From wages to conflict: Does an increase in the real wage decrease internal conflict in developing countries?

At times when social issues end their experiencers collide - such as while answering survey questions - a dominance relationship unfailingly results. A respondent dominates an issue when he/she feels positively, while an issue dominates a respondent when he/she feels negatively. Given two issues, a transitivity of this dominance is often coveted since it installs predictability: one’s attitude towards one topic will carry information about his/her attitude towards the other. In this work, using data from a recent Bentley-Gallup study surveying 5835 individuals and the mathematics of Guttman outliers, we test whether - and how intensely - this transitivity persists among sections of the population (partitioned by politics, age, and gender) through observations such as very conservative young men who believe that businesses should take a stance on political candidates are extremely likely to have checked a company’s political endorsements before buying a product. We show how groups that differ on one (of three) demographic detail fall on opposite ends of the predictability spectrum. Topics such as businesses’ involvement with political candidates, climate change, international conflicts, or DEI issues function well in a predictive mix, potentially helping most to infer how respondents would feel about other opinion or action items.

Young adults in Indonesia who identify as men attracted to men face intense pressure to conform to heteronormative expectations, particularly regarding marriage. During quarter-life crisis, this pressure often leads to internal conflict and emotional distress. This study explored how these individuals perceive marriage and how such perceptions impact their mental and emotional well-being during a critical life transition. A qualitative phenomenological approach guided by Colaizzi's method was used. Ten participants aged 22-29 were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in Bandung, Indonesia and analysed thematically. Participants reported psychological tension arising from the clash between personal identity and societal expectations. Emotional suppression and spiritual guilt were common. Trust in mental health services was limited due to prior stigma. Findings are context-specific and based on a small, urban sample of Muslim participants. Cross-cultural generalisability is limited. Mental health nurses must address identity-related distress with cultural humility and emotional safety. Nursing education and practice should prioritise inclusive assessment, spiritual care and stigma-free environments. This study provides critical insight into how young men navigating same-sex attraction in Indonesia experience emotional conflict during early adulthood due to cultural and religious pressures to marry. These findings highlight the urgent need for inclusive, identity-affirming and culturally sensitive approaches in mental health nursing. By understanding the unique psychological vulnerabilities of this group, mental health nurses can deliver more compassionate, ethical and effective care, reduce stigma in practice settings and contribute to the development of safe, non-judgemental spaces for all clients regardless of sexual or spiritual identity.

ABSTRACT Journalists’ safety and security are real concerns for many countries, specifically in developing countries, where political instability and internal conflicts have been pervasive. This article explores how journalists’ identities could be the cause of their repression in a conflict-prone country such as Ethiopia. The article used qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect data from 2020 to 2024, during which ethnically driven internal conflicts have been prevalent in the country. Questionnaires were distributed to 180 journalists working in private, public, and digital media, and interviews were carried out with 20 senior media practitioners. The results indicated that journalists in Ethiopia are facing severe harassment and intimidation coming from not only the government but also non-state actors. The results also indicated that journalists confirmed that reporting/framing the current internal conflict as ethnic conflicts, as well as their ethnic identities, are the main causes of their repression, which could have repercussions on the journalism profession and on ensuring freedom of expression.

