Interviews formed an integral part of Foucault's work alongside and complementary to the published works. It is primarily in interviews that he elaborates on the implications of his historical studies for thinking about the problems raised by social and political movements. Like his published books, Foucault's lectures sought to engage with the social, political, and intellectual present in which they were presented. In this sense, they are closer to the interviews. This chapter focuses on the developments in his thinking about (...) power as these are displayed in his lectures between 1976 and 1979. It also discusses the role of strategy in relations of power. Building on the centrality of freedom to this concept of power as action on the actions of others, Foucault asserts that there is an intransigence of freedom and a corresponding “agonism” at the heart of power relations. (shrink)

In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic backsliding or democratic regression. This article deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in their attempts to prevent a further erosion of democracy, transgress democratic norms. But the argument (...) advanced in the article is not merely about the ethics of resistance. It begins, perhaps unconventionally, by addressing the affective dimension of resistance to democratic regressions, looking in particular at the powerful feelings of anger and despair that pro-democratic citizens living under a regressive government are likely to experience. As the article argues, these feelings have not only motivational but also epistemic potential, which must be adequately theorized in order to understand how resisters can respond to the ethical challenges facing them. (shrink)

The article presents artistic body interventions as tactics of minimal resistance to the governance over those bodies, i.e., resistance to the apparatuses that govern, control and manage our bodies, and those that also make our bodies sacred. This means the resistance to the apparatuses that separate my body from my own management. Giorgio Agamben calls for the strategy of profanation, for bringing back what was sacred to the use and property of humans. The author offers a thesis (...) that the artistic acts that resist to the power over the bodies do not construct counter-apparatuses to the apparatuses of power, but they do challenge or even sometimes subvert the machines of governance over the bodies. (shrink)

As calls mount for resistance to recent political events, Simon Morgan Wortham explores the political implications and complexities of a psychoanalytic conception of resistance. Through close readings of a range of authors, both within and outwith the psychoanalytic tradition, the question of the politics of psychoanalysis itself is read back into the task of thinking resistance from a psychoanalytic point of view. Morgan Wortham also reveals a new theory of phobic resistance at the centre of the (...) politics of psychoanalysis, one that creates fresh possibilities for contemporary political analysis. (shrink)

The world is out of joint, so much so that disobeying should be an urgent question for everyone. In this provocative essay, Frédéric Gros explores the roots of political obedience. Social conformity, economic subjection, respect for authorities, constitutional consensus? Examining the various styles of obedience provides tools to study, invent and induce new forms of civic disobedience and lyrical protest. Nothing can be taken for granted: neither supposed certainties nor social conventions, economic injustice or moral conviction. Thinking philosophically requires us (...) never to accept truths and generalities that seem obvious. It restores a sense of political responsibility. At a time when the decisions of experts are presented as the result of icy statistics and anonymous calculations, disobeying becomes an assertion of humanity. To philosophize is to disobey. This book is a call for critical democracy and ethical resistance. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s theory of justifiable resistance to authority is complex and, at times, appears to conflict with his own practice, if not with itself. He distinguishes between the role of authority in “public” and “private” contexts. In private—e.g., when a person is under contract to do a specific job or accepts a social contract with one’s government—resistance is forbidden; external behavior must be governed by policy or law. In contexts involving the public use of reason, on the other (...) hand—e.g., when a person is faced with a moral decision or is engaged in a philosophical dispute—the freedom of conscience sometimes requires resistance, especially in cases where other persons inappropriately attempt to usurp authority over matters that are rightfully up to the individual to decide. In texts such as Perpetual Peace, Kant looks forward to a political situation wherein no political resistance (e.g., in the form of war) would be necessary. Yet in Metaphysics of Morals, he argues that a citizen never has the right to revolt against one’s government, suggesting we must cooperate even with war. On a personal level, Kant openly praised both the American and the French revolutions; yet when his own writings on religion were deemed by the censor to have come into conflict with the king’s edict, Kant failed to resist the (arguably unjust) authority; instead, he gave up his (apparently public) right to free philosophical expression, promising never to write or speak on religion again during the king’s reign. I shall argue that a key to resolving these tensions lies in the principle that universities must promote a healthy, public “conflict” between philosophers and all “private” employments of reason. The only ground for disallowing private resistance, therefore, is the underlying presence of genuine philosophical resistance. (shrink)

