Transitions Online-Books-Winning Hearts and Minds or Profiting from the Enemy
The outbreak of fighting in eastern Ukraine thrust book publishing into the role of cultural warrior.
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The outbreak of fighting in eastern Ukraine thrust book publishing into the role of cultural warrior.
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This paper concentrates on a particular example of cooperation between European cities and indigenous peoples of the Amazon river basin, namely that of Climate Alliance. The New Urban Agenda adopted at the UN Habitat III conference in October 2016 emphasizes that cities and other human settlements should meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities for current and future sustainable and economic inclusive development. Cities should also take measures to address climate change and protect and manage their ecosystems, water resources, the environment and biodiversity. Indigenous peoples, just like cities play a crucial role in the fight against climate change. 80 % of the territories with high biodiversity level are indigenous lands. Their indigenous ecological knowledge may serve as a valuable tool in initiatives aimed at fighting climate change. The aim of the paper is to show whether there are any benefits of such cooperation and what is its significance in the fight against climate change. The main research question is: what are the forms of cooperation between European cities and Amazonian indigenous peoples in the framework of Climate Alliance? In which way can European cities support indigenous peoples in their fight for their rights and consequently for the nature’s preservation? The hypothesis is that European cities may learn from indigenous peoples of the Amazon how to combat climate change.
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This paper presents selected conclusions related to the theoretical underpinnings of international humanitarian law, with special focus on the understanding of considerations of humanity and the dictates of public conscience (the Martens clause) and their impact on the regulation of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Despite the fact that different positions can be found in the doctrine, it is argued herein that the general principles of international humanitarian law are not sufficient to properly regulate the disruptive military technologies (new means and methods of warfare) and a new international norm is needed. Consequently, the paper agglomerates extra-legal and cross-cutting arguments stemming from other normative regimes that point to prioritization of the value of human life and the role and quality of the human factor in decision-making procedures relating to the health and life of victims of modern armed conflicts, which should be incorporated in it.
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In this article will be treated different skills for public administrators, during the process of decision making, which affect the effectiveness of their decisions, and thus will also affect the fulfilment of the objectives of the organizations they lead. The main purpose of the article is to identify the skills that demonstrate public administrators during decision making in order to define how good are their decision making process. On the basis of secondary and primary research, the authors would discuss the findings in order to identify the problems faced during these processes of decision-making public administrators.
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Migrants and organizational collectives, such as hometown associations (HTAs), have sent remittances to their countries of origin in an attempt to alleviate unmet health care needs. Additionally, migrants will use collective funds to rehabilitating roads; improving sewage systems and water quality; constructing recreational facilities; and refurbishing community buildings. All of these projects contribute to public health. The question explored in this paper is how remittances from abroad potentially contributes to the health of hometown communities. This focus on health and related issues allows for exploring HTA cross-border work as particularly informative in understanding state/society relations. In effect, we bring light to how a migrant transnational social movement can attempt to address health needs in its hometown. The Comparative Immigrant Organization Project (CIOP) is used to answer this question. For this paper, the level of analysis for the CIOP is organizational.
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Research is scant on the everyday sense of belonging of refugees in South Africa. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the everyday discourses of belonging of Eritrean refugees in South Africa. Purposive sampling technique was used to recruit participants, and qualitative data was gathered from 11 participants in the City of Tshwane, South Africa, through open-ended interviews and focus group discussions. Analysis of data resulted in three dominant discourses: 1) ‘we feel like outsiders’; 2) ‘we are neither here nor there’; and 3) ‘South Africa is home’. Drawing on the participants’ discourses, I argue that in the South African context, refugees’ sense of belonging tends to be varied mirroring multifaceted lived experiences. Participants’ construction of South Africa as their home also counters previous research that portrayed foreign nationals in South Africa as ‘excluded’.
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Human Security and Migration in Europe's Southern Borders by Susana Ferreira. Palgrave Macmillan: Springer Nature, 2018, xvii + 211 pp. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-77947-8. Reviewed by Diotima Chattoraj. Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond by Reece Jones and Md. Azmeary Ferdoush (eds.), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, Netherlands, 2018. PP.277, Price: € 99,00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9789462984547. Reviewed by Saleh Shahriar. Migration, Refugees and Human Security in the Mediterranean and MENA edited by Marion Boulby and Kenneth Christie, Palgrave Macmillan (2018, ISBN: 978-3319707747). Reviewed by Gül Oral. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018, 372 pp. ISBN: 978-1787330672. Reviewed by Uzi Rebhun.
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Corporate governance is a very actual subject. After the financial world has faced during the 2000s several financial scandals, developing principles of corporate governance became necessary at international level. The 2008 financial crisis has highlighted the need for the existence of effective codes of corporate governance, which is why the OECD principles of corporate governance suffer changes, as well as national codes. The paper aims to highlight the application of corporate governance but also the role of internal audit in the company's activity. We appreciate that an effective, high-quality internal audit is the thing that, applying the rules of International Standards on Auditing, manages to detect the risks which may be subjected to the work of the Organization, to take action to reduce them so that the value of the company would not diminish.
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The paper aims to contextualize the elements that define the peculiarities of the nonprofit nonprofit sector. In a general note, there is provided a series of answers to the following questions: ‘Which ones are the factors that influenced the establishment of the nonprofit sector?’, and ‘Of what consists the object of the conceptual delineations regarding the nonprofit sector?’. In a particular sense, the first part of the paper refers primarily to the aspects regarding the necessity to optimize the manner of organizing the society, along with the one related to the establishment of a distinctive framework in terms of organizational infrastructure of the civil society. The second part of the paper begins with the structural-operational definition of the nonprofit sector and continues with its general characteristics.
