumes of financing towards investments in climate-friendly assets. Nevertheless, the ultimate impact will largely be shaped by implementation at the national level.
'Tools' in public management
(2022)
Tools are methods or procedures, and thus operational patterns of action, applied in public administrations to solve standard problems. It is also possible to consider them as structured communication according to professional standards aiming at complexity reduction. Regularly, tools in management stem on a deductive-synoptic rationale offering a seemingly ‘objective’ decision basis. They have a strong formative influence on the organization, regularly also beyond the intended effects. The prominence of tools is sometimes confused with management as such, e.g. introducing tools is mistaken as equivalent to managing for a particular purpose. However, tools have to be closely and carefully managed regarding the objectives and purposes they should serve.
Idolatry
(2021)
Migrant integration is a prime example of intergovernmental coordination and multilevel governance; first because no level of government can carry out this task alone, and second because its cross-cutting nature often leads to fragmented institutional structures that must be overcome. Within the research strand of intergovernmental relations (IGR), the focus has been on executive actors and governmental decision-makers, resulting in an underexposure of the role of public administration, known as inter-administrative relations (IAR). Against this backdrop, we aim to remedy some of the deficits in IGR research by (1) adopting an explicit IAR perspective which systematically addresses the role of local governments; (2) including a comparative dimension in IAR research that accounts for different administrative ‘starting conditions’ in European countries; and (3) using the policy area of migrant integration as a case in point to empirically investigate developments of institutional convergence and divergence in IAR patterns. It is argued that the coordination of migrant integration in the three countries examined has moved towards more intergovernmental coordination, on the one hand, and that the role of municipalities in this context has been enhanced—varying degrees of (de-)centralization notwithstanding. While certain convergent patterns of inter-governmental coordination have become apparent during the migration crisis, historical path dependencies and administrative cultures still appear to be factors that influence institutional development.
Nuesiri assesses the UN-REDD (United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) commitment to strengthen local democracy as a safeguard protecting local interests in REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation with the added goals of Conserving and Enhancing Forest Carbon Stocks, and Sustainably Managing Forests). The chapter examines local representation during the consultative process associated with the Nigeria-REDD proposal. Local representation was through selected individuals (descriptive representatives), customary authority, and NGOs (symbolic representatives). Elected local government authorities (substantive representatives) were excluded from the consultative process. Exclusion of elected local governments is linked to godfather politics in Nigeria, which enables state governors to subordinate local government authority and constrain their responsiveness to local needs. In approving the Nigeria-REDD proposal, the UN-REDD reinforced the subversion of local democracy in Nigeria. The UN-REDD would be fulfilling its democracy objectives in Nigeria by engaging substantively all local governance actors, including elected local government authorities.
The years 1953 through the 1970s in the Soviet Union have been called the era of the “Jews of silence.” And yet through various types of musical activities, certain parts of the Jewish population in the USSR were able to maintain a collective cultural identity in the public sphere. Captured as a musical community, this collectivity also extended to non-Jewish composers, musicians, and audiences. As such it thematicized, performed, represented, and received Jewishness, through Yiddish theater and songs, art music, and popular music. Concerts and works conceived for the Soviet stages demonstrate that Jewishness mattered, with music taking on new symbolism and becoming imbued with new meaning. This chapter focuses on the presence (and absence) of Jewish music in the public sphere, specifically in the concert hall and other stages in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
The EU and its member countries have been laggards in using forest carbon to reduce EU emissions. The European Green Deal aims to change this. As part of its long-term emissions reductions, the EU aims to offset this by creating land-based carbon sinks, especially forest carbon sinks as well as carbon capture and storage. This chapter focuses on the role of forest carbon as part of the EU's climate policies towards achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It furthermore examines the European Commission's proposed forest strategy and its proposal for a revised LULUCF Regulation. The chapter shows that the logic of appropriateness dominates the European Commission's forest policies. Finally, the chapter makes policy recommendations on how the EU could credibly use long-term carbon sinks to achieve climate neutrality.
