Visuality and Security

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

This article delineates the areas where there might be same consonance between the dynamics underlying the present interest in Southeast Asia in the nation of civil society and those linked to the current reassessment of the discourse and practice of security in the region. The areas where tensions can be expected between these two sets of dynamics are also considered. An attempt is then made to establish the policy parameters which, under such circumstances, should guide the regional debate on these issues. The central argument advanced in this context is that it is now possible to create in Southeast Asia mechanisms allowing for a degree of synergy between the development of civil society and that of regional security which will be beneficial to both of these processes. Introduction Civil society has traditionally been conceived of by its proponents as a site of resistance against two forces: that of the state and that of the market. [1] In societies where the state apparatus and the nature of economic development are seen as creating forces of social inequality and exclusion, the exponents of civil society have argued that it can help constitute a space where critiques of these forces can be formulated and alternative trajectories of political and economic development propounded. This explains the wide appeal of the concept in current debates on the different scenarios for the reconstruction and development of Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis. If the current period is to mark a reassessment of the prevalent models of economic and political development in the region, the argument goes, then civil society represents an ideal standpoint from which to ensure that the reconstruction of regional and domestic politico-economic frameworks gives pride of place to more participatory and egalitarian processes and institutions. The rising demand for more participatory and egalitarian models of governance is also very much at the heart of the ongoing reconceptualization of domestic and regional security, as required by the recent upheavals in the region. [2] Security in Southeast Asia has been framed conventionally and quite exclusively in terms of the strength and sustainability of state-building and economic development, which have been at the top of the agenda of the countries in the region. The multi-level crisis which unfolded in mid-1997, however, appears to have ushered in a broader understanding of the different underlying factors which come into play in these processes and must, therefore, be considered part of the security equation. The importance, for example, of widening the space for public participation in development planning and implementation is now better recognized as one of these factors, which the crisis revealed as a necessary precondition to further economic and political growth. There are also dissimilarities, however, between the inner logic pursued by the proponents of civil society and that animating current debates on the reformulation of security in Southeast Asia. For its supporters, civil society is both a process and a goal: it is through the development of civil society that political and economic frameworks in the region can be made more democratic, and it is the presence of a strong and effervescent civil society which will, in the end, be proof of the success of that enterprise. The process of security reformulation, however, has, first of all, involved a much more disparate set of actors. Concepts of security are, of course, being debated within official channels, and these channels also bring into play a series of more informal networks which involve, for instance, academics, linked tacitly or more overtly to official circles. In turn, this structure, whereby Track One (official) and Track Two (unofficial) actors interact on issues of security, offers points of contact with civil society actors (dubbed Track Three in this milieu). …

Political science in the German-speaking world is only concerned peripherally with pictures. In the course of the “iconic turn” during the 1990s visual political communication became an issue of more weight, but other disciplines like art history still have more competence when it comes to analysing pictures. Thus, the basic question remains: How can we achieve a sustainable “iconic turn” in political science and civic education? The article proposes an answer in three parts: Its first chapter describes the relationship between political science, civic education, and visual communication in the German-speaking world. The effort to map this scattered research landscape ought to be a contribution to its transnational connectivity. The second part reflects on the special “power of pictures”. It argues that pictures probably have specific persuasive power, but nonetheless are neutral political tools (just like words). Obviously they can be exploited by liars, but quite as well they can serve as helpful information resources (e.g. in civic education). Finally, the third chapter claims that political science should try and learn from visually more competent disciplines like art history or communication science. All in all this leads to the final conclusion that political communication research should turn its attention to pictoriality.