Although free healthcare policies for women have been implemented in Burkina Faso, access to essential services remains severely hindered by insecurity, climate shocks, and widespread displacement. As one of the most affected countries in West Africa by internal conflict and fragility, Burkina Faso provides a critical context for examining gendered health disparities. Yet, studies that address the aspects of women's empowerment in this country remain rare, despite their importance for understanding healthcare access. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates how women's empowerment dimensions, such as decision making, information and communication technologies (ICT) access, bank account ownership, and perceptions of justified violence, shapes healthcare access in Burkina Faso. A nationally representative sample of 12,868 partnered women aged 15-49 years was analyzed. Healthcare access was measured using a composite score based on four barriers: needing permission, financial constraints, distance to health facilities, and reluctance to seek care alone. Each barrier was coded as 1 (present) or 0 (absent), generating a total score from 0 to 4, with higher scores indicating greater barriers. Key predictors included decision-making power, ICT access, bank account ownership, and acceptance of justified violence. To examine associations between healthcare access barriers and women's empowerment indicators, both unadjusted and adjusted ordinal logistic regression models were employed. Among the sampled women, 29.6% reported no barriers to healthcare access, while 5.8% experienced all four. In adjusted ordinal logistic regression models, women with moderate autonomy in decisions had significantly lower odds of experiencing high healthcare barriers (OR = 0.78; 95% CI: 0.66-0.93), and those with high decision-making power had even lower odds (OR = 0.47; 95% CI: 0.28-0.78). Acceptance of justified violence was associated with increased odds of high barriers (OR = 2.14; 95% CI: 1.72-2.66). Women with the highest level of ICT access had markedly lower odds of facing high healthcare barriers (OR = 0.18; 95% CI: 0.14-0.22). This study shows that women's empowerment dimensions, especially decision-making power and ICT access, substantially reduce healthcare barriers, while acceptance of justified violence increases them. Financial inclusion and sociodemographic factors such as higher education, urban residency, and household headship also improve access. These findings underscore the need to address both structural inequalities and restrictive norms to expand women's healthcare access in Burkina Faso. Limitations include the cross-sectional design, reliance on self-reported data, and lack of qualitative insights. Not applicable.

ABSTRACT Tourism decisions are increasingly influenced by travellers’ moral evaluations of countries’ involvement in geopolitical conflicts. This study examines how ethical judgments toward a country’s political behaviour shape destination image and visit intention. Guided by the Cognitive–Affective–Behavior (CAB) framework, the model positions ethical judgment as an antecedent shaping cognitive image, affective image, perceived warmth, and visit intention. Data were collected from potential tourists in the United Kingdom (n = 349) and the United Arab Emirates (n = 274) using an online survey capturing reactions to an ongoing international political conflict. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) results show that ethical judgment strongly shapes cognitive image and perceived warmth. Affective image and perceived warmth significantly predict visit intention, with affective image exerting the strongest effect. Multigroup analysis indicates that UK respondents rely more on affective appraisals, whereas UAE respondents place greater weight on cognitive beliefs and perceived warmth, suggesting culturally contingent pathways through which moral evaluations influence destination choice. Practically, the findings suggest that destination authorities facing deteriorating moral perceptions must address not only safety or economic concerns but also ethical narratives and trust-building communication.

<bold>ABSTRACT</bold> Museums’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized as evidence of the sector's resilience. Concurrently, there is evidence across the United Kingdom of a shrinking workforce and stagnating sector. Drawing on interviews with museum sector staff conducted in 2021–2022 and in 2025, predominantly in Northern Ireland, this article critiques narratives of resilience and their impacts in the museum sector. This article suggests that individualized expectations and resilience can obscure the need for systemic change. Recognizing the long-term impacts of austerity and recent crises including the rising cost of living and international conflict, we argue for the need for an ethics of care focused on the long-term wellbeing of museum staff, contending that this is integral to the sustainability of the sector. This article calls for this ethics of care to be built into strong museums leadership, particularly at the level of governance and policy.

ABSTRACT Armed conflicts are widely acknowledged as significant obstacles to economic stability and growth. This study analyzes how African countries recover economically after internal conflicts, focusing on endogeneity issues related to reverse causality. We use the entropy balancing method and find evidence of an economic catch-up effect in the post-conflict period. The analysis of transmission channels reveals that increased investment, consumption, and trade are the primary drivers of post-conflict economic recovery. The cumulative impact of growth is estimated at 2 percentage points in the first year, increasing only slightly to 2.5 percentage points by the fifth year. This modest 0.5 percentage point increase over five years indicates that post-conflict growth remains volatile and unsustainable, reflecting the persistent effects of conflict. We perform a series of robustness checks to validate our results, ensuring the consistency and reliability of our estimates across various specifications.

