Jonathan Fox Research Articles

Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time-series Analysis of Worldwide Data. By Jonathan Fox.

Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time-series Analysis of Worldwide Data. By Jonathan Fox.

Book Review: Jonathan Fox, Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data

Book Review: Jonathan Fox, <i>Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data</i>

Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data. By Jonathan Fox. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 291p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data. By Jonathan Fox. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 291p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Book Review: Jeffrey Haynes (ed.), Religion and Political Change in the Modern World and Nukhet Sandal and Jonathan Fox, Religion in International Relations Theory: Interactions and Possibilities

Book Review: Jeffrey Haynes (ed.), <i>Religion and Political Change in the Modern World</i> and Nukhet Sandal and Jonathan Fox, <i>Religion in International Relations Theory: Interactions and Possibilities</i>

Andrzej Więcek: east meets west in nephrology

Andrzej Więcek: east meets west in nephrology

Rwanda Redux: The Latent Genocide in the Central African Republic and the Failure to Protect

The paper makes a critical analysis of the conflict in the Central African Republic which began as a simple military coup but has gradually degenerated into a humanitarian disaster as clashes between rival militia groups have produced severe civilian casualties. The situation is made even more complex as the anti-balaka Christian militias have embarked on a systematic ethnic cleansing of Muslims and the AU led international peacekeepers supported by French forces are visibly overwhelmed by the unfolding crisis. It is argued here that religious polarization is perpetuating the conflict and the lethargic attitude of the international community to implement the Responsibility to Protect may, once again, result to genocide similar to Rwanda. The crisis is analyzed within the conceptual framework of Jonathan Fox’s theory of ethno-religious conflicts.

Routledge handbook of religion and politics

1. Introduction Jeffrey Haynes Part 1: 'The World Religions and Politics' 2. Buddhism and Politics Peter Friedlander 3. Christianity: Protestantism Paul Freston 4. The Catholic Church and Catholicism in global politics Allen Hertzke 5. Confucianism, from above and below Michael Barr 6. Hinduism James Chiriyankandath 7. Sunni Islam and politics Andrea Teti and Andrea Mura 8. Shiism and politics Mohammad Nafissi 9. Judaism and the state Shmuel Sandler Part 2: 'Religion and Governance' 10. Secularisation and Politics Steve Bruce 11. Religious fundamentalisms Jeffrey Haynes 12. Religion and the State John Madeley 13. Does God Matter, and If So whose God? Religion and Democratization John Anderson 14. Religion and political parties Clyde Wilcox and Payam Mohseni 15. Religion and civil society David Herbert 16. Religious commitment and socio-political orientations: Different patterns of compartmentalisation among Muslims and Christians? Thorleif Pettersson Part 3: 'Religion and International Relations' 17. Integrating Religion into International Relations Theory Jonathan Fox 18. Religion and Foreign Policy Jeffrey Haynes 19. Transnational Religious Actors and International Relations Giorgio Shani 20. Religion and globalisation David Wessels Part 4: 'Religion, Security and Development' 21. On the Nature of Religious Terrorism Rohan Gunaratna and Adam Dolnik 22. Conflict prevention and peacebuilding Atsuhiro Katano 23. Religion and Women: Canadian Women's Religious Volunteering: Compassion, Connections, and Comparisons Brenda O'Neill 24. Faith-based development aid Gerard Clarke 25. Religion, climate change and human suffering Noah Tully

Finding Religion: A Guide for the Perplexed (Policy-maker)

Given contemporary news headlines, it seems axiomatic to proclaim, as Peter Berger did a decade ago, that “the world today, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as ever, and in some places, more so than ever.” Nor is there much controversy over the conclusions of Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris that “the expanding gap between the sacred and the secular societies around the globe will have important consequences for world politics, raising the role of religion on the international agenda.” This was not the case so long ago. As Jonathan Fox noted in 2001—on the eve of the September 11 attacks—“the influence of religion has received comparatively little attention in international relations.” Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Fabio Petito used even stronger language to argue, “The rejection of religion . . . seems to be inscribed in the genetic code of the discipline” of international relations, and that “politics with reference to religion became the ultimate threat to order, security and civility, and could not inhabit both the practices of international relations and, subsequently, the discipline of International Relations.”

Jonathan Fox, A World Survey of Religion and the State.

