Megaregional trade negotiations have become the subject of heated debate, above all in the context of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this article, I argue that the justice of the global order suffers from its institutional fragmentation into regime complexes. From a republican perspective, which aspires to non-domination as a guiding principles and idea of global justice, regime complexes raise specific and important challenges in that they open the door to (...) specific forms of domination. I thereby challenge a more optimistic outlook in regime complexes, which paints a positive normative picture of regime complexes, arguing that they enable the enhancement of democracy beyond the state and, consequently, have the potential to reduce the democratic deficit in global governance. By drawing attention to how regime complexes reinforce domination-related injustice, this article contributes an original perspective on megaregionals and to exploring the implications of global justice as non-domination. (shrink)

Global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is currently governed by a decentralized regime complex composed of multiple institutions with overlapping and sometimes conflicting principles, norms, rules, and procedures. Such a decentralized regime complex provides certain advantages and disadvantages when compared to a centralized regime. A pandemic instrument can optimize the regime complex for AMR by leveraging the strengths of both centralization and decentralization. Existing climate treaties under the UNFCCC offer lessons for achieving this hybrid approach.

Since their inception in the 1980s, complexity sciences have been described as a revolutionary new domain of research. By describing some of the practices and assumptions of its representatives, the present article shows that this field is an association of subdisciplines laying on existing disciplinary footholds. The general question guiding us here is: On what basis do complexity scientists consider their inquiry methods and results as valuable? To answer it, I describe five “epistemic argumentative regimes,” namely the ways in which (...) complexity scientists argue the credibility of their research, and five “ontological views,” that is the ways in which they interpret the material and formal causes of their study objects and models. Finally, the article proposes the term of “regime of evidence” to designate the specific combination of one ontological view with one or more epistemic argumentative regimes. (shrink)

An increasingly complex governance architecture has become a major characteristic of current global environmental governance, often resulting in different degrees of complexity and fragmentation within global environmental regimes. Social learning processes are introduced by scholars and policy makers alike as management approaches for governing complex dynamic systems in situations that feature a high degree of complexity and uncertainty. Scholars argue that actors in complex environmental issue areas can learn in their social context and could develop the necessary knowledge, attitudes and (...) behaviour to enhance their capacity to effectively address the environmental problem. This is where this article picks up the discussion and assesses the impact of a regime's complexity on its learning capabilities. It further identifies major drivers and barriers of regime learning processes in international environmental regimes. (shrink)

Complexity science has witnessed a number of advances since the publication of Jervis's System Effects. These advances better allow us to untangle the messy elements in a system and predict sets of likely outcomes. However, just because a system is complex doesn't mean that all the ideas relating to complexity—such as agent-based modeling, path dependency, tipping points, between-class versus within-class effects, and networks—are necessarily relevant. One of our tasks is to determine whether they are—and, if so, their implications. As examples, (...) we use China's role in the formation of the United States housing bubble; the federal government's bailout of AIG and Bear Stearns but not Lehman Brothers; and China's failure to experience a regime change such as the Middle East's Arab Spring. (shrink)

In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work (...) organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs. (shrink)

‘Regime shift’ has emerged as a key concept in the environmental sciences. The concept has roots in complexity science and its ecological applications, and is increasingly applied to intertwined social and ecological phenomena. Yet what exactly is a regime shift? We explore this question at three nested levels. First, we propose a broad, contingent, multi-perspective epistemological basis for the concept, seeking to build bridges between its complexity theory origins and critiques from science studies, political ecology, and environmental history. (...) Second, we define the concept in a way that is consistent with this epistemology, building on previous work on speed, scale, stickiness, and interrelationships, but also emphasising human perceptions and rhetorical uses of the notion. Third, we propose a novel typology of the ways in which the regime shift concept is used in analysing social–environmental phenomena in geography and beyond. These uses are categorised along two axes. On the one side, we distinguish between description of past or present changes and normative prescriptions for the future. On the other side, we distinguish between whether the focus is on material shifts (social and ecological) or conceptual shifts (discourses and ideas). We illustrate the typology with reference to social–environmental changes in landscapes around the world that are dominated by plantations or the widespread naturalisation of Australian Acacia species. We conclude that the regime shift concept is a boundary object with value as both an analytical and communicative tool in addressing social–environmental challenges. (shrink)

Powerful, technically complex international compliance regimes have developed recently in certain professions that deal with risk: banking (the Basel II regime), accountancy (IFRS) and the actuarial profession. The need to deal with major risks has acted as a strong driver of international co-operation to create enforceable international semilegal systems, as happened earlier in such fields as international health regulations. This regulation in technical fields contrasts with the failure of an international general-purpose political and legal regime to develop. We (...) survey the new global regulatory systems in the actuarial, banking and accounting fields, with a view to showing how the need to deal reasonably with risk has resulted in an international de facto law solidly based on correct abstract principles of probability. (shrink)