ABSTRACT To understand activism in unfavorable contexts, existing research on political opportunities has largely emphasized social movements’ extra-institutional strategies, whereas studies on institutional activism have primarily focused on bureaucracies resisting executive control. Yet how activists adapt within participatory institutions amid narrowing political opportunities remains understudied. However, participatory institutions can play a crucial role in claim- making strategies, even as they remain particularly vulnerable to political change. This article addresses this gap by examining how right-to-the-city activists involved in Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting, an institution that has experienced a gradual decline since 2002 reinvent strategies to retain and create political opportunities during times of uncertainty, despite constraints and limited support from decision-makers. Based on qualitative data, this article shows how strategies of leveraging internal conflicts, interpersonal negotiation, and coalition- building are combined with institutionalized participation within the same participatory institution.

ABSTRACT How do authoritarian regimes that rely on the disengagement of their citizens adapt to the demands of a major international conflict, particularly in political communication? Instead of risking potential destabilization by exclusively turning to mobilizing messages, we propose that a more dynamic rhetorical adaptation will follow, with a mixture of mobilizing, legitimating, and co-opting messages in the state media and – hitherto underexplored subject of authoritarian propaganda – public communication of the rank-and-file elites during an armed conflict. We argue that such elites, while generally reflecting the official propaganda in speech, will, however, display less war-mobilizing messages if they are more distant from the autocrat’s agenda; there will also be agency loss due to electoral individual incentives. Drawing from an originally collected dataset of 144,567 social media posts by Russia’s members of parliament during the military conflict against Ukraine, 2022–23, and using word embeddings and topic classification methods, supplementing with alternative approaches and accounting for the audience, we find support for the argument that the social media posts by individual MPs reflect not only centrally directed messages but also their own political and electoral incentives. These findings illuminate how political communication mediates the effects of external conflict on authoritarian resilience, also contributing to the literatures on authoritarian parliaments and legitimation, as well as social media under autocracies.

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the development of Spanish economic thought in the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on the foundation of the Faculty of Political and Economic Sciences in 1943. Using a Foucauldian approach, this study explores the power structures that fostered intellectual alignments with the Francoist Regime, while also identifying the academics who shaped Spain’s negotiations for entry into the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. Design/methodology/approach The paper is structured around four themes: 1. The origins of the Faculty of Political and Economic Sciences and its first graduating class. 2. The economic orthodoxy of the 1940s as the foundation for intellectual change and the debates of the early 1950s. 3. The role of a politically influential sector, closely tied to the Catholic Church, that embraced liberal capitalism. 4. The externally driven push for economic liberalization, which led to internal conflict within the 1957 government, particularly involving Castiella and Ullastres. Findings This study has highlighted the crucial role of the first Faculty of Political Science and Economics in dismantling the autarkic framework of the Spanish Franco Regime. The economic orthodoxy of its curricula and the academic rigor of its faculty were decisive in producing specialists proficient in the mechanisms of Western capitalism, which dominated postwar Europe after 1945, a period characterized by reinforced international economic cooperation, particularly following the establishment of the IMF. The database used in this study has been drawn directly from the archives of the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. Originality/value The role of the first Faculty of Political Science and Economics in the Spanish 1959 stabilization program has never been studied using data from the files of the Faculty itself, which shows the importance of knowledge and university in the transformation of the Francoist regime during the 1940 and the1950s. This study shows that the impulse of the opening of Spanish economy came from the US but was facilitated by the embededness of a internationalist thought that came back to 1943, which was in alignment with the Catholic thought of the time. The different people involved in this transformation are stressed, in particular the role of Castiella, undervalued in the literature.

ABSTRACT Involvement of corporations in international crimes and conflict atrocities, such as crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, are neither isolated events nor uncommon. Importantly, corporate involvement in atrocity crimes is shaped by conditions in “zones of legal risk” (International Commission of Jurists), where gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes and extreme violence are pervasive. In this context, corporations become complicit in the most serious state crimes. The empirical study of 205 historical and contemporary cases across all global regions in a total of 36 countries explores patterns of involvement starting from the conceptual framework developed by the International Commission of Jurists. We identify six “risk profiles” of involvement defined by industry type, partners in such crimes, and the type of involvement and contribution to the crimes. Our results showcase the relationship between corporate characteristics and risks of involvement in serious violence for different risk profiles across space and time. Starting from a legal conceptual framework, we discuss how these results contribute to criminological theories of corporate crime, as well as to regulation theory and practice.