Jonathan Fox, A World Survey of Religion and the State.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Christopher Bacon, V. Ernesto Méndez, Stephen R. Gliessman, David Goodman, and Jonathan Fox (eds.), Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008), pp. xii+390, £43.95, £17.95 pb.

Christopher Bacon, V. Ernesto Méndez, Stephen R. Gliessman, David Goodman, and Jonathan Fox (eds.), Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008), pp. xii+390, £43.95, £17.95 pb. - Volume 41 Issue 1

Jonathan Fox, Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. xi+438, £55.00, £14.99 pb.

Jonathan Fox, Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. xi+438, £55.00, £14.99 pb.

Personal protection in the workplace

Jonathan Fox of the Association of Professional Ambulance Personnel outlines the need for the provision of a complete package of safety measures, including personal protective equipment, to protect the front-line paramedic from assault and injury.

Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America (review)

Reviewed by: Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America James Wiley Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America. Christopher Bacon, V. Ernesto Méndez, Stephen Gliessman, David Goodman, and Jonathan Fox, (eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. xii and 400, 15 illustrations, notes, and index. $27.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-262-52480-3). As the lengthy title indicates, this is a very ambitious volume in its analysis of a variety of Mesoamerican responses to the crisis in the global coffee industry precipitated by the collapse in 1989 of the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) and the subsequent decline in prices paid to farmers for their product. This interdisciplinary effort goes far beyond the ramifications of that on-going crisis to study various coffee production systems utilized by the region's small-scale producers who are the primary focus of the study. In doing so, it also considers a variety of social and environmental factors as well as introducing the many external actors involved in the region's industry, including NGOs and several organizations that work with alternative trade systems, organic labeling, and fair trade certification. It is important to note, however, that this is not intended to provide an overview of Mesoamerica's coffee industry; the dominant corporate sector is not analyzed beyond its recent flirtations with several forms of alternative trade. The multi-dimensionality of the subject material is matched by the diversity of the editors and individual chapter authors. The book, comprised of 14 chapters, has five editors and an additional 12 contributing authors. They represent a mix of disciplines including agro-ecology, social anthropology, plant and soil science, geography, Latin American studies, and environmental studies. Several are/were practitioners with development or government agencies; many of them work in the region. The academic core of the group resides at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Together, they have assembled a book based on an impressive volume of field work, which is one of its greatest strengths. Most of that, however, occurred prior to 2001 leaving the reader to ponder what has transpired since in the several study areas described in individual chapters. One of the book's weaknesses is a direct result of the diversity of its authors. The editing is uneven, with some chapters, particularly the first few case studies, more difficult to follow. With five editors, this is not altogether surprising, but the book would have benefited from a more careful final edit by the MIT Press. Otherwise, though, the volume is logically organized. The first three chapters provide the framework underlying the issues researched. Using the ICA collapse as a starting point, Chapter 1 analyzes how that event enabled the greater penetration of globalization processes into the industry in ways that led to a smaller share of the rents going to producers and greater shares to industry operatives in consuming countries. It goes on to chronicle the rise of the alternative trade sector as one means of attempting to counter that trend. The second chapter introduces readers to agro-ecology, a unifying theme of the book, and its application to the analysis of the traditional production and cultural systems that characterize many of the region's small-scale farmers. Chapter 3 provides a more detailed look at the roots of the crisis, the market glut induced by the rise of Vietnam as a major exporter and the [End Page 210] expansion of Brazilian exports, and the difficulties encountered by small-scale producers as they try to compete with the giants of the industry. The second section includes six chapters devoted to case studies from selected locales in Mexico, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Collectively, they serve to reinforce the agro-ecology perspective regarding the environmental and cultural benefits of traditional systems. Specifically, shade-grown coffee production systems offer greater conservation benefits as well as the potential for enhancing food supply and opportunities to locally market other farm goods and wood. The case studies also illustrate the contributions of such systems to the maintenance of rural cultures while recognizing their limitations in improving rural incomes. There is much...