Recent discussions about violence against women have shifted their attention to specific forms of violence in relation to migration and Islam. In this article, I consider different modes of representing women's experiences in French immigrant communities. These representations relate to the French feminist movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (neither whore nor submissive), a movement that in the early 2000s deplored both the sustained degradation of certain banlieue neighborhoods and also the charges and restrictions that this entails, particularly for young women. (...) Drawing on different narratives and images of women's painful experience, I consider, in a first step, how the question of representing violence against (post)migrant women is framed in terms of the tension between universality and particularity within French republicanism. In the next part of my argument, I bring into focus the question of how to access women's suffering. For a perspective on pain not as an interiorized, private experience but as an accessible complex of practices, articulations, memories, visions and social reconfigurations, I consider Smaïn Laacher's sociological study (2008) about written testimonies of violent experience that had been addressed by (post)migrant women to French women organizations such as Ni Putes Ni Soumises. I finally suggest reading women's accounts on violence not in relation to a universal discourse of rights, but as a political contestation of the naturalized order of representing violence, suffering and agency inside French banlieue communities. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's notion of dissensus, such a contestation can be staged through words by those who have no visibility in the representational order, words not to criticize the unaccomplished ideals of universal equality, but to create a universal community and a common language of experience in the mode of ‘as-if’. (shrink)

We present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called chemical organization theory sheds new light on the longstanding complexity–stability debate. Namely, COT provides a novel conceptual landscape plenty of analytic tools to explore the interplay between structure and stability of ecological systems. Given a large set of species and their interactions, COT identifies, in a computationally feasible way, each and every sub-collection of species that is closed and self-maintaining. These sub-collections, (...) called organizations, correspond to the groups of species that can survive together in the long-term. Thus, the set of organizations contains all the stable regimes that can possibly happen in the dynamics of the ecological system. From here, we propose to conceive the notion of stability from the properties of the organizations, and thus apply the vast knowledge on the stability of reaction networks to the complexity–stability debate. As an example of the potential of COT to introduce new mathematical tools, we show that the set of organizations can be equipped with suitable joint and meet operators, and that for certain ecological systems the organizational structure is a non-boolean lattice, providing in this way an unexpected connection between logico-algebraic structures, popular in the foundations of quantum theory, and ecology. (shrink)

: The main purpose of this paper is to understand the complex and many-sided nature of the theory of regimes elaborated by Aristotle in Politics III. We identify the main philosophical and conceptual elements that make it possible for the philosopher to accomplish a vigorous defense of the thesis that kingship can be considered, under certain political circumstances, the best form of government. Resumo: A proposta principal do presente artigo é compreender o caráter complexo e multifacetado da teoria dos regimes (...) elaborada por Aristóteles, no livro III da Política, e, por meio disso, identificar os principais elementos filosóficos e conceituais que tornam possível ao filósofo, nesse momento da obra, efetuar uma vigorosa defesa da tese segundo a qual a realeza pode ser considerada, em determinadas circunstâncias políticas, como a melhor forma de governo. (shrink)

Controversy has long surrounded the complex relationship between King Victor Emmanuel III and the dictator Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. It is clear that the king played decisive roles in bringing Mussolini to power in 1922 and in removing him in 1943. In between, the two coexisted as Italy became a ‘dyarchy’, with two foci of power. The presence of the monarchy at once checked Fascist radicalism and persuaded many conservatives to adhere to the regime. Thanks especially to the (...) monarchy, the innovative thrust of Fascism was channelled in certain delimited directions, toward a statist economy, for example. Still, the relationship between the crown and Mussolini was often rocky, though the king’s reluctance did not prevent alliance with Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism, and war. Tensions were largely papered over by rhetoric and myth-making, as if the elements of Fascism fit together neatly. Despite his opposition to certain particulars, Victor Emmanuel identified with the overall Fascist project to some extent, and he worried that outright opposition to the regime would jeopardize the monarchy. But as the Second World War went badly for Italy, the king finally deposed Mussolini. Nevertheless, Italy soon voted to eliminate the monarchy, discredited by its association with fascism. (shrink)

Early food regimes literature tended to concentrate on the global scale analysis of implicitly negative trends in global food relations. In recent years, early food regimes authors like Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael have begun to consider the sites of resistance, difference and opportunity that have been emerging around, and into contestation with, new food regime relations. This paper examines the emerging global-scale governance mechanism of environmental food auditing—particularly those being promoted by supermarkets and other large food retailers—as an (...) important new dynamic in our understanding of the politics and potentials of food regimes. Commencing with an examination of Friedmann’s corporate environmental food regime, two key dynamics are identified as being pivotal in the rise and decline of global-scale regimes: securing social legitimacy for food relations and the importance of ecological dynamics in global food relations. By extending McMichael’s notion of ‘Food from Nowhere’ versus ‘Food from Somewhere’, the paper interrogates the emergence of a cluster of relations that comprise ‘Food from Somewhere’ and examines whether this cluster of relations has the potential to change some of the constituent ecological dynamics of food regimes. These ecological dynamics have historically been problematic, amply demonstrating Marx’s metabolic rift as the early food regimes solidified relationships between ‘ecologies at a distance’. By using socio-ecological resilience theory, ‘Food from Somewhere’ is characterized as having denser ecological feedbacks and a more complex information flow in comparison to the invisibility and distanciation characterizing earlier regimes as well as contemporary ‘Food from Nowhere’. The conclusion of this article is that while ‘Food from Somewhere’ does provide one site of opportunity for changing some key food relations and ecologies, the social legitimacy of this new form of food relations does rely on the ongoing existence of the opposite, more regressive, pole of world food relations. The key question for resolving this tension appears to be whether new food relations can open up spaces for future, more ecologically connected, global-scale food relations. (shrink)

