Global Relations Research Articles

Potential of the Use of Functional Beverages from Plant By-Products in the Reduction the Damage to Human Health Caused by SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging the world's socio-economic and health systems and exemplifies the degree of global interdependencies. This opinion-paper reviews challenge, potential solutions for the COVID-19 coronavirus that focuses on Nutraceutical fermented beverages were intensively studied and promoted by various organizations in the field of food nutrition and health WHO (World Health Organization). In search of experimental confirmation of the numerous fermented beverages health-promoting aspects cited previously.

Hospital quality interdependence in a competitive institutional environment: Evidence from Italy

In this paper we explore the geographical scope of hospital competition on quality, using Italian data on over 207,000 patients admitted to 174 hospitals located in the Lombardy region in the years 2008–2014. We propose an economic framework that incorporates both local and global forms of quality competition among hospitals, the latter emerging from periodically released hospital performance rankings. Under this framework, we derive the hospital reaction functions and, accordingly, we characterize the structure of interdependence among hospital qualities. We employ recent methods from the graphical modelling literature to estimate the set of local rivals for each hospital, as well as the degree of global interdependence among hospitals. Consistently with our micro-founded framework, our results show a significant positive degree of short- and long-range dependence, suggesting the existence of forms of local and global competition amongst hospitals with relevant implications for health care policy.

What Climate Models can tell us about Pacific Climate Variability [Video

Global climate models are the main tool of climate scientists who investigate the impact of human action on future climate change. Run on supercomputers, these models can simulate global interdependencies of diverse climate factors such as ocean circulation, sea level rise, or vegetation growth. They also integrate socio-economic models that predict population growth, GDP, actions of cities and transportation, and air pollution. However, different models or model ensembles produce different future scenarios because the systems that are modeled are extremely chaotic: they contain a lot of “noise” and the slightest change in assumed background conditions or the recognition of feedback processes between, for example, ocean surface temperatures and cloud formations, will produce very different future scenarios. Since the apparent differences between climate models are due to both random internal climate variability and real structural differences in model physics, climate scientists are running model experiments (computer simulations) that compare the performance of the different models in order to better understand the physics behind them. <br> Video available at: https://vimeo.com/527397952

“We Are the Future”: Critical Inquiry and Social Action in the Classroom

This study explored how engaging in critical inquiry through Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global fostered social action with high school students. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from critical inquiry and social action and employing a collective case study approach, we focused on six diverse students from two of the 18 teams who participated in a PBI Global examining global water and sanitation over a two-month period. Data sources included semi-structured student interviews, students’ posts and uploads in a shared writing space, and students’ multimodal products of learning. Three themes emerged from the analysis across the data sources: synergistic collaboration, critical analysis and creation of multimodal texts, and understanding global and local interdependence to take social action. The discussion illuminates how students’ engagement in critical inquiry and social action ignite the emergence of Freire’s notion of critical consciousness.

A Globalized Era: ICT and its Implications on Higher Education in a Pandemic Period (With Special Reference to Mizoram)

Globalization and global interdependence from a multi-dimensional perspective have generated a web of connectivity and integration across all areas of the globe. Events or outbreaks are no longer confined to any particular region but have widespread repercussions and long-lasting impacts around the world. The revolution of ICT has further intensified the nature of dependence and the commonalities in terms of practises and policies located across the globe. Education and its various connotations is a powerful tool and a process where ICT dependence and reliance are closely intertwined. This study aims to highlight the nature of changes and development brought about in the field of higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic period and the role played by ICT in the context of Mizoram.

The Risk as a Communication Phenomenon Within McLuhan’s Global Village

Positioning one of the crucial dimensions of recent global society - global interdependence in the center of interest, the essential goal of this paper is primarily to reflect on the communication potential of global risks as a new reflection of interdependence within McLuhan’s global village. The paper explains how the media’s reduction of the world to the level of a global village has affected and transformed the relevant determinants of various risks, but also the process by which different societies cooperate and communicate to deal with them effectively. Speaking primarily from the perspective of global interdependence, as a product of a globalized-driven change in the communicative-technological-social paradigm, the paper is oriented towards theoretical consideration of the position of risk as a communication phenomenon in the modern age.