Every time we hear the expression ‘peace in our world’, it naturally conjures the absence of warfare and internal disorder, and the end of military or other hostilities. Throughout history, innumerable human beings have suffered from the scourge of conflict. Quite naturally they tried, often at significant costs, to protect themselves with assorted resources against all major threats to their (human) security. The human security concept continues to loom large in global policy and peace discourse notwithstanding growing doubts about the ‘effectiveness’ of its promise in a highly vulnerable modern society overloaded with weapons of mass-destruction amid other threats to peace. The bottom-line is the imperative of replacing the dominant thoughts about securing peace. This paper accentuates the theory of peace and its relationship to the concept of human security. It takes its point of departure from the theoretical framework of critical security studies (CSS) and argues that there is a specific sense in which CSS needs to comprehend peace, and that this understanding is closely affiliated with human security. The paper is arguably a theoretical exploration of the concepts of peace and security. It is not, therefore, an empirical examination of where or when there is peace or how to obtain it. It is important to emphasize that this is not a paper that answers the question ‘what is peace?’ Although a proposal of how CSS theorists should contemplate peace is made, the main aim is the theoretical relationship between peace and human security and the theoretical and possible practical gains achieved by a clarification of this relationship.

This chapter examines the main international migrations of Vietnamese after 1975 and Afghans after 1978. The two population flows are similar in many respects. They resulted from the same type of social conflict, consisting of revolutionary struggle compounded by foreign intervention. Both conflicts, moreover, became closely tied to the globalized confrontation between the two superpowers, and the people leaving both Vietnam and Afghanistan have been widely recognized as refugees by intergovernmental and governmental agencies. A striking difference between the two movements, however, is that most of the Afghans outside their country have remained in Asia, whereas few of the Vietnamese have. Apart from forming an interesting pair in and of themselves, the two cases are theoretically significant. They reveal crucial relationships between the causes and the directions of movement in certain types of migrations that are formally recognized as consisting of refugees. The Vietnamese represent the classic resettlement case involving a largescale, organized movement of people from Asia to Western Europe and the United States. The Afghans provide the contrasting case. Millions are concentrated in refugee camps or have spontaneously settled in neighboring countries, while only a tiny proportion has been resettled elsewhere.

James W. Davis’s Terms of Inquiry: On the Theory and Practice of Political Science (2005) presents a critique of the application of the scientific method to the social sciences. Davis argues that the use of the scientific method obfuscates usable knowledge that might otherwise be gathered by applying methodology more appropriate to the study of social science. Davis, a classically-trained political scientist, became disturbed by the dissociation between disciplinary political science and the practice of politics (p. 2). Additionally, despite the empirical orientation of his training, Davis became dissatisfied with the lack of apparent success in predictive abilities of social science theories, despite these disciplines’ adherence to scientific methodology. These issues propelled the development of this work. His objections do not focus upon the academicians who employ these methods (p. 3); rather, his concerns center upon the appropriateness of the scientific method itself to study social interactions. His assessment rests upon his observations concerning academic political science and international relations (p. ix), though he argues that his conclusions are applicable across social science disciplines (p. 3). Davis examines the assumptions upon which the scientific method rests and illustrates through examples drawn from both the social and natural sciences foundational problems with respect to social science applicability. Overall, Davis succeeds in raising important questions concerning the validity of the use of the scientific method in the social sciences, and his meticulous attention to the problematic pieces of that methodology go far towards this work’s success. However, the book could be more unified to avoid redundancy of ideas and to reduce superfluous examples in some parts, while more fully developing several of the more provocative ideas that inexplicably receive short shrift, and eliminating tangential digressions that add little to his thesis. Additionally, Davis’s general case for neo-interpretivist methodology might collapse under the weight of serious scrutiny.

The traditionally dominant discourse of The Great White North views Canada as a land of vast wilderness and abundant resources. However, this discourse excludes growing environmental risk and prevalent insecurity felt by vulnerable populations in Canadian society, namely indigenous groups whose livelihoods are deeply dependent upon their relationship with their environments. The effect of the relationship between the physical environment and conceptions of security can contribute to a deeper understanding of traditional and critical accounts of security. This article investigates traditional Canadian environmental security discourses and alternative environmental security discourses promoted by Arctic Inuit groups. It examines how these discourses impact the analytic and normative goals of critical security studies and interprets the way in which they affect the concept of emancipation. It argues that Canadian security is co-constituted with its understanding of the environment, and that the Canadian case compels an expansion of the notion of the referent object of security to include the environment – a change which throws it into contrast with other schools of critical security, whose visions of emancipation might not, as currently theorized, be equipped to overcome these phenomena.