This monograph focuses on two major themes of current interest---those of complexity and emergence. Neither of the two concepts is, in the very nature of things, precisely defined or easily comprehended. Complexity is all around us while the sciences often analyze entities and events by making simplifications. But the fault lines in the latter get exposed over larger spans of space and time. Complexity entails emergence that involves discontinuity and novelty in the evolution of complex systems, based on the appearance (...) of distinctive spatial and temporal structures. Underlying an occurrence of emergence is an instability involving the transition from one stable regime to another, where distinct space-time scales acquire relevance across the transition. The structures on the two sides of the transition are characterized by distinct sets of state variables where, on one side of the transition, collective variables make their appearance. -/- Complexity and emergence are viewed in this book in the context of the Kantian noumenal-phenomenal divide. The noumenal reality is the repository of all the complexity that there is, while the phenomenal reality emerges from the noumenal in the process of our perception, interpretation, and inference. The noumenal exists in itself as a self-determined whole, and reveals itself to us in fragmentary patches as skewed projections that we assemble to form our phenomenal world that keeps on emerging ceaselessly. Our own biological evolution and the evolution of our phenomenal world occurs in a mutually consistent process, that can be referred to as co-evolution. -/- We seek regularities in the phenomenal world by means of our scientific theories which are often successful, but that success is fragile as, over larger spans of space and time, anomalies make their appearance, giving a lie to the simplicity and regularity previously presumed to have been unearthed. Simplicity, regularity, and harmony are only fleetingly located in the phenomenal world by means of our theories as these keep on being revised endlessly and often radically, thereby generating a mosaic of theories that becomes ever more complex, indicating a pervasive complexity of the noumenal world from which the phenomenal emerges by way of strictly limited projections. The foundational metaphysics on which this book is based tells us that reality is fundamentally complex, while tiny islands of simplicity, regularity, and harmony are embedded in it in isolated space-time domains. (shrink)

Many European planning schools recently celebrated their 50th anniversary: a sign that planning education became a distinct and established discipline in Europe. Simultaneously, political regimes, paradigms, cultures, and economies continue fueling mixed connotations within the planning sector. Additionally, growing wicked problems in built areas emphasize an even greater need for well-trained planners. These challenges span climate crises, wars, authoritarian regimes, socio-political instability, and constantly changing global geopolitics. The increasingly complex demands on planners are highly pertinent for Young Academics (YA). They (...) require political, regulatory, and technical knowledge to navigate the profession. To support them and represent their voices in planning debates, the YA network (YAN) of AESOP was established in 2003. We, the current Coordination Team, use this paper to voice our take on the question of what planning challenges dominate and what can be done to prepare YAs better for the future. Building on plenty discussions within the YAN, literature, and AESOP’s activities at large, we propose: A challenge compilation for the profession, a list of core capacities, and a framework for future education. This shall aid in enabling YAs and educators today to set the foundation for planning sustainable and people-centered settlements tomorrow. (shrink)

Since 2007, Tomás Saraceno has been developing a project that aims to break out of the anthropocentric understanding of communication and coexistence with other animal organisms. In this article, I point out the importance of using modern visualization technologies to analyze and investigate the structure of communication frameworks and their modalities in the animal world, specifically using the example of spiders. The visualization of what is normally invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear rearticulates the realm of the (...) visible and the audible, which Saraceno then uses for art-critical purposes, with the aim of forming a new type of posthuman attunement to the environment and other animal species. The condition for outlining and articulating Saraceno’s artistic vision is the use of the latest technologies of visualization, which operate on the principle of digital and algorithmic code. They synthesize different planes of affectivity and transform, modulate, and combine the different modes of signs into a single technical-organic complex: they offer new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Thus, hybrid ecology in Saraceno’s case does not imply a return to primordial ways of life, but on the contrary, it forms a semiosphere attuned to a specific plane of consistency that enfolds distinct modes of signs and develops them into an expression of hitherto unsuspected variants of life. (shrink)

The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of Nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of Nature have been continuously developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it (...) certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of Nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at Nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name "Gaia" for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on "natural religion", Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of Nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime. (shrink)