The emergence of global governance in several key areas calls into question conventional understandings of world politics in terms of conflicts of interests between sovereign states under conditions of anarchy. At the same time the new phenomena of anti-globalisation demonstrations, transnational social movements and an emergent global civil society point to developments in international relations that are both of profound importance and analytically complex. This volume's starting point is the hypothesis that one way of thinking about these processes is in (...) terms of a dichotomy between the politics of governance and the politics of resistance. Leading scholars from several perspectives reflect on the usefulness of this dichotomy and consider its application to several crucial areas of international relations. (shrink)

Everyday resistance is about the many ways people undermine power and domination through their routine and everyday actions. Unlike open rebellions or demonstrations, it is typically hidden, not politically articulated, and often ingenious. But because of its disguised nature, it is often poorly understood as a form of politics and its potential underestimated. Conceptualizing Everyday Resistance presents an analytical framework and theoretical tools to understand the entanglements of everyday power and resistance. These are applied to diverse empirical (...) cases including queer relationships in the context of heteronormativity, Palestinian daily life under military occupation, workplace behaviors under office surveillance, and the tactics of fat acceptance bloggers facing the War against obesity. Johansson and Vinthagen argue that everyday resistance is best understood by accounting for different repertoires of tactics, relations between actors, and struggles around constructions of time and space. Through a critical dialogue with the work of James C. Scott, Michel de Certeau, and Asef Bayat, they aim to reconstruct the field of resistance studies, expanding what counts as resistance and building systematic analysis. Conceptualizing Everyday Resistance offers researchers and students from different theoretical and empirical backgrounds, an essential overview of the field and a creative framework that illuminates the potential of all people to transform society. (shrink)

Educational leaders in Ontario’s publicly-funded Catholic schools typically resist establishing Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) on grounds that they contradict Catholic moral teaching and so cause scandal in the school. While the protection of GSAs in these schools is derived from recent provincial legislation, the government intervention has the potential to exacerbate religious-secular tensions in the school and society. This paper assumes that, in the Catholic Church’s current political climate, the only justifications for GSAs that will gain genuine traction and possibly deflate (...) this tension descend from within Catholicism’s own tradition of thought and educational practice. The first part of the argument critiques the Catholic hierarchy’s traditional, narrow conception of scandal, and replaces it with a revised, broader conception from within Catholic theology in which the traditional marginalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students is the true scandal. These two frameworks are used to analyze inconsistencies between the resistance Catholic schools show toward LGBTQ students wanting to establish GSAs, and the welcoming attitude they display toward pregnant and parenting students. The second part of the argument reveals that the main reason for this difference is that Church officials perceive all LGBTQ organizations as threats to their authority, and this perception is extended to GSAs. This internal critique provides sufficient reason to reverse the current negative Catholic evaluations of GSAs. (shrink)

John Locke is widely perceived as a foundational figure within the liberal tradition. This book investigates the competing purposes that informed Locke's political philosophy, not all of which resulted in outcomes consistent with what we today understand as "liberal" ideals. Locke himself was unaware that he belonged to a "liberal" tradition. Traditions only acquire meaning in retrospect. But many have perceived the development of Locke's political philosophy as involving a smooth evolution from "authoritarian" origins to "liberal" conclusions, beginning with Locke's (...) Two Tracts on Government (1660-62) and culminating in his later political works, the Two Treatises of Government (1689) and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). This book advances an interpretation of this development which reveals how, by the time of his mature political writings, Locke sought to advance three competing imperatives within his political philosophy, only two of which were consistent with ideals of individual liberty. The other imperative sustained purposes much more aligned with the "authoritarianism" with which Locke's political philosophy began. The result is a much more complex and variegated understanding of Locke's political philosophy, focusing on its competing purposes. Liberty, Governance and Resistance will be of interest to researchers studying Locke, liberalism, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

What do we mean by nonviolence? What can nonviolence achieve? Are there limits to nonviolence? These are the questions that Ramin Jahanbegloo tackles in his journey through the major political advocates of nonviolence during the 20th century. Focusing on examples of their way of thinking in different cultural, geographic and political contexts, from the Indian Independence Movement and US Civil rights and Anti-Apartheid movements to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and nonviolent protests in Tunisia, Iran, Serbia and Hong-Kong, Jahanbegloo explores (...) why nonviolence remains relevant as a form of resistance against injustice and oppression around the world. (shrink)