Les Blancs (1970) by Lorraine Hansberry offers a compelling exploration of the violent structures underlying colonial power and their impact on indigenous life and subjectivity. Through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this study examines how the play reconfigures colonialism as a regime governed not merely by authority or ideology, but by the systematic management of life and death. The analysis focuses on key elements such as missionary intervention, racial dehumanization, militarized authority, and colonial education to reveal how these forces operate as interconnected mechanisms that sustain a necropolitical order. Central to this reading is the construction of the colonial space as a “death-world,” where indigenous populations are subjected to conditions of extreme precarity and reduced to states of living death. The play’s portrayal of racial hierarchies and linguistic violence highlights the ways in which colonial discourse legitimizes disposability and normalizes brutality. Major Rice emerges as the embodiment of sovereign violence, through whom colonial authority is enacted via the regulation of life and death. By foregrounding the psychological and existential dimensions of colonial domination, this study also examines the central character, Tshembe Matoseh, whose internal conflict reflects a condition that may be understood as necropolitical paralysis, wherein agency is constrained within a system that renders all choices ethically and materially compromised. Ultimately, this paper argues that Les Blancs not only critiques colonial violence but also exposes the structural logic through which power operates by producing and sustaining conditions of death.

Turkey's foreign policy strategies in the Black Sea region are of great importance in international relations due to its geographical location and geopolitical features. Active neutrality is an approach that envisions states contributing to regional stability through diplomacy and peacebuilding while avoiding taking sides in international conflicts. This article aims to analyze Turkey's Black Sea policies through the concept of “active neutrality” and examine the implementation of this strategy and its regional implications. This study examines Turkey's roles in the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), the Montreux Straits Convention, and the Russia-Ukraine tensions through case studies. It also discusses elements such as the broader foreign policy context of active neutrality (relations with Iran) and the triggering role of NATO expansion. Consequently, the advantages and limitations of this strategy and Turkey's interactions with regional dynamics (the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict) are evaluated. The findings of the article show that Turkey's active neutrality offers opportunities in terms of security, international prestige, and economic interests, but faces challenges due to the influence of major powers, NATO expansion, and domestic political pressures.

Representing technological "minds": How anthropomorphic inferences influence legal judgments and policy opinions.

This article analyzes how the religious field operates in constructing narratives about success and failure in Rio de Janeiro’s samba school parades. Based on ethnographic research conducted during the 2024 carnival cycle, two emblematic cases are examined: Mangueira’s tribute to singer Alcione and Unidos do Viradouro’s plot about the vodum Dangbé. Using Clara Flaksman’s concept of “enredo” (plot) to understand relationship systems in Candomblé, we demonstrate how Afro-Brazilian religions constitute a structuring dimension of contemporary carnival. The research reveals that, while Mangueira faced internal conflicts related to the management of the sacred in its biographical plot, resulting in narratives of failure associated with the invisibility of religious care, Viradouro established a formal and explicit relationship with the religious field, incorporating sacred elements both in its plot and public communication. This difference in approach was reflected in interpretations of events that occurred during the parades: at Mangueira, the breaking of a float was seen as a consequence of the lack of religious care; at Viradouro, the unplanned inversion of the order of floats in the champions’ parade was interpreted as a manifestation of the honored vodum itself. The analysis shows how, regardless of the chosen theme, the religious field remains an essential element in the structure of carnival, capable of influencing narratives and shaping interpretations about the outcome of the parades, revealing the persistence and centrality of Afro-Brazilian religiosity in the production of the carnival spectacle.