Semiclassical theory based upon complexified classical mechanics is developed for periodically time-dependent scattering systems, which are minimal models of multi-dimensional systems. Semiclassical expression of the wave-matrix is derived, which is represented as the sum of the contributions from classical trajectories, where all the dynamical variables as well as the time are extended to the complex-domain. The semiclassical expression is examined by a periodically perturbed 1D barrier system and an excellent agreement with the fully quantum result is confirmed. In a stronger (...) perturbation regime, the tunneling component of the wave-matrix exhibits a remarkable interference fringes, which is clarified by the semiclassical theory as an interference among multiple complex tunneling trajectories. It turns out that such a peculiar behavior is the manifestation of an intrinsic multi-dimensional effect closely related to a singular movement of singularities possessed by the complex classical trajectories. (shrink)

As the aim of the responsible robotics initiative is to ensure that responsible practices are inculcated within each stage of design, development and use, this impetus is undergirded by the alignment of ethical and legal considerations towards socially beneficial ends. While every effort should be expended to ensure that issues of responsibility are addressed at each stage of technological progression, irresponsibility is inherent within the nature of robotics technologies from a theoretical perspective that threatens to thwart the endeavour. This is (...) because the concept of responsibility, despite being treated as such, is not monolithic: rather this seemingly unified concept consists of converging and confluent concepts that shape the idea of what we colloquially call responsibility. From a different perspective, robotics will be simultaneously responsible and irresponsible depending on the particular concept of responsibility that is foregrounded: an observation that cuts against the grain of the drive towards responsible robotics. This problem is further compounded by responsible design and development as contrasted to responsible use. From a different perspective, the difficulty in defining the concept of responsibility in robotics is because human responsibility is the main frame of reference. Robotic systems are increasingly expected to achieve the human-level performance, including the capacities associated with responsibility and other criteria which are necessary to act responsibly. This subsists within a larger phenomenon where the difference between humans and non-humans, be it animals or artificial systems, appears to be increasingly blurred, thereby disrupting orthodox understandings of responsibility. This paper seeks to supplement the responsible robotics impulse by proposing a complementary set of human rights directed specifically against the harms arising from robotic and artificial intelligence technologies. The relationship between responsibilities of the agent and the rights of the patient suggest that a rights regime is the other side of responsibility coin. The major distinction of this approach is to invert the power relationship: while human agents are perceived to control robotic patients, the prospect for this to become reversed is beginning. As robotic technologies become ever more sophisticated, and even genuinely complex, asserting human rights directly against robotic harms become increasingly important. Such an approach includes not only developing human rights that ‘protect’ humans but also ‘strengthen’ people against the challenges introduced by robotics and AI [This distinction parallels Berlin’s negative and positive concepts of liberty ], by emphasising the social and reflective character of the notion of humanness as well as the difference between the human and nonhuman. This will allow using the human frame of reference as constitutive of, rather than only subject to, the robotic and AI technologies, where it is human and not technology characteristics that shape the human rights framework in the first place. (shrink)

The sociology of science has shown that the scientific quest for truth, framed by the search for objectivity was granting objects of knowledge the form of independent and autonomous things, “data” already given and preexisting their observation. But do “real” objects only fit the form of data or things? If not, to which other form and objectivity do they fit? The author considers the question by examining the dispute between scientists and vintners on the issue of terroir, a complex combination (...) of viticulture and wine-making practices and agro-climactic factors, which gives wines a particular taste, or terroir typicity. For scientists who are unable to reduce it to a stable list of determining factors, terroir is an unfounded notion, an imaginary social construction, and an economic barrier. Producers, on the other hand, along with the wider distribution network of terroir wines, consider terroir as a real object, although one whose manifestations cannot be evaluated using the same procedures as those of scientists. By analyzing how proof of terroir is implemented, the author uncovers a regime of existence of objects different from the scientific regime: a pluralist one governed by critical discussion from which objects emerge as distributed results of a production process. (shrink)

In this thesis we have examined the complex interaction between intellectual property rights, life sciences and global justice. Science and the innovations developed in its wake have an enormous effect on our daily lives, providing countless opportunities but also raising numerous problems of justice. The complexity of a problem however does not liberate society as a whole from moral responsibilities. Our intellectual property regimes clash at various points with human rights law and commonly held notions of justice.

Blood coagulation is regulated through a complex network of biochemical reactions of blood factors. The main acting enzyme is thrombin whose propagation in blood plasma leads to fibrin clot formation. Spontaneous clot formation is normally controlled through the action of different plasma inhibitors, in particular, through the thrombin binding by antithrombin. In the current study we develop a mathematical model of clot formation both in quiescent plasma and in blood flow and determine the analytical conditions on the antithrombin concentration corresponding (...) to different regimes of blood coagulation. (shrink)