Playing the Other: Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Playing the Other: Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre Linda M. Park-Fuller Playing the Other: Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre. By Nick Rowe. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2007; pp. 208. $35.00 paper. With this book, Nick Rowe substantially addresses two lines of scrutiny facing those who work with improvisational, audience-interactive, or auto/biographical theatre: (1) the need to theorize the work's theatrical values, and (2) obligations for the ethical deployment of materials that come raw from everyday life. He does this by rigorously testing, then blurring the binaries that undergird these dual demands. To illustrate requires a review of playback theatre (PT) and an introduction to Rowe's background and purpose. Playback theatre is an improvisational ensemble form that, according to its founder Jonathan Fox, was meant to "recapture that kind of ceremonial enactment in which there is no distinction between art and healing" (20). In PT, a "conductor" invites personal stories from audience members; when a storyteller comes to the stage, the conductor publicly interviews the "teller," then signals, "Let's watch." Without consultation, the acting ensemble, accompanied by a musician, performs the story while the teller, conductor, and audience watch. Afterward, the teller is acknowledged and invited to comment. A performance consists of several story "tellings" and enactments framed and punctuated by short performance forms. Involved in the company Playback Theatre York for ten years, Rowe is also senior lecturer at York St. John University (UK). Baz Kershaw advised his doctoral dissertation, parts of which contribute to this book. Rowe is a state-registered drama therapist and a past editor of the International Playback Theatre Network's journal Interplay. Not only is he conversant with a range of theatre literature, then, but he is also in close contact with PT practitioners on five continents and offers deeply reflexive examples of their practices as well as his own company's work. Articulating his purposes, Rowe states that the few PT books previously available were written by founders and enthusiasts to explain, justify, and describe it. As valuable as these are, he writes that "[a] canon of literature which exposes the practice to critique has not yet developed. This book aims to open up some of the debates related to the telling and performing of personal stories in public places, which are often heard amongst practitioners, but have not yet reached a wider audience" (13). While he succeeds in addressing those and other criticisms levied against PT, in the process he also discovers insights that enhance our vocabulary for articulating the values of staged personal narrative, improvisation, and performance in general. Limiting his focus to the actors' work in PT, Rowe calls for other studies to explore the demands of conductor and musician. The book includes two appendices: a description of a story, and a list of PT short forms. Following an introductory chapter that includes a history of PT and a description of illuminating projects in the US, Israel, and India, Rowe introduces the term "openness" in chapter 2 as crucial to his theory. For Rowe, openness means more than the teller's willingness to disclose, more than the performer's sense of receptivity. Borrowing Umberto Eco's phrase "open work" to designate "art work [End Page 333] which has an unfinished quality that invites elaboration and exploration" (32), Rowe applies openness to the teller's story, not as a story that is written or memorized, but as it is spontaneously told in the public context of the conductor-teller interview—in process, contingent, unpredictable. He notes that open stories provide room for engagement; and he identifies several characteristics of open stories while contrasting them to closed or "finished" stories where little can be explored through dramatization. Later, he applies openness to the performers' responses as well, revealing how a PT enactment is less a replication of a literal story and more likely a symbolic transformation, accurate yet different, that evolves collaboratively in the moment and is itself not closed and determinate, but open. If openness is desired for aesthetics and healing, however, ethical risks can accrue regarding the volunteer tellers and their life stories. Is this "therapy without boundaries?" Rowe asks...

A Caspase-3-cleaved Fragment of the Glial Glutamate Transporter EAAT2 Is Sumoylated and Targeted to Promyelocytic Leukemia Nuclear Bodies in Mutant SOD1-linked Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

EAAT2 (excitatory amino acid transporter 2) is a high affinity, Na+-dependent glutamate transporter of glial origin that is essential for the clearance of synaptically released glutamate and prevention of excitotoxicity. During the course of human amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and in a transgenic mutant SOD1 mouse model of the disease, expression and activity of EAAT2 is remarkably reduced. We previously showed that some of the mutant SOD1 proteins exposed to oxidative stress inhibit EAAT2 by triggering caspase-3 cleavage of EAAT2 at a single defined locus. This gives rise to two fragments that we termed truncated EAAT2 and COOH terminus of EAAT2 (CTE). In this study, we report that analysis of spinal cord homogenates prepared from mutant G93A-SOD1 mice reveals CTE to be of a higher molecular weight than expected because it is conjugated with SUMO-1. The sumoylated CTE fragment (CTE-SUMO-1) accumulates in the spinal cord of these mice as early as presymptomatic stage (70 days of age) and not in other central nervous system areas unaffected by the disease. The presence and accumulation of CTE-SUMO-1 is specific to ALS mice, since it does not occur in the R6/2 mouse model for Huntington disease. Furthermore, using an astroglial cell line, primary culture of astrocytes, and tissue samples from G93A-SOD1 mice, we show that CTE-SUMO-1 is targeted to promyelocytic leukemia nuclear bodies. Since one of the proposed functions of promyelocytic leukemia nuclear bodies is regulation of gene transcription, we suggest a possible novel mechanism by which the glial glutamate transporter EAAT2 could contribute to the pathology of ALS.