Why you have the right to resist unjust government The economist Albert O. Hirschman famously argued that citizens of democracies have only three possible responses to injustice or wrongdoing by their governments: we may leave, complain, or comply. But in When All Else Fails, Jason Brennan argues that there is a fourth option. When governments violate our rights, we may resist. We may even have a moral duty to do so. For centuries, almost everyone has believed that we must allow (...) the government and its representatives to act without interference, no matter how they behave. We may complain, protest, sue, or vote officials out, but we can’t fight back. But Brennan makes the case that we have no duty to allow the state or its agents to commit injustice. We have every right to react with acts of “uncivil disobedience.” We may resist arrest for violation of unjust laws. We may disobey orders, sabotage government property, or reveal classified information. We may deceive ignorant, irrational, or malicious voters. We may even use force in self-defense or to defend others. The result is a provocative challenge to long-held beliefs about how citizens may respond when government officials behave unjustly or abuse their power. (shrink)

Provides a robust theoretical and methodological framework for researching of resistance and social change.

This study examines the effectiveness of the inoculation strategy in countering vaccine-related misinformation among Hong Kong college students. A three-phase between-subject experiment was conducted to compare the persuasive effects of inoculation messages, supportive messages, and no message control. The results show that inoculation messages were superior to supportive messages at generating resistance to misinformation, as evidenced by more positive vaccine attitudes and stronger vaccine intention. Notably, while we expected the inoculation condition would produce more resistance than the control (...) condition, there was little evidence in favor of this prediction. Attitudinal threat and counterarguing moderated the experimental effects; issue involvement and political trust were found to directly predict vaccine attitudes and intention. The findings suggest that future interventions focus on developing preventive mechanisms to counter misinformation and spreading inoculation over the issue is an effective strategy to generate resistance to misinformation. Interventions should be cautious about using health advocacy initiated by governments among populations with low political trust. (shrink)

The essay examines local resistance to the New Deal rural electrification program in the United States before World War II as a crucial aspect of sociotechnical change. Large numbers of farm men and women opposed the introduction of the new technology, did not purchase a full complement of electrical appliances, and did not use electric lights and appliances in the manner prescribed by the government modernisers and manufacturers. These acts of 'transformative resistance' helped to shape artefacts and social (...) practices. (shrink)

This article analyzes how the development of the European Union fundamental rights policy feeds Euroscepticism—and notably political Euroscepticism—within segments of national political elites in EU Member States. More specifically, it argues that this relatively new policy also gives rise to a new form of political Euroscepticism, which has been defined as “value-based Euroscepticism,” e.g., the perception that the EU via its fundamental rights policy, unduly interferes in matters where value systems and core domestic preferences on ethical issues are at stake. (...) This happens in a context where the EU is resented, by some segments of political elites, for allegedly empowering diverse groups at the expense of popular sovereignty. This resentment is exacerbated by the fact that national governments are increasingly submitted to the critical assessment of EU-level actors in terms of democratic credentials. (shrink)

Part two of an innovative trilogy on anarchist geography, this text examines how we can better understand the ways in which space has been used for resistance.

This paper develops a Foucauldian analytics of resistance in relation to components of a system of governance – a governmentality. Techniques of resistance that can transform a governmentality towards the development of a new politics of truth require the design of techniques of resistance to counter directly oppressive techniques of biopower and disciplinary power, in turn to produce new regimes of practices or counter-conduct that can engender a new mentality and set of discourses to convey it. Strategies (...) of resistance towards transformative change in the governance of a population as well as of the self therefore require development following, and in relation to, an analytics of governance. I thread these points through a particular case, the problem of care for the infirm elderly in the United States, focusing specifically on nursing homes by critically synthesizing issues from inter-disciplinary literatures and casting them in terms of governmentalities. I frame the problems of eldercare broadly in terms of interrelated neoliberal and scientific mentalities and associated discourses, and then examine the associated techniques of biopower, disciplinary power, and regimes of practices to identify roots of problems, explain failures of policies, and crucially, to frame the design of techniques of resistance to produce new regimes of counter-conduct. I suggest avenues of resistance in relation to existing governmentalities on the terrain of inter-firm relations and everyday life in nursing-home care, all currently entangled with government policies, economies of documentation, and dehumanizing scientific practice. (shrink)