This article discusses the normative implications of the European integration process by addressing the question of the legitimacy deficit in the EU and its member states. It starts from an analysis of legitimacy as implying a distinction between `polity' and `regime', each of which has an `internal' and an `external' dimension relating respectively to the subjective perceptions of citizens and to more objective- and universalist-oriented criteria. Standard accounts of the integration process and the constitutionalisation of the EU have overlooked (...) the complex ways in which polity- and regime-building interact. They have also emphasized the external legitimacy of the EU while neglecting the internal dimension. Both descriptively and prescriptively, the EU lies in between the interpretations offered by neofunctionalist or intergovernmental realists and federal idealists. The `internal' norms channelled through the EU's `regime' have helped form the economic interests appealed to by the former, but in rather different ways to that assumed by the latter. The result has been a polycentric `polity' with a multi-level `regime'. Consequently, we reject having either an EU written constitution that goes beyond the treaties or a federal legislature, advocating instead the `republican' model of a `mixed commonwealth'. (shrink)

Emanuel Copilaș ABSTRACT: The present article aims to offer a synoptic picture of communist Romania’s relations with Third World countries during the Ceaușescu regime. Within these relations, economic and geopolitical motivations coexisted along with ideological ones, thus making the topic one of the most interesting and relevant key for understanding RSR’s complex and cunning international...

Using relevant theoretical approaches, this article seeks ways in which to consider the conditions of existence of a politics of recognition through the elaboration of ‘regimes of recognition’. The ‘regimes of recognition’ are developed through an understanding of decentred political and social formations that, nevertheless, foreground a series of sites that are central to the politics of recognition: democracy, citizenship and the nation. This article takes issue with current accounts of the demise of the nation as both imaginary and territorially (...) realized. Instead, it offers a substantive account of political activism in Ecuador as one moment in the politics of recognition. (shrink)

In the past few decades, much political-philosophical reflection has been dedicated to the realm of "the political." Many of the key figures in contemporary political theory—Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Reinhart Koselleck, Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj i ek, among others—have dedicated themselves to explaining power relations, but in many cases they take the concept of the political for granted, as if it were a given, an eternal essence. In An Archaeology of the Political, Elías José Palti argues that the (...) dimension of reality known as the political is not a natural, transhistorical entity. Instead, he claims that the horizon of the political arose in the context of a series of changes that affirmed the power of absolute monarchies in seventeenth-century Europe and was successively reconfigured from this period up to the present. Palti traces this series of redefinitions accompanying alterations in regimes of power, thus describing a genealogy of the concept of the political. Perhaps most important, An Archaeology of the Political brings to theoretical discussions a sound historical perspective, illuminating the complex influences of both theology and secularization on our understanding of the political in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Blood coagulation is regulated through a complex network of biochemical reactions of blood factors. The main acting enzyme is thrombin whose propagation in blood plasma leads to fibrin clot formation. Spontaneous clot formation is normally controlled through the action of different plasma inhibitors, in particular, through the thrombin binding by antithrombin. In the current study we develop a mathematical model of clot formation both in quiescent plasma and in blood flow and determine the analytical conditions on the antithrombin concentration corresponding (...) to different regimes of blood coagulation. (shrink)

Some mathematical theories in physics justify their explanatory superiority over earlier formalisms by the clarity of their postulates. In particular, axiomatic reconstructions drive home the importance of the composition rule and the continuity assumption as two pillars of quantum theory. Our approach sits on these pillars and combines new mathematics with a testable prediction. If the observer is defined by a limit on string complexity, information dynamics leads to an emergent continuous model in the critical regime. Restricting it to (...) a family of binary codes describing ‘bipartite systems,’ we find strong evidence of an upper bound on bipartite correlations equal to 2.82537. This is measurably different from the Tsirelson bound. The Hilbert space formalism emerges from this mathematical investigation as an effective description of a fundamental discrete theory in the critical regime. (shrink)

Living systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals (...) and perturbations, due to the action of a dedicated subsystem which is operationally distinct from the regulated ones. The role of regulation, however, is not exhausted by its contribution to maintain a living system’s viability. While enhancing robustness, regulatory mechanisms play a fundamental role in the realization of an autonomous biological organization. Specifically, they are at the basis of the remarkable integration of biological systems, insofar as they coordinate and modulate the activity of distinct functional subsystems. Moreover, by implementing complex and hierarchically organized control architectures, they allow for an increase in structural and organizational complexity while minimizing fragility. Finally, they endow living systems, from their most basic unicellular instances, with the capability to control their own internal dynamics to adaptively respond to specific features of their interaction with the environment, thus providing the basis for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition. (shrink)

Did Tocqueville treat democracy as a type of society, as a political regime, or in terms of their interactions? This paper argues against the assumption that Tocqueville's concept of this relationship remained constant over his three decades as a theorist. Beginning with his literal acceptance of Guizot's doctrinaire definition of democracy as an état social, Tocqueville then developed an eclectic political sociology. Without rejecting the significance of social organization for politics, he often reverted to Montesquieu's theory of the complex (...) interaction between the social and political. Finally, after the Second Republic's violent end by the coup he had as a statesman sought to prevent, Tocqueville was disgusted by the pseudo-democratic Bonapartist arguments used by the Second Empire's apologists to legitimate it. His final position was that any adequate definition of democracy had to include, not only social equality, but also political liberty and the participation of citizens in a government incorporating a genuine political life. (shrink)