Abstract. In this study, the evaluation of the 9th European Conference on Social and Behavioral Sciences held on 3-6 February 2016 in Paris will be mentioned. Keywords. Social sciences, Political sciences, Business administration, Financial economics, Finance, European Conference, Paris. JEL. G10, M10, M20.

In 1875 Carlo Alfieri di Sostegno founded the first Italian School of Social and Political Sciences in Florence. In 1888 it took the name “Cesare Alfieri” Institute of Social Sciences. The name of Cesare Alfieri, father of the founder, former President of the Council and Senate in the Kingdom of Sardinia, has remained as a distinctive element even in the subsequent phases of its history: from 1938, when it was incorporated by the University of Florence and transformed into the Faculty of Political Science, until 2013, when the name “Cesare Alfieri” passed to the current School of Political Science. The book reconstructs the history of this institution, for decades the only one active in Italy in the field of political and social sciences: a point of reference for the development of these disciplines.

Human security suggests that security policy and security analysis, if they are to be effective and legitimate, must focus on the individual as the referent and primary beneficiary. In broad terms, human security is “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear:” positive and negative rights as they relate to threats to core individual needs. Human security is normative; it argues that there is an ethical responsibility to (re)orient security around the individual in line with internationally recognized standards of human rights and governance. Much human security scholarship is therefore explicitly or implicitly underpinned by a solidarist commitment to moral obligation, and some are cosmopolitan in ethical orientation. However, there is no uncontested definition of, or approach to, human security, though theorists generally start with human security challenges to orthodox neorealist conceptions of international security. Nontraditional and critical security studies (which are distinct from human security scholarship) also challenges the neorealist orthodoxy as a starting point, although generally from a more sophisticated theoretical standpoint than found in the human security literature. Critical security studies can be conceived broadly to embrace a number of different nontraditional approaches which challenge conventional (military, state-centric) approaches to security studies and security policy. Human security has generally not been treated seriously within these academic security studies debates, and it has not contributed much either.