Patients who are diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (AN patients) characteristically refuse to receive medical treatment, including life-saving treatment, for their illness. These refusals are generally not honored on the grounds that AN patients are incapable of making autonomous medical decisions regarding their illness. Despite being widely shared by medical and legal experts, the judgment that AN patients are incapable of medical decision-making lacks a sound theoretical basis in the existing bioethics literature. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by offering a novel explanation of AN patients' incapacity. AN patients, I propose, are subject to three sources of incapacity: deep internal conflict, compulsion, and irrationality. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of my proposal, including the challenge that it poses to the capacity model that is standardly used by clinicians in the United States.

This article examines Felix Umarov’s 2024 film The Prophet. The Story of Alexander Pushkin as a contemporary act of communicative and cultural interpretation of the image of Alexander Pushkin as a “canonized” figure of Russian literature for a twenty-first-century audience. The present study has a syncretic character, determining how modern communicative and cinematographic techniques (primarily the integration of contemporary music, choreographic episodes, and dynamic editing) function as psychological instruments and kinetic-kinesthetic (non-verbal) means that translate the internal conflicts of Alexander Pushkin’s personality into a visual-auditory language accessible to the modern viewer. The image of the Great Poet, traditionally presented as a monumental and almost mythologized national symbol, is reinterpreted through the communicative and cinematographic techniques of his modernization used by the director, as well as through specific representational means: Alexander Pushkin in literature and cinema has often been depicted as a detached, flawless genius. F. Umarov’s film disrupts this established narrative by dismantling the static image of the poet and reconstructing him as an emotionally vulnerable, politically constrained, and internally contradictory individual. Drawing upon theories of screen representation that make it possible to establish mechanisms of representing reality and image (or media image), as well as upon the psychology of musical perception and the concept of historical periodization, a contemporary visual image is formed. Special attention is paid to the depiction of personal and social relationships: Alexander Pushkin’s relationship with Natalia Goncharova, his complex interaction with Emperor Nicholas I, and the emotional consequences of the Decembrist uprising. The performance of Alexander Pushkin by Yura Borisov, a young actor who has already become widely known among cinema audiences, is considered as a central element in humanizing the image of the poet and as a factor ensuring the emotional realism of the film’s stylistic experiments and a “new” interpretation of the well-known national symbol.

ABSTRACT Who are the artists? In the face of health challenges, can the act of coping through art transform our experience of suffering into healing, and our role from that of observers to artists? The poem We the Artists aims to shed light on these questions by exploring how, in overcoming life’s struggles such as health woes, everyone becomes an artist through the daily and extraordinary act of coping and making meaning. The poem argues that, whether through poetry, dance, or simply quiet reflection, art is a universal tool for navigating pain, confusion, along with other internal conflicts and external turmoil, and healing. Overall, the poem proposes that artistic expression, in all its forms, is not just reserved for professional artists, but is a shared human experience essential for emotional growth and psychological strength. In other words, in arts and health, we live, we learn, we reflect, we grow, we relay warmth to those around us, and we radiate light for a better tomorrow.

Final-year female students are frequently confronted with a dilemma between pursuing further education and entering the workforce, which leads them either to postpone marriage or to prioritize personal relationships through marriage. This phase represents a transitional period toward professional life. Balancing academic responsibilities and marital life simultaneously presents considerable challenges. This study aimed to analyze the factors contributing to the emergence of the dilemma of marriage postponement, the strategies employed by female students in coping with the resulting internal conflicts, the perspective of Islamic family law on this dilemma, and the influence of educational attainment on partner selection criteria. This research adopted a qualitative method with a case study approach focusing on final-year female students at the Sekolah Tinggi Dirasat Islamiyah Imam Syafi’i. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with research participants, and analyzed using the Miles and Huberman model. The findings revealed that: (1) there are four primary factors contributing to the dilemma of marriage postponement among the students; (2) four key strategies are employed by the students to cope with the internal conflict associated with postponing marriage; (3) the dilemma of marriage postponement is perceived as a test of faith; and (4) educational level significantly influences the criteria used in selecting a prospective spouse.