The philosophy of blockchain technology is concerned, among other things, with blockchain ontology, how it might be characterised, how it is being created, implemented, and adopted, how it operates in the world, and how it evolves over time. This paper concentrates on whether Bitcoin/blockchain can be considered a complex system and, if so, whether it is a chaotic one. Beyond mere academic curiosity, a positive response would raise concerns about the likelihood of Bitcoin/blockchain entering a 2010-Flash-Crash-type of chaotic regime, (...) with catastrophic consequences for financial systems based on it. The paper starts by highlighting the relevant details of the Bitcoin/blockchain ecosystem formed by the blockchain itself, bitcoin end users, capital gains seekers, miners, full nodes maintainers, and developers, and their interactions. Then the Information Theory of Complex Systems is briefly discussed for later use. Finally, the blockchain is investigated with the help of Crutchfield's Statistical Complexity measure. The low non-null statistical complexity value obtained suggests that the blockchain may be considered algorithmically complicated but hardly a complex system and unlikely to enter a chaotic regime. (shrink)

Intellectual property has historically been a self-contained policy at the international level. With the introduction of the TRIPs Agreement in 1994 and developments since the conclusion of the TRIPs Agreement, the relationship between intellectual property policy and other areas of public policy has become much more complex and interactive. This shift reflects the centrality of intellectual property in the knowledge economy, the rapid development of enabling technologies, notably the Internet and biotechnology, and the advent of the networked society. The consequences (...) of this shift are manifold and herald the increased sophistication and complexity that may be expected of intellectual property regimes in the knowledge economy. (shrink)

The theory of boundary organizations was developed to address an important group of institutions in American society neglected by scholarship in science studies and political science. The long-term stability of scientific and political institutions in the United States has enabled a new class of institutions to grow and thrive as mediators between the two. As originally developed, this structural feature of these new institutions—that is, their location on the boundary between science and politics—dominated theoretical frame-works for explaining their behavior. Applying (...) the theory of boundary organizations to international society requires a refocusing of some of the theory’s central features, however. In this article, I introduce a new framework—hybrid management—to explain the activities of boundary organizations in the more complex, contingent, and contested settings of global politics. I develop the framework of hybrid management using the specific example of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice. (shrink)

The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed an explosion in the population of women prisoners in Europe, North America and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison construction. This article argues that this new pattern of women's incarceration has been forged by three overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental shift in the role of the state that has occurred as a result of neo-liberal globalization. The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of what has been (...) labelled a ‘prison industrial complex’ made up of an intricate web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs. These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex. The article calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. The article seeks to reveal the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever increasing numbers. (shrink)

The present article aims to offer a synoptic picture of communist Romania’s relations with Third World countries during the Ceaușescu regime. Within these relations, economic and geopolitical motivations coexisted along with ideological ones, thus making the topic one of the most interesting and relevant key for understanding RSR’s complex and cunning international strategy. However, I intend to prove that mere pragmatism is not enough to comprehend the drive behind Ceaușescu’s diplomatic efforts in post-colonial Africa; ideological factors need also to (...) be taken into account. (shrink)

Living systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals (...) and perturbations, due to the action of a dedicated subsystem which is operationally distinct from the regulated ones. The role of regulation, however, is not exhausted by its contribution to maintain a living system’s viability. While enhancing robustness, regulatory mechanisms play a fundamental role in the realization of an autonomous biological organization. Specifically, they are at the basis of the remarkable integration of biological systems, insofar as they coordinate and modulate the activity of distinct functional subsystems. Moreover, by implementing complex and hierarchically organized control architectures, they allow for an increase in structural and organizational complexity while minimizing fragility. Finally, they endow living systems, from their most basic unicellular instances, with the capability to control their own internal dynamics to adaptively respond to specific features of their interaction with the environment, thus providing the basis for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition. (shrink)

In this way, his diffuse if not altogether random behavior is already action in the world, directed towards ends which he did not lay down and yet which satisfy his needs. The neonate is integrated in a system of immediate utility, and his body is surrounded by a complex of instruments, utensils, and commodities, never made or put there by him but nonetheless constituting the meaning of his objectivity. Hence his objectivity, or his body as a significant object, is constituted (...) by the activity of others. Although he has not himself made or given himself this meaning, it is what he is, for his needs are silenced and this is decided according to an empirical test of satisfaction as drive reduction. At the stage of immediate utility it cannot be maintained that the child's objectivity or the systematic interpretation of his behavior is forced upon him, since the system works and his needs are satisfied. We conclude, then, that his body is his being-for-others and that he is this body although he cannot pose it for himself; that is to say, he cannot manipulate and control the complex of instruments that surround him and thus give to his gestures the meaning they have for others. (shrink)