What is at the heart of political resistance? Whilst traditional accounts often conceptualise it as a reaction to power, this volume (prioritising remarks by Michel Foucault) invites us to think of resistance as primary. The author proposes a strategic analysis that highlights how our efforts need to be redirected towards a horizon of creation and change. This text combines a range of political and philosophical scholarship and provides an innovative rethinking of Foucault's model of power relations that leads (...) towards a new autonomism for the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper argues that attempts to apply Alasdair MacIntyre’s positive moral theory to business ethics are problematic, due to the cognitive closure of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice. I begin by outlining the notion of a practice, before turning to Moore’s attempt to provide a MacIntyrean account of corporate governance. I argue that Moore’s attempt is mismatched with MacIntyre’s account of moral education. Because the notion of practices resists general application I go on to argue that a negative application, which (...) focuses on regulation, is more plausible. Large-scale regulation, usually thought antithetical to MacIntyre’s advocacy of small-scale politics, has the potential to facilitate practice-based work and reveals that MacIntyre’s own work can be used against his pessimism about the modern order. Furthermore, the conception of regulation I defend can show us how management is more amenable to ethical understanding than MacIntyre’s work is often taken to imply. (shrink)

Imagine that you are a farmer living in Kenya. Though you work hard to sell your produce to foreign markets you find yourself unable to do so because affluent countries subsidize their own farmers and erect barriers to trade, like tariffs, thereby undercutting you in the marketplace. As a consequence of their actions you languish in poverty despite your very best efforts. Or, imagine that you are a peasant whose livelihood depends on working in the fields in Indonesia and you (...) are forcibly displaced from your land by a biofuels company because corrupt government officials have stolen the land and sold it to the company. Or, suppose that you work on the coast of Bangladesh but find that increasingly you are unable to cope with salination resulting from sealevel rise – a product of anthropogenic climate change. These, I believe, are cases of global injustice. My question is: What are those who bear the brunt of global injustice entitled to do to secure their, and other people’s, entitlements? Often people focus on the duties of the affluent to respect and uphold the rights of the disadvantaged. This is understandable. But there is a striking omission. Rarely do people analyze, or even mention, what those who lack their entitlements are entitled to do to secure their own rights. This is my focus in this paper. More specifically, I examine what agents are entitled to do to change the underlying social, economic and political practices and structures in a more just direction. (shrink)

While a growing number of firms are being evaluated on environment, social and governance criteria by sustainability rating agencies, comparatively little is known about companies’ responses. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with companies operating in Italy, the present paper seeks to narrow this gap in current understanding by examining how firms react to ESG ratings, and the factors influencing their response. Unique to the literature, we show that firms may react very differently to being rated, with our analysis yielding a fourfold (...) typology of corporate responses. The typology captures conformity and resistance to ratings across two dimensions of firm behaviour. We furthermore show that corporate responses depend on managers’ beliefs regarding the material benefits of adjusting to and scoring well on ESG ratings and their alignment with corporate strategy. In doing so, we challenge the idea that organisational ratings homogenise organisations and draw attention to the agency underlying corporate responses. Our findings also contribute to debates about the impact of ESG ratings, calling into question claims about their positive influence on companies’ sustainability performance. We conclude by discussing the wider empirical, theoretical and ethical implications of our paper. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest public health crises of our time. The natural biological process that causes microbes to become resistant to antimicrobial drugs presents a complex social challenge requiring more effective and sustainable management of the global antimicrobial commons—the common pool of effective antimicrobials. This special issue of Health Care Analysis explores the potential of two legal approaches—one long-term and one short-term—for managing the antimicrobial commons. The first article explores the lessons for antimicrobial resistance that (...) can be learned from recent climate change agreements, and the second article explores how existing international laws can be adapted to better support global action in the short-term. (shrink)

Around the world, a growing number of communities are voicing their demands for authority in the governance of research involving them. Many such communities have experienced histories of exploitative, stigmatizing, intrusive research that failed to benefit them. To better understand what strategies communities are developing in order to have a say in research oversight, we conducted a scoping review of the international peer-reviewed and grey literature. Three primary strategies were identified: (1) guidelines; (2) community review boards; and (3) community advisory (...) boards. Guidelines include documents developed by, with, or for communities to outline ethical behavior or conduct in research with or within the community. Community review boards offer ethical review of research protocols, much like traditional research ethics boards, but are community led and focus on community interests. Community advisory boards consist of representatives from a given community and are developed to advise institutions or research teams on community-level ethical matters pertaining to research projects. Initiatives led by Indigenous communities far outnumbered others in the sample, reflecting the legacy of continuous Indigenous resistance to research as a tool of colonialism. In several cases, communities in marginalized neighbourhoods, where harmful and exploitative research practices have taken place, emphasized the significance of community-led governance grounded in shared geographical and social contexts. We discuss some of the beneficial and challenging features of each type of strategy and offer recommendations for stakeholders who wish to support community-led efforts in research ethics. (shrink)