Flood resilience is increasingly discussed in academia and practice as a complement to existing flood risk management approaches (Fekete, Hartmann, & Jüpner 2020). It is seen as a promising concept to deal with increasingly severe consequences of climate change in general, and with increasing flood risk in particular. The debate on flood resilience is linked to the paradigm shift from flood protection to risk management, which started in Europe after the major river flood events in 1993 and 1995 along the river Rhine (Hartmann, 2012), and has developed over the past decades—pushed by further major fluvial and pluvial flood events (Begum, Stive, & Hall, 2007; Hartmann & Juepner, 2014; Klijn, Samuels, & van Os, 2008; Patt & Jüpner, 2020). However, in flood risk management, the academic debate on resilience is only in its infancy (Jüpner et al., 2018; Vis, Klijn, Bruijn, & Buuren, 2003). Many different definitions exist (Disse, Johnson, Leandro, & Hartmann, 2020). Especially when it comes to specific implementation of resilience, the vagueness of the concept—which is sometimes described as one of its strengths (Baggio, Brown, & Hellebrandt, 2015; Brand & Jax, 2007)—can present a problem. How to design a resilient hydraulic infrastructure? This question has not only technical but also concerned with financial and legal aspects. This becomes more complicated when individual protection measures are put in a context of a larger system, such as a city or a region. When and how is a system such as a city or a region resilient, and how does one measure resilience? These questions are important, not only for construction but also for legal (such as liabilities), financial (budgetary), and political reasons. In other words, resilience is not (yet) a ready-to-use concept in flood risk management. Resilience challenges presumptions of traditional flood risk management in many ways. Resilience implies that more and different stakeholders and actors will be involved in flood risk management than before, such as landowners or spatial planners. Hitherto, flood risk management has been and still is mainly the domain of water management (Hartmann & Driessen, 2017), although the prevalence of the traditional civil engineering approach has been questioned before (van den Brink, 2009). This change is not positive for all actors—affected homeowners, but also city planners or mayors now must deal with questions that were previously outside of their realm of competence and responsibility. From a flood risk management perspective, many questions arise, such as: How does resilience add to and change the existing flood risk management system? How can resilience contribute to a more effective and efficient flood risk management approach? What are the specific advantages of integrating resilience in flood risk management? How can resilience be measured and quantified? Which parameters are most relevant? This special collection brings together contributions from different disciplines that address the specific challenges of implementing resilience in flood risk management. The special collection takes the European debate as a starting point. The European Floods Directive from 2007 (2007/EC/60) pushed the debate on flood risk management and resilience in Europe. This Directive established a legal frame on how countries in the European Union have to deal with flood risk for the first time (Hartmann & Jüpner, 2014). At the same time, the shift toward a risk-based approach raised questions such as "what can happen?" "what must not happen?" and "which security level can be realized at which costs?" Ultimately, flood risk management replaces the paradigm of complete protection against floods with the idea of managing the risk (Grünewald, 2005). This makes approaches to resilience and the reduction of damage potential (vulnerabilities)—not only for river floods but also for pluvial rainfall—important. The first three papers in this collection highlight the necessity and consequences of defining the concept of resilience. In their opinion paper, Fekete, Hartmann, and Jüpner (2020) point out that resilience is indeed a trend that neither can nor should be ignored in flood risk management, rather than it should be embraced—with a caveat: the concept is still not exactly defined and cannot be understood as a panacea for all shortcomings and challenges of flood risk management. So, is resilience merely a new buzzword? Dewulf et al. (2019) discuss the power and impact of defining resilience and therewith unravel the political-normative notion of flood resilience as a concept. This illustrates that, with flood resilience, flood risk management turns much more strongly towards social and political science than ever before. Discussing resilience and its definition is thus a crucial step toward successfully implementing it in flood risk management. In her advanced review, Rodina (2019) reveals different notions of resilience in different disciplines when taking on a broader view of the concept (i.e., not solely focusing on flood risks). She concludes that participation and stakeholder involvement are important components of resilience—a theme that is picked up in the next section of this special collection as well. So, though this article had not been part of the original set-up of the special collection, the conclusions are highly relevant for implementing flood resilience in flood risk management. Resilience requires more action by homeowners and citizens. All papers in this section of this special collection leave no doubt about that. Snel, Witte, Hartmann, and Geertman (2020), however, start with a very critical point of departure, namely that many publications on homeowner and citizen involvement do not seem to question if this involvement is necessary. The paper unravels the arguments that are prevalent in the academic debate for more involvement of homeowners in flood resilience, which supposedly comes along with a shift towards flood governance. Four types of main arguments are identified and discussed in the paper. Kuhlicke and the multidisciplinary team of authors writing on the behavioral turn in flood risk management (Kuhlicke et al., 2020) discuss in detail three underlying assumptions of increased involvement of citizens in flood risk management: the motivations of citizens, the effectiveness of measures, and capacities of citizens. In this vein, Rufat et al. (2020) discuss in their opinion paper need for a more nuanced debate on the link between flood risk perception and risk-mitigating behavior. Attems, Thaler, Genovese, and Fuchs (2020) then provide an overview of the measures that homeowners can take to enhance resilience by using property-level flood risk adaptation (PLFRA) measures. The paper confirms that such measures