This article engages with pragmatic sociology to understand an environmental dispute and its underlying moral issues in a direct-democratic and bottom-up setting. The non-establishment of a planned national park in the Swiss Alps serves as a case study to analyse principles of worth presented in national park negotiations. We point to the complex nature of conservation negotiations and argue that loosely defined ideas of the common good can lead to additional difficulties for a bottom-up project. Moreover, we open up new (...) ground for discussion concerning the interplay of nature conservation and direct democracy. (shrink)

A masterful new account of old regime France by one of the world's most prominent political philosophers France before 1789 traces the historical origins of France's National Constituent Assembly of 1789, providing a vivid portrait of the ancien régime and its complex social system in the decades before the French Revolution. Jon Elster writes in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described this tumultuous era with an eye toward individual and group psychology and the functioning of institutions. Whereas (...) Tocqueville saw the old regime as a breeding ground for revolution, Elster, more specifically, identifies the rural and urban conflicts that fueled the constitution-making process from 1789 to 1791. He presents a new approach to history writing, one that supplements the historian's craft with the tools and insights of modern social science. Elster draws on important French and Anglo-American scholarship as well as a treasure trove of historical evidence from the period, such as the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the journals of the lawyer Barbier and the bookseller Hardy, the Remonstrances of Malesherbes, and La Bruyère's maxims. Masterfully written and unparalleled in scope, France before 1789 is the first volume of a trilogy that promises to transform our understanding of constitution making in the eighteenth century. Volume 2 will look at revolutionary America in the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 while the third volume will examine all facets of the French and American assemblies, from how they elected their delegates and organized their proceedings to how they addressed issues of separation of powers and representation. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the multilevel selection -1 to MLS-2 model of a major transition is incomplete because it overlooks a crucial component of fitness. It addresses that the evolution of individuality literature has failed to account for expansive fitness and that expansive fitness differences play an important role in the transition to regimes sensitive to the fitness of the corporate agent. It discusses multilevel evolution during the three phases of transitions in individuality: the aggregate phase, the group phase, and (...) the individual phase. This chapter shows that the path a lineage takes through the phases of transitions is not fixed, but determined by ecology. (shrink)

This paper begins with the lived accounts of emergency and critical care medical interventions in which an unhoused person is brought to the emergency department in cardiac arrest. The case is a dramatised representation of the extent to which biopolitical forces via reduction to bare life through biopolitical and necropolitical operations are prominent influences in nursing and medical care. This paper draws on the scholarship of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe to offer a theoretical analysis of the power (...) dynamics that influence the health care and death care of patients who are caught in the auspices of a neoliberal capitalist healthcare apparatus. This paper offers analysis of the overt displays of biopower over those individuals cast aside as generally unworthy of access to healthcare in a postcolonial capitalist system, in addition to the ways in which humans are reduced to ‘bare life’ in their dying days. We analyse this case study through Agamben's description of thanatopolitics, a ‘regime of death’, and the technologies that accompany the dying process, particularly in that of the homo sacer. Additionally, this paper illustrates the ways in which necropolitics and biopower are integral to understanding how the most advanced and expensive medical interventions make visible the political values of the healthcare system and how nurses and healthcare functions in these deathworlds. The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater understanding of biopolitical and necropolitical operations in acute and critical care environments, and to offer guidance to nurses in these spaces as they work to uphold ethical duties in a system that increasingly dehumanises. (shrink)

The notion of the “deep state” or a “state within a state” is creepy, to say the least. It indicates the existence of a shadowy group of unelected bureaucrats deeply embedded in the military-intelligence establishment secretly manipulating government policy. International relations scholars and public administration experts associate deep states with authoritarian regimes, such as Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and pre-civil-war Syria. However, as we’re finding out, the U.S. has its own deep state. While some media outlets portray deep state talk as (...) tantamount to conspiracy theory, the deep state is quite real. (shrink)

Intellectual property (IP) can internalize positive externalities associated with the creation and discovery of ideas, thereby increasing investment in efforts to create and discover ideas. However, IP law also causes negative externalities. Strict IP rights raise the transaction costs associated with consuming and building on existing ideas. This causes a tragedy of the anticommons, in which valuable resources are underused and underdeveloped. By disincentivizing creative projects that build on existing ideas, IP protection, even if it increases original innovation, can inadvertently (...) reduce the rate of iterative innovation. The net effect of IP law on innovation and welfare depends on the relative magnitude of these positive and negative externalities. We argue that the current regime probably suffers from excessive, and excessively rigid, IP protection. This motivates the search for institutional alternatives and complements. We suggest that a monocentric IP rights regime may not be the only, or the most efficient, way to internalize the positive externalities of innovation. The knowledge economy supports the emergence of diverse, polycentric forms of bottom-up self-governance, both market and community led, that entail the citizen coproduction of the norms and practices of intellectual creation and discovery. (shrink)