In the United Kingdom, clinical governance has become a master narrative for health care over the last decade. While many see this political imperative as embodying both enlightening and humanistic goals, I argue that it has also become an apparatus for resuscitating a hypermodernist worldview which further conceals the political drivers of health care delivery. While resistance to clinical governance seems futile, insistence on the inclusion of historical analysis in understanding modern health care delivery may be profitable. Drawing from (...) selected dramatic texts by Henrik Ibsen, an historical moment of clinical governance may be analysed showing the complex interplay of the personal, social, empirical and ethical dimensions of health care delivery. (shrink)

Anarchism, of whatever type, is likely to be resistance to the idea of world government. But this does not entail that it is resistance to world governance. Governance can happen at a variety of levels. It does not have to be top-down, as with world government, but can arise from the bottom up. To assume otherwise is to assume that governance happens only through hierarchies and not through the building of networks. The question facing those of us who (...) would like to ask about how people’s behavior might be non-hierarchically governed in a world sense is that of how to construct networks of practices that presuppose the equality of everyone rather than asking what kind of transnational government would be adequate to the task of governing everyone. (shrink)

Governments can practically and efficiently address zoonoses and AMR –– within the text of the new pandemic instrument. We map the overlaps between the efforts needed to address both pandemic threats, including (a) equitable access to medical countermeasures, (b) globally integrated One Health surveillance and monitoring systems, (c) increased technical and laboratory capacity in low- and middle-income countries, and (d) a regulatory framework governing the stewardship of antimicrobials. By outlining potential dual-purpose provisions that could be included in a pandemic instrument, (...) we argue that addressing AMR in the pandemic instrument is practicable, the most effective use of limited time and resources, and provides the best opportunity for future global pandemic readiness. (shrink)

John Harris recently argues that the moral bioenhancement proposed by Persson and Savulescu can damage moral agency by depriving the recipients of their freedom to fall (freedom to make wrongful choices) and therefore should not be pursued. The link Harris makes between moral agency and the freedom to fall, however, implies that all forms of moral enhancement, including moral education, that aim to make the enhancement recipients less likely to “fall” are detrimental to moral agency. In this paper, I present (...) a new moral agency-based critique against the moral bioenhancement program envisaged by Persson and Savulescu. I argue that the irresistible influences exerted by the bioenhancement program harms our capabilities for conducting accurate self-reflection and forming decisions that truly express our will, which subsequently undermine our moral agency. (shrink)

In this article I reconstruct the philosophical conditions for the emergence of the notion of counter-conduct within the framework of Michel Foucault’s study of governmentality, and I explore the reasons for its disappearance after 1978. In particular, I argue that the concept of conduct becomes crucial for Foucault in order to redefine governmental power relations as specific ways to conduct the conduct of individuals: it is initially within this context that, in Security, Territory, Population, he rethinks the problem of (...) class='Hi'>resistance in terms of counter-conduct. However, a few months later, in What is Critique?, Foucault replaces the notion of counter-conduct with that of critical attitude, defined as the particular form that counter-conduct takes in modern times. This notion allows him to highlight the role played by the will in resistance to governmental strategies. But since the notion of counter-conduct is conceptually wider than that of critical attitude, I suggest in conclusion that it could be worth reactivating it as a “historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history.”. (shrink)

A obra apresenta uma discussão sobre o sentido da democracia e sua relação com os padrões de dominação presentes na sociedade. A ordem democrática liberal não pode ser entendida como a efetiva realização dos valores que promete, pois a igualdade entre os cidadãos, a possibilidade de influenciar as decisões coletivas e a capacidade de desfrutar de direitos são sensíveis às múltiplas assimetrias que vigoram na sociedade. Porém, tampouco pode ser lida segundo a crítica convencional às "liberdades formais" e à "democracia (...) burguesa", que a apresenta como mera fachada desprovida de qualquer sentido real. Assim, a democracia não é um ponto de chegada, e sim um momento de um conflito que se manifesta como sendo entre aqueles que desejam domá-la, tornando-a compatível com uma reprodução incontestada das assimetrias sociais, e quem, ao contrário, pretende usá-la para aprofundar contradições e avançar no combate às desigualdades. Portanto, o conflito na democracia é um conflito também sobre o sentido da democracia, isto é, sobre quanto ela pode se realizar no mundo real como projeto emancipatório e quanto as instituições vigentes contribuem para promovê-la ou para refreá-la. (shrink)

Looks at the connections between practices of resistance and political theory.