Local and global encoder network for semantic segmentation of Airborne laser scanning point clouds

Interpretation of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point clouds is a critical procedure for producing various geo-information products like 3D city models, digital terrain models and land use maps. In this paper, we present a local and global encoder network (LGENet) for semantic segmentation of ALS point clouds. Adapting the KPConv network, we first extract features by both 2D and 3D point convolutions to allow the network to learn more representative local geometry. Then global encoders are used in the network to exploit contextual information at the object and point level. We design a segment-based Edge Conditioned Convolution to encode the global context between segments. We apply a spatial-channel attention module at the end of the network, which not only captures the global interdependencies between points but also models interactions between channels. We evaluate our method on two ALS datasets namely, the ISPRS benchmark dataset and DCF2019 dataset. For the ISPRS benchmark dataset, our model achieves state-of-the-art results with an overall accuracy of 0.845 and an average F1 score of 0.737. With regards to the DFC2019 dataset, our proposed network achieves an overall accuracy of 0.984 and an average F1 score of 0.834.

New Museum Order

In the framework of the 2nd Commodity Frontiers Initiative Journal with the theme of ‘Stimulants’ I could not have wished for a better-suited match to interview than Roger M. Buergel and Sophia Prinz from the Johann Jacobs Museum, which owes its existence to the coffee and cacao trade, but more importantly is unique in its endeavour to lay bare the intrinsically interwoven histories of commodities. The museum is dedicated to the global interdependencies of our life-world that become especially clear when tracing the history of important trade goods and their transport routes. Products such as coffee, cocoa, petroleum, opium, sugar, silk, watches and diamonds have had a hand in shaping our planet, impacted cultures and revolutionized societies.

Mapping the Global Business Cycle Network

We build a weighted network of business cycle similarities across countries and assess its main quantitative properties. Business cycle similarity is measured at the annual frequency using the Euclidean distance. Network analysis is well suited to map the full set of pairwise similarities at an annual frequency. We find that the global business cycle network has become more dense and more homogeneous over time, reflecting global trends such as rising trade and financial integration. At the same time, similarity exhibits a jagged pattern, underscoring the importance of also taking into account short-term factors to explain the dynamics of global business cycle interdependence. Unlike earlier studies focused on aggregate measures of similarity, our empirical approach is able to uncover and assess both the long-term trend rise and the short-term pattern of business cycle similarity.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE SYSTEM OF THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN POST COVID-19 PERIOD

The article analyses possible scenarios of global world order followed by the outbreak of COVID-19. It assesses to what extend the pandemic will impact the process of transformation of the system of international relations and discusses possible scenario of the global politics for post-COVID period. The article suggests that the expected outcome of the pandemic will be bi-polar world order, which will much differ from the system of the International Relations of Cold War period. The impact of COVID-19 on ongoing processes will be tangible. In the meanwhile, bearing in mind emerging neorealistic tendencies, enhancing role of states as pivotal actors of international system and current level of global inter-dependence, the international relations cannot return to the epoch where political realism had dominant position in global affairs. The article concludes that the pandemic will not drastically change the international order, but it will decently accelerate international processes, started years ago.

Предхаос как среднесрочное состояние глобальной политики и экономики

The contemporary world is characterized with slowdown of key processes of global institutional development at the background of instrumental capabilities for geo-economic competition that could now include the methods of political and economic pressure upon competitors. Such a state of affairs could be called «a pre-chaos» that means the backpedaling major developments in the global geoeconomics (including the investment ones) as well as the political one while waiting for the massive turbulence that could include application of force. The USA are interested in maximum prolongation of the pre-chaos state in order to buy time to consolidate the elite and stabilize the society socially. But the prolonged existence of world economy within the frame of pre-chaos model that among other things results in avoiding the longer-term economic decisions including investment-related ones, only increases the destructive potential of future crisis with the destruction of the vital elements of the system of global economic interdependence.

Socioecological System Transformation: Lessons from COVID-19

Environmentalists have long warned of a coming shock to the system. COVID-19 exposed fragility in the system and has the potential to result in radical social change. With socioeconomic interruptions cascading through tightly intertwined economic, social, environmental, and political systems, many are not working to find the opportunities for change. Prefigurative politics in communities have demonstrated rapid and successful responses to the pandemic. These successes, and others throughout history, demonstrate that prefigurative politics are important for response to crisis. Given the failure of mainstream environmentalism, we use systemic transformation literature to suggest novel strategies to strengthen cooperative prefigurative politics. In this paper, we look at ways in which COVID-19 shock is leveraged in local and global economic contexts. We also explore how the pandemic has exposed paradoxes of global connectivity and interdependence. While responses shed light on potential lessons for ecological sustainability governance, COVID-19 has also demonstrated the importance of local resilience strategies. We use local manufacturing as an example of a possible localized, yet globally connected, resilience strategy and explore some preliminary data that highlight possible tradeoffs of economic contraction.