It’s personal
(2021)
The new technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) are disrupting traditional models of work and learning. While the impact of digitalization on education was already a point of serious deliberation, the COVID-19 pandemic has expedited ongoing transitions. With 90% of the world’s student population having been impacted by national lockdowns—online learning has gone from being a luxury to a necessity, in a context where around 3.6 billion people are offline. As the impacts of the 4IR unfold alongside the current crisis, it is not enough for future policy pathways to prioritize educational attainment in the traditional sense; it is essential to reimagine education itself as well as its delivery entirely. Future policy narratives will need to evaluate the very process of learning and identify the ways in which technology can help reduce existing disparities and enhance digital access, literacy and fluency in a scalable manner. In this context, this chapter analyses the status quo of online learning in India and Germany. Drawing on the experiences of these two economies with distinct trajectories of digitalization, the chapter explores how new technologies intersect with traditional education and local sociocultural conditions. Further, the limitations and opportunities presented by dominant ed-tech models is critically analyzed against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Article 34 1951 Convention
(2024)
This chapter tackles the features and historical development of the 1951 Convention's Article 34. It explains the function of the provision, which primarily focuses on requesting Contracting States to facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees. Moreover, the provision forms the legal bases for local integration and naturalization as some of the traditional durable solutions to refugeehood. The soft obligation imposed by Article 34 primarily focuses on the long-term solution by naturalization. The chapter then elaborates on the balance between local integration, naturalization, and voluntary return after it was disrupted due to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.
In the context of the “postcatastrophic” culture after the Shoah, the question of the ethics of seeing has developed its own specificity and incisiveness, one that resulted from the complex distribution of the visibility and invisibility of the criminal acts themselves.
On the one hand, the perpetrators’ efforts to conceal their crimes and erase their tracks stood in opposition to the desire of the same to meticulously document their crimes. On the other hand, local communities became direct eyewitnesses to the persecution and killing of Jews—in mass shootings as well as in the extermination camps, which were frequently set up close to populated areas.
It is precisely these two aspects—the photographic archives of the perpetrators as well as the bystanders’ eyewitnessing—around which heated debates unfold.
They are also of primary interest to postmemorial art, which grapples with the legacy of this visuality and visibility of the Shoah.
This chapter discusses the possibility of a critical analysis of the images from contaminated photographic material in the Nazi archives in postmemorial art and film as well as artistic projects focussing on the problem of visibility and seeing that deal with the question of the possibility of the witnessing of bystanders and of future generations who are faced with the legacy of the bystander experience.
These projects were developed during the time of intense examination—and not only artistic—of the role of direct eyewitnesses to the Shoah, examinations that were characteristic for the public discourse in Poland after the year 2000.
Introduction
(2017)
In the course of the last four decades, neo-liberalism has established itself as the dominant form of governing both national societies and global affairs. On the foundation of both Keynesian economic policies and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates among currencies, the world economy recovered. The classical sociological meaning and concept of citizenship as defined by T. H. Marshall and others after World War II rests on an analysis of the relationship between the capitalist economy and political democracy against the background of 'embedded liberalism'. Today, however, the enforcement of neo-liberal principles in order to turn modern democracies into 'market societies' impinges heavily on our idea of citizenship. The critical aspects of a flawed citizenship go directly to the heart of the idea of citizenship itself, as both democratic and social participation and a substantial conception of individual liberty all seem to be under attack from the global politico-economic regime.
Introduction
(2017)
The history of citizenship is one of social struggle against pre-modern authorities, nobles and aristocracies, of class struggles and the demands of social movements, and no less of cultural, ethnic, indigenous protests against the long history of colonialism. Paths to citizenship in Europe have taken very different directions, as Charles Tilly has shown with regard to England, the Netherlands, Russia or Prussia. Max Weber's dictum of defining the state by the accomplishment of the monopolisation of the legitimate means of violence is of utmost significance for the history of citizenship. There can be no doubt that the experience of World War II prepared the ground for the twentieth-century idea of citizenship. Consequently the Western concept of citizenship has been promoted as a role model in the march towards modernity as peaceful, democratic and universalistic. Finally, this chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
Introduction
(2017)
This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the role of Frontex in the European Union as an agency to protect its external borders in the Mediterranean from irregular or 'illegal' migration. It discusses that Europe is an arrangement for European citizens only – and for some privileged non-citizens as in the Swiss case. The book explains the points to the possibility of a transnational membership regime that, however, bears certain antinomies that also point to unresolved problems. It offers an interesting view on the symbolic boundary between the citizen and the consumer, discussing this nexus from the perspective of citizenship studies, consumer culture and surveillance studies. Among the many far-reaching transformations that both societies and citizens have faced in recent years, the European migration crisis has most urgently brought to mind the fact that modern citizenship has always been about boundaries and about processes of inclusion and exclusion