This article examines the letters to editor genre unique to the Pakistani English newspapers in the post-9/11 socio-political historical context. Bhatia’s framework of applied genre theory was central to this study of the letters to the editor corpus that focused on textual links, rhetorical structure, and argumentative patterns in the Pakistani LE discourse. The corpus-driven discourse analysis demonstrated diversity in organization patterns, and the juxtaposition of general discussion, references to particular incidents, and personal accounts, exhibiting what Bhatia calls the ‘seemingly (...) chaotic realities’ of a society in transition. The findings reveal an overwhelming dissatisfaction of the people vis-a-vis life in general, and the government and its seemingly insurmountable distance from Pakistani people, more specifically. The study draws attention to letters to the editor as a resistant genre in public discourse. (shrink)

The Soviet government utilized a variety of tactics while attempting to secularize the U.S.S.R. Oppression of the Russian Orthodox Church demonstrates how interconnected faith and the former tsarist regime were. It is ironic that while trying to wipe out religion, the Bolsheviks replacement methods carried religious-type qualities as well.

This article examines India’s response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country’s Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world’s largest alternative agriculture movements: natural farming. This puts farmer expertise at the centre of soil fertility and attends (...) to the wider ecological health of soils. Despite emerging as a mode of resistance to dominant agricultural systems, natural farming is now being delivered in increasingly bureaucratic ways by India’s state governments. This article offers Himachal Pradesh as a case study in how the soil is governed, drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with scientists, agricultural officers, non-governmental organisation leaders, and activists. Rather than assess approaches to soil health according to their ecological bottom line, we examine the differing forms of knowledge, expertise and ‘truth’ in the SHC and Natural Farming approaches. Our analysis reveals discontinuities in how farmers are imagined, as well as continuities in how quasi-spiritual language combines in a bionationalist project, positing assumptions about the correct arrangement of life in nationalist terms. We point to a shift toward hybrid and pick-and-mix approaches to soil health, as farmers and their organisers are increasingly invested with the capacities to combine multiple options. We see a fracturing of expertise and the opening up of epistemic pluralism in responses to the soil fertility crisis. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in the number of civilian resistance movements (CRMs) within states to counter government repression and coups d’états through which civilians are on the frontlines of state brutality and mass atrocities. This article considers the implications of CRMs for atrocity prevention and the associated responsibility to protect norm by asking, Should the international community support CRMs as part of its wider commitment to ending mass atrocities? In this article, we evaluate both military (...) and nonmilitary support to CRMs. We argue that in the context of coups and government repression, providing lethal military support to CRMs will often make things worse in terms of atrocity prevention. We however explain that the provision by the international community of nonlethal and nonmilitary support through political recognition, technical assistance, and accountability can yield positive results. We illustrate this argument with the case of Myanmar. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance kills people. According to a recent estimate, ‘7 00 000 people die of resistant infections every year’, and ‘by 2050 10 million lives a year are at risk due to drug resistant infections, as are 100 trillion USD of economic output’.1 Today, ‘bacteria are resistant to nearly all antibiotics that were earlier active against them’.2 For all these reasons, antimicrobial resistance is considered a ‘slowly emerging disaster’3 and a ‘global health security issue’.4 The prospect we are (...) facing is that of a ‘post antibiotic era’,5 in which we risk losing the availability of effective antibiotics and, with them, of medical interventions that require effective antibiotics, such as chemotherapy, transplantation and major surgery. One of the causes of antimicrobial resistance is antimicrobial consumption. As put by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘the use of antibiotics is the single most important factor leading to antibiotic resistance around the world: simply using antibiotics creates resistance’.6 According to the 2016 Review on Antimicrobial Resistance commissioned by the UK Government, ‘more consumption of antibiotics directly leads to more resistance’.1 This is because microbes that are not killed by antimicrobials are more likely to reproduce and proliferate and to pass their resistance genes on to other microbes. Thus, exactly like the consumption of many other finite resources, antibiotic and antimicrobial consumption gives rise to the collective action problem known as ‘tragedy of the commons’: consuming a certain resource, such as antimicrobials, is in an individual’s best short-term interest, but many instances of individual consumption erode the resource and therefore conflict with the collective interest in preserving the good. How to solve a tragedy of the commons? As is the case with the consumption of other finite resources, the answer is quite simple: by rationing the resource. Simon Oczkowski’s article …. (shrink)