Using equity market reactions and network analysis to infer global supply chain interdependencies in the context of COVID-19

While the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of “just-in-time” international supply chains and is set to further accelerate their reconfigurations, very little is known about how global production networks are linked together at the firm level, making it difficult to assess where the dependencies lie. In this study, we use firm-level data on customer-supplier relationships from over 170 economies and network analysis tools to map global supply chain dependencies and shed light on the complex interconnections that facilitated the propagation of COVID-19’s economic impact. Leveraging the early virus outbreak in China as an exogenous shock, we first study the equity price responses of China-linked firms to news of virus-induced lockdowns, finding that markets priced in significant transmission effects of the coronavirus shock across global supply chains. Then, we dive deeper into the production networks of three globalised industries, whose unique and convoluted network structures may serve as a reminder that “reshoring” supply chains is easier said than done.

Globalization, Urbanization and COVID-19: Implications for a World All Too Connected​

It takes approximately forty hours to circumnavigate the Earth via airplane. The fastest-moving car travels over 300 miles per hour (MPH) and NASA’s latest spacecraft is set to hit a record speed of 430,000 MPH. Since the ‘80s, technological revolutions have produced some of the world’s most innovative transport inventions, challenging the boundaries of space and time all while fulfilling our human desire to move freely from one place to another. Similarly, globalized trade and urbanization also challenge spatial and temporal borders, as the world economy further integrates. Globalization has propelled humanity into the modern economic era of today, granting us access to new cultures, markets and talent at speeds unseen before. However, there is one significant disadvantage to increasing transborder flows: you can travel from Monrovia, Liberia to Dallas, Texas within the limited temporal window of Ebola’s incubation period (Huebener et al., 2015). With this increase in connectivity, comes an increase in global interdependence.

Identification of globalizing factors of socio-economic development: the concept of endogenization

The article addresses the problem of the impact of the modern socio-economic development globalization factors in the context of its endogenization. The authors argue that forming of the global economic system with high interdependence between regional integration entities and interaction of national economies in global conditions of uncertainty, instability, and unpredictability constitute the nature and main feature of modern globalization processes. Global interdependence is the major factor of global interaction for an efficient solution to joint problems, their prevention, and realization of joint interests, including political, economic, social, and environmental, etc. The fundamental interests of global interaction include the Sustainable Development Goals directed at “building forward better” based on the “leave no one behind” principle defined in the UN Sustainable Development Summit Resolution “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” and the implementation of the Paris Climate Accords and European Green Deal. The globalization factors are identified following the methodology of KOF Globalization Index calculation on the national level: by globalization types – de-facto and de-jure; by the kind of globalization – economic, social, political; by the sub-kind of globalization – trade-based, finance-based, interpersonal, informational, cultural. The following issues are determined based on the content analysis of analytical, scientific, and legal sources and governance practices in the socio-economic development: main factors affecting de-facto the economic growth in Ukraine and its regions; external political factors that strengthen the relationship between the national economy and modern globalization processes and foster endogenous development of Ukrainian regions; factors of goal-oriented endogenization of regional development in Ukraine (domestic political, spatial, economic, social, environmental) as prospective drivers of sustainable socio-economic growth in Ukraine.

Global Interdependency and Strategic Neocorporatism: The Social Identity Dynamics of Progressive Social Movements Utilizing International Sustainable Development Regimes

Global Interdependency and Strategic Neocorporatism: The Social Identity Dynamics of Progressive Social Movements Utilizing International Sustainable Development Regimes

COVID-19’s Impacts and the End of Globalization?

With the COVID-19’s impacts to humanity, some have quickly shouted, believed and thought abusively to the end of globalization. But in this paper, following to the dimension of the strategic approach of analysis, tinged with a bit of globalism, I propose to explain why globalization could not end with the COVID-19’s impacts. In total, I advance successively throughout this paper, five (5) core arguments, which together ostensibly support my central point, pointing to the impossibility of arriving at the end of globalization with the COVID-19’s impacts. These five (5) core arguments are: COVID-19 as a pro-globalization messenger: “You are living in a global village” (i), Virus Complex nature (ii), Nationalism and Unilateralism as COVID-19’s counter-anti-dote strategies (iii), COVID-19’s Impacts Nature on Social-economic activities (iv), and the Global Complex Interdependence (v). And instead of shouting to the end of globalization, humanity should rather seek to think about, understand and internalize the different lessons that COVID-19 has just come to give it—for its best survival. Otherwise, disaster is coming.