Religion and Globalization

Religion and Politics in the International System Today. By Eric O. Hanson New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 350 pp., $70.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-85245-5), $26.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-61781-2). Eric Hanson's Religion and Politics in the International System Today “proposes a post-Cold War paradigm based on the interaction between the contemporary globalization of the political, economic, military, and communication systems and the significant role of religion in influencing politics” (p. 17). The book complements the rapidly growing body of post-September 11 scholarship on religion and international affairs—such as Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile by Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Fabio Petito (2003) , The Sacred and the Sovereign by John Carlson and Erik Owens (2003) , Bringing Religion into International Relations by Jonathan Fox and Schmuel Sandler (2004), The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations by Scott Thomas (2005), and Religion and Politics: Cultural Perspectives by Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Suber (2005). Unlike these books, however, Hanson confronts explicitly the relationship between religion and the evolving complexities of global politics, economics, and technology. Religion and Politics in the International System Today is divided into two parts. The first part contains four chapters in which Hanson explains his self-described “new paradigm for world politics” (p. 17). The first chapter lays out Hanson's views of the salient features of what he calls the “political and EMC” systems (by which he means the political plus economic, military, and communication systems) in the world today. The following chapters take “a political perspective on religion and politics” and a “religious perspective on religion and politics,” respectively. Finally, Hanson includes a brief history of the “religions of the book, meditative experience, and public life” as a background for the case studies that follow (p. 92). The second part of the book is an application of Hanson's theoretical framework to religion and politics in five regions: the West; East Asia; South and Central Asia; …

Jonathan Fox, and Shmuel Sandler, . Bringing Religion into International Relations. Culture and Religion in International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 212 pp. $55.00 (cloth).

Jonathan Fox, and Shmuel Sandler, . <i>Bringing Religion into International Relations</i>. Culture and Religion in International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 212 pp. $55.00 (cloth).

Comings and Goings: The Multiple Faces of Latin American Diasporas

ERLACS – European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies is an Open Access, scientific journal. It publishes peer-reviewed articles in English and Spanish. Contributions reflect substantial empirical research and/or are theoretically innovative with respect to major debates within social science research (understood in the broadest sense, including history and economics) on Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to research articles, ERLACS includes 'Explorations' (a section in which new themes are presented and new debates are stimulated), review essays, book reviews, and film reviews. Articles are published online soon after they have been accepted.Sign up for our newsletter and read our latest issue!Special Collections:Violent configurations of power in MexicoVenezuela's crisis from global perspectivesElite and popular responsed to a left in crisisMega-projects, contentious action, and policy change in Latin America ERLACS – Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe es una revista científica de Acceso Abierto. Difunde artículos bajo la revisión de pares en inglés y español. Las contribuciones reflejan la investigación empírica sustancial y/o son teóricamente innovadoras con respecto a los grandes debates dentro de la investigación social (en el sentido más amplio, incluyendo la historia y la economía) en América Latina y el Caribe. Además de los artículos de investigación, ERLACS incluye 'Exploraciones' (una sección en la que se presentan los nuevos temas con el fin de estimular nuevos debates), ensayos de reseña, reseñas de libros, y críticas de cine. Los artículos se publican en línea poco después de haber sido aceptados.¡Suscríbase a nuestro boletín de noticias y lea nuestro último número!Números especiales:Venezuela's crisis from global perspectivesElite and popular responsed to a left in crisisMega-projects, contentious action, and policy change in Latin America

Bringing Religion into International Relations

Bringing Religion into International Relations. By Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 224p. $55.00. With this book, Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler offer the most comprehensive meditation to date on the question of religion as a factor in international relations. Stating as their central purpose a desire to “expand the boundaries of international relations theory by the inclusion of religion as a variable in the research of international politics” (p. 4), the authors provide a superbly structured overview of a topic that has been crying out for sustained engagement for some time now. While the questions asked (and many of the answers eventually posited) are by no means wholly original, Bringing Religion Into International Relations finally offers IR a systematic baseline of inquiry that subsequent scholarship on religion and international affairs can build upon or challenge.