Since 1983, legislators and advocates have introduced Land Access Policy Incentives in twenty of the fifty United States. These bills share a demographic goal: to fund land rental or purchase for young and beginning farmers and ranchers. States’ efforts to facilitate land access are part of a global movement to support farmers’ entry into agriculture and to resist farmers’ increasing exclusion from land. We examine the policy creation processes of nine states to describe how coalitions and government leaders are translating (...) their values around land access barriers into policy tools whose political appeal is broad. The bills often pass unanimously, and enrollments are strong: about 2,000 young and beginning US farmers and ranchers will purchase or rent farms this year through a few states’ land access policy programs. We trace the themes from interviews with 66 of the bills’ authors and advocates, and their documentation and media coverage, to demonstrate the values that bipartisan coalitions enlist to construct successful bills and the compromises that make them politically feasible. The coalitions’ values turn on the threats of rising land costs, farm expansion or consolidation, and land conversion out of agriculture. As a group, the policies serve broadacre farming operations while leaving specialty crop farms largely unserved. Two states have endeavored to include all farmers of color among their policies’ beneficiaries. Our findings demonstrate tradeoffs of states’ current Land Access Policy Incentives and suggest next steps for research and advocacy to inform policy development to support next generation farming opportunities. (shrink)

Why do some parents refuse to vaccinate their children? Why do some people keep guns at home, despite scientific evidence of risk to their family members? And why do people use antibiotics for illnesses they cannot possibly alleviate? When it comes to health, many people insist that science is wrong, that the evidence is incomplete, and that unidentified hazards lurk everywhere. In Denying to the Grave, Gorman and Gorman, a father-daughter team, explore the psychology of health science denial. Using several (...) examples of such denial as test cases, they propose six key principles that may lead individuals to reject "accepted" health-related wisdom: the charismatic leader; fear of complexity; confirmation bias and the internet; fear of corporate and government conspiracies; causality and filling the ignorance gap; and the nature of risk prediction. The authors argue that the health sciences are especially vulnerable to our innate resistance to integrate new concepts with pre-existing beliefs. This psychological difficulty of incorporating new information is on the cutting edge of neuroscience research, as scientists continue to identify brain responses to new information that reveal deep-seated, innate discomfort with changing our minds. Denying to the Grave explores risk theory and how people make decisions about what is best for them and their loved ones, in an effort to better understand how people think when faced with significant health decisions. This book points the way to a new and important understanding of how science should be conveyed to the public in order to save lives with existing knowledge and technology. (shrink)

Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy (...) conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings--in technology, empire, and industrialization--are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, _Hermeneutic Communism_ realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought. (shrink)

Surveillance programs supporting the management of One Health issues such as antibiotic resistance are complex systems in themselves. Designing ethical surveillance systems is thus a complex task (retroactive and iterative), yet one that is also complicated to implement and evaluate (e.g., sharing, collaboration, and governance). The governance of health surveillance requires attention to ethical concerns about data and knowledge (e.g., performance, trust, accountability, and transparency) and empowerment ethics, also referred to as a form of responsible self-governance. Ethics in reflexive (...) governance operates as a systematic critical-thinking procedure that aims to define its value: What are the “right” criteria to justify how to govern “good” actions for a “better” future? The objective is to lay the foundations for a methodological framework in empirical bioethics, the rudiments of which have been applied to a case study to building reflexive governance in One Health. This ongoing critical thinking process involves “mapping, framing, and shaping” the dynamics of interests and perspectives that could jeopardize a “better” future. This paper proposes to hybridize methods to combine insights from collective deliberation and expert evaluation through a reflexive governance functioning as a community-based action-ethics methodology. The intention is to empower individuals and associations in a dialogue with society, which operation is carried out using a case study approach on data sharing systems. We based our reasoning on a feasibility study conducted in Québec, Canada (2018–2021), envisioning an antibiotic use surveillance program in animal health for 2023. Using the adaptive cycle and governance techniques and perspectives, we synthesize an alternative governance model rooted in the value of empowerment. The framework, depicted as a new “research and design (R&D)” practice, is linking operation and innovation by bridging the gap between Reflexive, Evaluative, and Deliberative reasonings and by intellectualizing the management of democratizing critical thinking locally (collective ethics) by recognizing its context (social ethics). Drawing on the literature in One Health and sustainable development studies, this article describes how a communitarian and pragmatic approach can broaden the vision of feasibility studies to ease collaboration through public-private-academic partnerships. The result is a process that “reassembles” the One Health paradigm under the perspective of global bioethics to create bridges between the person and the ecosystem through pragmatic ethics. (shrink)