Harmonising Insolvency Law in the EU: New Thoughts on Old Ideas in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 crisis, which hit the world with full force in 2020, represents one of the greatest health and economic crises in recent history. The pandemic paralysed the world economy, forcing many countries around the globe to take emergency measures. Countries’ emergency responses to the crisis uncovered a tension between the continuous phenomenon of global economic interdependence and the tendency for nation-state governance during the crisis. Although this dichotomy was quite acute in the European Union (EU) at the onset of the pandemic – reflected overall by Member States’ preferences for national solutions over common multilateral solutions – governments eventually converged towards similar responses to the spread of the virus. These responses to the crisis included partial or total isolation of populations, travel bans, and the temporary closure of non-essential businesses. This so-called phenomenon of ‘copycat coronavirus policies’ was the result of regulatory emulation, which occurred spontaneously, with limited direct impetus from the EU. Our paper investigates whether insolvency and restructuring laws, policies, and measures followed a similar pattern. The study focuses on six selected European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (UK). From a methodological perspective, our contribution relies on a case study approach. Building on the findings of this case study, our paper, then, draws more general conclusions on the process of harmonisation across the EU.

Examining Small and Middle States’ Behaviour Vis-à-vis Rival Great Powers Through a Case Study of Australia

One of the most significant questions in international relations today is whether the world is heading towards a new Cold War. It is important to examine this issue from the viewpoint of small and middle states, whose behaviour vis-à-vis the great powers during the Cold War basically consisted of siding with one or the other. Are we seeing the same behaviour today, or are small and middle states employing different strategies due to the different circumstances? This paper seeks to answer this question through a case study of Australia, a middle power, whose security is guaranteed by the US but whose main trading partner is China. While during the Cold War Australia clearly belonged to the US-led Western bloc, its situation in the current power struggle between the US and China is more complicated. The paper examines Australia’s relationship with both superpowers and concludes that it follows a hedging strategy, whereby it maximises rewards from both sides while also preparing a fallback position in case circumstances change. This strategy is necessitated by the global economic interdependence that has resulted from globalisation. The study finds that Australia’s strategy vis-à-vis the two rival great powers of today is different from its strategy during the Cold War. Many other small and middle states are hedging in a similar way, and this fundamental difference in their behaviour compared to the Cold War leads to the conclusion that there will be no return to a Cold War with clearly separate blocks.

American Exceptionalism in the Time of COVID-19: American National Identity-based Populism versus Cosmopolitan Global Integration Responses to Twenty-first-century Global Crises

Ineluctable global interdependency shapes trends in self-identity evolution. Constituencies within national publics benefit from the individual career and prosperity benefits of globalization. Conservative populist constituency ingroups react hostilely to the perceived threat to their traditional status as the core cultural community within nation states. This response produced the political victory of the 2106 Donald Trump presidential campaign. Reactionary populism emerges from perceived threat to core cultural group traditional supremacy within the national polity, heretofore setting the institutionalized, stereotyped norms of individual and constituency behavior and relations. In the US, their status grievances utilize the language of conservative evangelical Christian identity to mobilize their social movement political resources. They draw upon American foundational settler colonial ideologies with a basis in slavery and casteism. Postwar emerging transnational normative authority centers progressively challenge the utilitarian relevance of these parochial, ascriptive norms and ethics. Post-Cold-War reactionary trends displaying nationalist values have intensified globally, and the disruptions in individual and collective formal and informal institutionalized behaviors and role expectations due to the COVID-19 pandemic intensify them. These consequences foreshadow the knock-on effects of anthropogenic climate change. Liberal progressive political strategic responses can highlight transnational diaspora political activism as offering opportunities for pluralization of the American nation state. Communities marginalized as legacies of imperial expansion and settler colonialism display mobilizational capacities to promote government incentivization for corporate environmental, social and governance investment goals that support global sustainable development. This recommendation emphasizes the institutionalization of transnational supraordinate identities in alliance with global epistemic scientific communities. © Common Ground Research Networks, Benedict E. DeDominicis, Some Rights Reserved (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Permissions: cgscholar.com/cg_support ISSN: 2327-0004 (Print), ISSN: 2327-2147 (Online) https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-0004/CGP/v21i01/11-34 (Article)