can indeed be an appropriate addition or complement to flood risk management. The third group of papers in this special collection addresses the issue of measuring and communicating resilience. The need for this comes not only from hydraulic engineering but also from the need to communicate about flood risk with homeowners and citizens, as they have to become more involved (as the earlier papers in this special collection clearly show). Pohl (2020) views resilience from a hydrological as well as a hydraulic engineering perspective and outlines what it means to include the concept in flood risk management. In particular, the contribution points out the difficulties of embedding resilience as a design criterion in hydraulic structures. Pohl concludes that—though the fuzziness of resilience is appreciated by some social scientists as a "boundary concept" (Baggio et al., 2015)—hydraulic engineering and hydrology inevitably require some quantifiable measurement of resilience. Fekete (2019) elaborates in his paper how cascading effects and critical infrastructure matter for flood resilience. It thereby shows how flood resilience with this perspective extends existing flood risk management approaches. Cascading effects of critical infrastructure can substantially affect the measurement of flood resilience. Schmitt and Scheid (2020) discuss the need for better risk communication and discuss approaches by focusing on pluvial floods. In particular, they show how a rainstorm severity index may supersede the communicative capacity of statistical rainfall parameters in the communication with nonexperts especially. In conclusion, the contributions in this special collection show how the concept of resilience is advancing flood risk management but also point out some crucial changes and challenges that flood resilience as a concept brings to the practical implementation of flood risk management. It seems inevitable that homeowners especially will play a much more fundamental role in flood resilience, which raises needs for measuring and communication of flood resilience. Along with this shift in flood risk management, the papers illustrate that flood resilience puts flood risk management in a hitherto unknown domain for many water managers, as flood resilience means embracing social and political science. Embedding flood resilience into flood risk management becomes a balancing act—on the one hand, resilience is a political and normative concept, but on the other hand, it needs to be implemented with concrete steps designed via civil engineering and hydrology. This tension is still unsolved and remains a dilemma in implementing flood resilience.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsSheep, Goats, and Roses Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism. By Charles A. McCoy and John Playford Contemporary Political Science: Toward Empirical Theory. By Ithiel de Sola Pool Politics and Social Science. By W. J. M. Mackenzie Eugene J. MeehanEugene J. Meehan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 1, Number 4Summer 1969 The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Copyright 1969 PolityPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume I · Number 3 * Spring 1938 AID TO SCIENCE EDUCATION AN EDITORIAL The mobilization of our educative resources now demanded by the public and our national leaders could be accelerated almost immediately by retired able scientists and teachers. Some scientists in universities, government , and industry at and beyond a fixed retirement age are great teachers who can offer much to young men and woman, especially in schools that are now sterile. Our government and private foundations could aid science education by establishing well-paying fellowships for those who would like to teach in secondary schools and colleges of their choice. The school administrators and scientists would arrangethe details ofagreement among themselves. Some scientists find new careers when they retire from tenure positions, but only rarely do these moves bring them into the company ofstudents. The opportunity to work with gifted young minds should be linked with adequate financial rewards. Science education will be far more efficient if we concentrate upon the quality of the teacher, the quality of the student, and the natural appeal of science itself. Most science courses in preparatory schools and colleges are depressingly dull. Poor ability and poor preparation of the average teacher are factors, but they are seldom the sole ones. His aim ofobjectivity makes the average scientist and teacher exclude the exciting qualities of science and equate science with quantitative measurement and data. What scientists now communicate to one another is more and more the kind of symbolism that can be coded into an IBM machine or electronic computer . No doubt, information that is subject to precise formulation will 235 be relegated to machines. But the teaching of science to young men and women and the communication ofideas among scientists should keep all the beauty and excitement of inquiry. The advantage of letting a senior statesman in science choose his teaching methods should be recognized by school administrators. The greatest teachers the world has known spoke simply and directly to and with their students about ideas. This and other aids should be applied in all fields ofscience toward support ofa strong, balanced educational program. Our public and state concern over the needs ofeducation is closely linked with the technology of weaponry. The drives and pressures to deal with this critical problem are likely to be effective if sufficient time remains. But what about those natural and social sciences which hope to serve humanity? Ifthere is a way to avoid war, it is a positive approach to peace, and this will require the best that can be had from the physical sciences, the life-sciences, the social and political sciences, and the humanities as well. Those ofus in the fife-sciences know about the serious shortage ofbiological and medical scientists, especially the creative sort. The social and political sciences are no better off. We need a balanced educational program and should invite to support it all gifted teachers who are retired but able. D.J.I. ACKNOWLEDGMENT In the first issue ofPerspectives in Biology and Medicine we acknowledged grants from twenty-one companies toward the initial support ofthis Journal. We wish to thank the following additional firms now for their grants to help launch Perspectives: The Armour Laboratories; Baxter Laboratories, Inc.; Johnson & Johnson; Parke, Davis & Company; Chas. Pfizer & Co., Inc.; and A. H. Robins Company, Inc. 236 Aid to Science Education ¦ An Editorial Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1958 ...