In order to address questions about how to conceptualize and resist epistemic oppression most effectively, this essay develops a critical engagement with Kristie Dotson’s “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Relying on a conceptual clarification of what is meant by “shared epistemic resources,” I argue against Dotson’s distinction which finds some instances of epistemic oppression to be “reducible” to the unequal distribution of social and political power, and some to be distinctively epistemic, and thus “irreducible” to these factors. Rather, I maintain the most (...) effective conceptualization of the phenomenon will find that all of its forms have a distinctive epistemic dimension that must be contended with; they are thus irreducible in Dotson’s sense. In other words, the critical interrogation of governing norms will be necessary for resistance in all three cases. I briefly consider the import of my view by looking at epistemic oppression amidst the presidency of Barack Obama. (shrink)

Bioethics can be considered as a topic, an academic discipline, a field of study, an enterprise in persuasion. The historical specificity of the forms bioethics takes is significant, and raises questions about some of these approaches. Bioethics can also be considered as a governance practice, with distinctive institutions and structures. The forms this practice takes are also to a degree country specific, as the paper illustrates by drawing on the author’s UK experience. However, the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics can (...) provide a starting point for comparisons provided that this does not exclude sensitivity to the socio-political context. Bioethics governance practices are explained by various legitimating narratives. These include response to scandal, the need to restrain irresponsible science, the accommodation of pluralist views, and the resistance to the relativist idea that all opinions count equally in bioethics. Each approach raises interesting questions and shows that bioethics should be studied as a governance practice as a complement to other approaches. (shrink)

Drawing on institutional historical records, interviews and student theses, this article charts the intersection of hospital acquired illness, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), environments of armed conflict, and larger questions of social governance in the specific case of the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in Lebanon. Taking a methodological cue from approaches in contemporary scientific work that understand non-clinical settings as a fundamental aspect of the history and development of AMR, we treat the hospital as not (...) just nested in a set of social and environmental contexts, but frequently housing within itself elements of social and environmental history. AMR in Lebanon differs in important ways from the settings in which global protocols for infection control or rubrics for risk factor identification for resistant nosocomial outbreaks were originally generated. While such differences are all too often depicted as failures of low and middle-income countries (LMIC) to maintain universal standards, the historical question before us is quite the reverse: how have the putatively universal rubrics of AMR and hospital infection control failed to take account of social and environmental conditions that clearly matter deeply in the evolution and spread of resistance? Focusing on conditions of war as an organized chaos in which social, environmental and clinical factors shift dramatically, on the social and political topography of patient transfer, and on a missing “meso” level of AMR surveillance between the local and global settings, we show how a multisectoral One Health approach to AMR could be enriched by an answering multisectoral methodology in history, particularly one that unsettles a canonical focus on the story of AMR in the Euro-American context. (shrink)

The majority of antimicrobials that are produced are administered to animals, particularly food animals. While the overall impact of antimicrobial use in animals on antimicrobial resistance in humans and the environment is unclear, it undeniably has a role. Yet, some degree of antimicrobial use in animals is necessary for animal health and welfare purposes. Balancing the benefits and risks of antimicrobial use in animals is challenging because of the complexity of the problem and limitations in available data. However, a (...) range of measures can be implemented to reduce, refine and optimize antimicrobial use in animals, with a goal of minimizing the impact on human and environmental health while maintaining necessary therapeutic use in animals. A pandemic instrument can provide the necessary foundation for the whole-of-society and whole-of government One Health approach that is required to strengthen surveillance, communication, collaboration, and action. (shrink)