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Employee wellness is one of the key and most essential antecedents to employee and organizational performance. Organisational performance heavily depends on the health and wellness of employees and their attitude towards their work. The study explored the relationship between wellness programs and job satisfaction for workers in armed conflict societies. The study focused on one wellness program; that is the establishment of organizational onsite health centers. A quantitative research methodology was employed to carry out the study. A questionnaire was used to solicit data from 50 people who witnessed or directly or indirectly participated in the war of liberation in Zimbabwe and the civil war in Mozambique. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the collected data. The study established that there is a strong relationship between the establishment of onsite health centers and job satisfaction. All the major services of health clinics such as provision of health services to the injured during the war, provision of counseling services, provision of physical fitness programs and provision of ill-health prevention services showed a strong relationship with job satisfaction. It was recommended that all organizations operating in armed conflict societies should establish health centers within their premises to provide health services to the physically and emotionally injured employees.
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This text will offer a mapping of the cultural and creative hubs in Vietnam, its roles and purposes. It would question the ethics of knowledge transfer through direct concept transmission from Global North to Global South, without understanding contextual differences. It studies 12 creative hubs in Ho Shi Minh City (6), Hanoi (2) and from different provincial cities (4), taking in consideration results of the overviews and analysis done previously by British Council. The survey has shown limits of the concept application, as creative economy in Vietnam is not developed enough to enable its practitioners to rent spaces and services on commercial basis. Thus, the concept of creative industries in practice is limited on bars and restaurants (creative gastronomy), or advertising and PR services, joined by several exhibition spaces that might offer excellent international exhibitions (foreign curators looking for such places) or temporary art residency. This text represents a plaidoyer for a new ethics in international cultural relations, where foreign aid will be based on recipient needs and its cultural values (context understanding).
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This article aims to explain the reasons behind Charles de Gaulle’s rejection of British membership in the European Economic Community. Britain applied to join the organisation twice, first in 1963 and then again in 1967, but was rejected by the French president Charles de Gaulle. The rejection seems relevant now since Britain intends to disengage itself from the EU. The cause of rejection, however, was the British close relationship to the United States, which, in de Gaulle’s opinion, was a threat to a united Europe. This article also aims to explain the various factors that motivated Britain, which was fundamentally against a united Europe, to join the EEC while knowing that the EEC was based on the concept of a united Europe. Using a historical causal method and a political approach, the writers conclude that while Britain was more or less forced to act by economic issues, de Gaulle’s rejection was rather political in nature.
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The present article is an attempt to discuss the legal and axiological aspects of preventing the causes of disability in the context of a “healthy” environment. The legal discourse on disability naturally touches upon matters related to the models of disability and the rights of the disabled. Yet, legal studies seldom link disability with environmental causes and consider the legal aspects of the subject from that perspective. This article explores the fundamental axiological conditions for combating the environmental factors of disability. The considerations resulted in listing the constitutional conditions in the form of a ‘healthy environment’ and two vital principles: the principle of sustainable development and the principle of intergenerational solidarity. Furthermore, both principles are based on supranational regulations.
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In recent years, the European Union, as a supranational actor, with the declared objective to play an important role in the security field, has developed its own regulatory framework and capabilities in order to manage the cross-border crises. In the service of this objective, European Union has built a mechanism aiming at coordinating and leading at the highest political level the response to threats that require by the nature of their consequences a conjugated reaction. We propose ourselves to analyse its effectiveness by studying the events that generated the triggering of the mechanism, or which could have led to the triggering of this mechanism, but did not do it. The approach of the threats that transcend the national boundaries can involve actions which start with the interconnection of states’ response capacities to their integration through the framework advanced by EU.
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The European Union is in the process of re-assessing the various challenges engulfing it. Enlargement - a flagship policy of the EU, is now materialising as a challenge, critically testing its competence. The course of Western Balkan enlargement comes with its own tier of difficulties. Complications stem from the very conceptualisation of the six Western Balkan countries as a single bloc and the underlying fragilities that characterise them. This paper attempts to deconstruct the EU’s political conditionality applied in the Western Balkan enlargement. It postulates the critical issues of ethno-political conflicts within these territories as one of the major causes behind the delay in accession and highlights the limits of EU’s approach to influence these countries. As a result, the geopolitical vacuum gives space for external actors like Russia to become proactive. The growing Russian intervention in these regions, contributes to the construction of salient political discourse in the enlargement.
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The article looks at the origins and scale of migration of Poles to the Republic of Ireland and the characteristics of migrants in light of various statistical data. It outlines the characteristics of the Polish population in Ireland on the basis of 2016 census, taking into account the main directions of changes in relation to previous censuses. Polish immigrants, very few in Ireland before 2004, have since become the largest group of non-Irish nationals, stable in size and spread all over the country. Despite its size and multiple ties to Ireland such as the growing number of Polish-Irish citizens and the increasing share of homeowners, it is argued that the Polish community has limited visibility and impact on the Irish society and politics. The author also points out the housing crisis and Brexit-related risks as important challenges for the Polish community.
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The paper looks at the selected issues related to the Polish migrants in Iceland. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the number of the Polish migrants there grew nearly tenfold and exceeded 17,000 in 2018. As a result, Poles are the most numerous national minority in Iceland. The author discusses demographics, including size of the community and its distribution, migration patterns, occupational careers and position in the labour market, integration and activities of Polish associations, both formal and informal ones.
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The article provides an overview of the dynamics of migration from Poland to Germany and the socio-demographic characteristics of Polish community. It begins with the history of migration processes between the two countries, with special focus on the most important periods (including post-accession migration). Next, the socio-demographic characteristics of the Polish community are analyzed, including its size, distribution, education and labour market situation. A comparison between the Polish community and the entire migrant community in Germany is conducted as well.
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