This research analyzes the frequency of undergraduate research topics selected as “memoirs” by 4th-year students in the social and political science departments in the Faculty of Arts, Media and Social Sciences (FAMSS) at the National University of Rwanda. Its objective was to ascertain (a) if multiple instances of near-identical topics form identifiable trends, and (b) what convincing explanations might be identified as causal to these topic trends.In total, 1335 memoirs submitted between 1997 and 2011 were analyzed. In this study it was hypothesized that certain research topics are preferred by NUR students in different years, depending on the national popularity of specific social, political and developmental issues, and that these preferences change over time.The researcher used unix-based grep for string analysis of memoir topics, which were then aggregated into frequency histograms and converted the data to N-maps for visualization of the change over time in the respective topics. The research findings indicate that memoir topics follow trends in “popularity” for social research: they rise, remain steady, or fall, depending on exogenous social stimuli, and perhaps for endogenous reasons too.The research concluded that changing preferences for research topics by students can be linked to national or regional events. The causal mechanism evolves from popular discussion in the media, leading to student interest, and eventually to student-selected research topics. The most obvious examples were government policies and programs which attracted significant student attention, causing increased topic frequency, followed by decline as the issue decreased in popularity.The research also identified the tendency for students to copy their research topic from memoirs existing in the Faculty Library. While the issue of plagiarism was not specifically addressed by this study, it is possible that the N-map trends portrayed by this research emerge in part because some students have used past memoirs as templates, possibly including indirect or direct copying. For this reason, the research concluded that while the majority of topic trending observed in the N-grams may be explainable the popularity of national issues, copy-cat research and outright plagiarism could also play a role in these trending phenomena. Further research using full-text soft copies (not available for pre-2009 topics) is suggested.Recommendations include that students should be guided towards unexplored areas of new research and actively discouraged from replicating the research of previous year's memoirs; that the memoir room within the Faculty Library serves little purpose other than to encourage copying and plagiarism and should therefore be closed until a plan for its usefulness can be envisioned; that the teaching of Research Methodology in the social and political sciences is inadequately preparing students for the challenges of actual research (which pushes them to consider plagiarism as a pathway to success) and that NUR should systematize and upgrade its present rudimentary plagiarism detection measures and to publicize this to all students so as to discourage topic replication, copying and outright plagiarism.Keywords: N-gram, plagiarism, research methods, National University of Rwanda, memoir topics

Exploration of a new integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. Research in the cognitive sciences has advanced significantly in recent decades. Computational cognitive modeling has profoundly changed the ways in which we understand cognition. Empirical research has progressed as well, offering new insights into many psychological phenomena. This book investigates the possibility of exploiting the successes of the cognitive sciences to establish a better foundation for the social sciences, including the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. The result may be a new, powerful, integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. The book treats a range of topics selected to capture issues that arise across the social sciences, covering computational, empirical, and theoretical approaches. The chapters, by leading scholars in both the cognitive and the social sciences, explore the relationship between cognition and society, including such issues as methodologies of studying cultural differences; the psychological basis of politics (for instance, the role of emotion and the psychology of moral choices); cognitive dimensions of religion; cognitive approaches to economics; meta-theoretical questions on the possibility of the unification of social and cognitive sciences. Combining depth and breadth, the book encourages fruitful interdisciplinary interaction across many fields.