This paper outlines the methodological and empirical limitations of analysing the potential relationship between complex social phenomena such as democracy and inequality. It shows that the means to assess how they may be related is much more limited than recognised in the existing literature that is laden with contradictory hypotheses and findings. Better understanding our scientific limitations in studying this potential relationship is important for research and policy because many leading economists and other social scientists such as Acemoglu and Robinson (...) mistakenly claim to identify causal linkages between inequality and democracy but at times still inform policy. In contrast to the existing literature, the paper argues that ‘structural’ or ‘causal’ mechanisms that may potentially link the distribution of economic wealth and different political regimes will remain unknown given reasons such as their highly complex and idiosyncratic characteristics, fundamental econometric constraints and analysis at the macro-level. Neither new data sources, different analysed time periods nor new data analysis techniques can resolve this question and provide robust, general conclusions about this potential relationship across countries. Researchers are thus restricted to exploring rough correlations over specific time periods and geographic contexts with imperfect data that are very limited for cross-country comparisons. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 epidemic, draconian countermeasures forbidding nonessential human activities have been adopted in several countries worldwide, providing an unprecedented setup for testing and quantifying the current impact of humankind on climate and for driving potential sustainability policies in the postpandemic era from a perspective of complex systems. In this study, we consider heterogeneous sources of environmental and human activity observables, considered as components of a complex socioenvironmental system, and apply information theory, network science, and Bayesian inference to analyze their (...) structural relations and nonlinear dynamics between January 2019 and August 2020 in northern Italy, i.e., before, during, and after the national lockdown. The topological structure of a complex system strongly impacts its collective behavior; therefore, mapping this structure is essential to fully understand the functions of the system as a whole and its fragility to unexpected disruptions or shocks. To this aim, we unravel the causal relationships between the 16 environmental conditions and human activity variables, mapping the backbone of the complex interplay between intervening physical observables—such as NO2 emissions, energy consumption, intervening climate variables, and different flavors of human mobility flows—to a causal network model. To identify a tipping point during the period of observation, denoting the presence of a regime shift between distinct network states, we introduce a novel information-theoretic method based on statistical divergence widely used in statistical physics. We find that despite a measurable decrease in NO2 concentration, due to an overall decrease in human activities, locking down a region as a climate change mitigation is an insufficient remedy to reduce emissions. Our results provide a functional characterization of socioenvironmental interdependent systems, and our analytical framework can be used, more generally, to characterize environmental changes and their interdependencies using statistical physics. (shrink)

In this chapter we offer a critical analysis of organizational models about the process of origins of life and, thereby, a reflection about life itself (understood in a general, minimal sense). We begin by demarcating the idea of organization as an explanatory construct, linking it to the complex relationships and transformations that the material parts of (proto-)biological systems establish to maintain themselves under non-equilibrium dynamic conditions. The diverse ways in which this basic idea has been applied within the prebiotic field (...) are then reviewed in relative detail. We distinguish between “network” and “protocell” approaches, discussing their specific implications and explaining the greater relevance of the latter in the current state of affairs. Despite the key role that such organizational approaches play (and should keep playing) to advance on the problem of primordial biogenesis, the second half of our contribution is devoted to argue that they must be combined with other explanatory accounts, which go beyond the physiology of any single (proto-)organism. With that aim, we underline the fundamental differences between the autonomous, metabolic dynamics that individual (proto-)cells perform and the evolutionary and ecological dynamics that take place in a collective and trans-generational dimension. Apart from obvious gaps in the characteristic temporal and spatial scales involved, the corresponding causal and interactive regimes also reveal themselves as neatly distinct, what is reflected in the unpaired functional integration and the agent behavior displayed by biological individuals. Nevertheless, any living organism (and life in a wider, general sense) derives from the deep interweaving of those two phenomenological domains: namely, the “individual-metabolic” and the “collective-evolutionary” domains. At the end of the chapter, we propose the principle of dynamical decoupling as the core idea to develop a more comprehensive theoretical framework to understand how this intricate, causally asymmetric connection must be articulated during the actual process of biogenesis (as it happened here on Earth or anywhere else in the universe), so that life’s minimal complexity threshold is reached. (shrink)

Corporate ethics has undergone significant change in response to environmental issues, and is beginning to evolve further in response to emerging notions of social responsibility, defined in terms of human rights issues. Three dimensions of ethical behaviour – national, international and theoretical – are defined and illustrated through three case studies. The increasingly complex interaction between two of the dimensions, national and international in a global context, poses a significant challenge to corporations attempting to develop and extend best practices. Essentially, (...) that challenge is not only one of corporate compliance, either voluntary or enforced by a system of regulatory and legal measures, but also a question of responsibility for damage or abuse. Three cases are presented which illustrate the complexity of the interactions. The Simon Jones case emphasises the dangers of casual work in multinational labour transactions, and the shortcomings of national remedies even in an advanced economy such as the UK. The second case, Tommy Hilfiger et al., raises a complex set of questions regarding national and international responsibility for compensation in developing economies. The third case, the Royal/Dutch Shell Group, serves as a model of voluntary corporate reform designed to bridge the gap between principles and practice both nationally and internationally. (shrink)