Local Affiliates Research Articles

The Islamic State-Khorasan’s Recent Reorganization and Remaining Threat for Central Asia in 2024

The self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was defeated in 2019 but today there are still some branches of the organization active in various parts of the world. For a long time ISIS functioned as a state (a self-proclaimed caliphate) with its territory, governance, and bureaucracy although it was not recognized on an international level. The main research question is what makes ISIS (as being an unrecognized state) a challenge for international and regional security today. This presentation refers to the first question in the workshop regarding how continuities, changes and/or transformations are expressed in the practice of terrorism. ISIS is not functioning anymore as a state but has autonomous local affiliates around the world. This is also related to the implications of borders, spaces and territorialities on the fight against terrorism. The report looks more specifically at the activities of the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISK or ISKP) in Central Asia and particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its strategy on a regional and international level comprises interlinked media warfare and kinetic action. The military and political pressures have caused it to restructure or face a more lasting attenuation. Although it is now reorganizing, it still presents a danger in Central Asia. The very recent example is the attack in Iran from January 3. The author provides some future recommendations on how the international community should address the current risks presented by ISK in particular.

A blueprint for success in real-world evidence: "glocal" approach to building capabilities and generating impactful evidence.

The past decade has seen the increasing influence and relevance of real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) in healthcare decision making. The value added by RWD/RWE has prompted the pharmaceutical industry to develop high performing systems and practices to harness the power of evidence generated at the global level. However, this worldwide transformation provides outstanding opportunities to support capability building within local affiliates and to impact key country-level stakeholders through resulting evidence. Therefore, we present an Evidence Blueprint Initiative, which links the global and local ("glocal") skills, and furthermore addresses the opportunities and gaps in evidence generation capabilities at the local level. Cross-functional experts were recruited at the local, regional, and global level to define best practices. A framework was developed to characterize the foundational expertise needed and to assess markets' existing capabilities. Subsequently, targeted roadmaps were developed and implemented to build capabilities in specific areas within each affiliate. The impact from the Blueprint is encouraging, resulting in improved local evidence plans, established evidence teams, enhanced RWD use and strategic implementation of patient centric science in local affiliates. The success of the Blueprint resides in empowering affiliates to realise their local evidence generation ambitions and to match them to their local context. It strengthens and expands the ties between various parts of the organisation and the external environment while building fit-for-future evidence capabilities from local affiliates.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

Citing a partnership to encourage mental health awareness, Sinclair Broadcast Group announced Feb. 27 that the company will partner with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to launch Sinclair Cares: Mental Health Support + Hope, a campaign to encourage mental health awareness, with a focus on young adults. The campaign will begin on March 6 and run throughout the month, the news release distribution group, Business Wire, reported. Sinclair Cares: Mental Health Support + Hope will be supported through public service campaigns across Sinclair's television stations and the Tennis Channel network. Sinclair's daily news show, The National Desk, and the broadcaster's local content centers, in partnership with NAMI, will produce content to air within stations’ newscasts, while also helping to connect viewers with local NAMI affiliates for resources and information. Sinclair stations will feature interviews with NAMI Chief Medical Officer Ken Duckworth, M.D., author of “You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health — With Advice from Experts and Wisdom from Real People and Families.”

¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Inc.: Design principles for recentering social justice in evaluation training and disrupting whiteness and neoliberalism

AbstractAcross the nation, the American Evaluation Association (AEA) recognizes over thirty volunteer‐led organizations called local affiliates. These affiliates provide professional development, networking, and field building opportunities that influence the local evaluation marketplace and ecosystem in ways that have not been systematically studied or understood within the larger discourse of continuing education for evaluators. In this chapter, we present a single case study on the long‐term efforts of ¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Inc., the AEA Local Affiliate in Wisconsin, to recenter social justice in evaluator training and education. The case study is presented in the form of two design principles that have shaped the affiliate's work over the past 10 years and helped move the local evaluation marketplace and infrastructure toward deeper expressions of social justice. The affiliate uses a two‐generation approach, creates liminal spaces as the site for critical consciousness raising and emancipatory capacity building, validates (working class) evaluators of color, and covers topics such as reparations and neoliberalism in its educational offerings. The rationale for this approach is discussed.

The impact of multimedia journalism on ageism in television news: Commodification and the anxiety of ageing in the newsroom

Television news corporations changed their work roles from a tradition of team production to a ‘one-man-band’ method of production. Many veteran reporters are hesitant to accept the new methodology. This study intended to examine how television news reporters adjusted to more work demands and new technologies. A questionnaire was combined with participant observation for analysis. The participants included 289 television journalists, selected from local affiliates throughout the United States. The results indicate that there is preference for younger workers and burnout occurring to all age groups. This study explores the commodification of the profession in terms of labour value.

Food system dynamics structuring nutrition equity in racialized urban neighborhoods

The food system is a social determinant of health and a leverage point for reducing diet-related racial inequities. Yet, food system interventions have not resulted in sustained improvement in dietary outcomes for underrepresented minorities living in neighborhoods with a history of disinvestment. Research is needed to illuminate the dynamics structuring food systems in racialized neighborhoods to inform intervention development. To conduct participatory research examining the complexity and inequity of food systems in historically redlined neighborhoods to identify feedback mechanisms to leverage in efforts to transform system outcomes for racial equity. We conducted a mixed-methods study in Cleveland, Ohio, USA from 2018 to 2021 using participatory system dynamic modeling with 30 academic and community partners, in-depth qualitative interviews with 22 key stakeholders, and public convenings with 250 local food policy council affiliates. Data were synthesized into causal loop diagrams depicting feedback mechanisms reinforcing or balancing neighborhood-level food system dynamics. We identified 10 feedback mechanisms structuring nutrition equity, which was identified as a meta-goal for food systems in racialized neighborhoods. Feedback mechanisms were organized in 3 domains: 1) meeting basic food needs with dignity (i.e., side hustle, government benefits, emergency food assistance, stigma, and stereotypes); 2) local food supply and demand dynamics (i.e., healthy food retail, job security, food culture, and norms); and 3) community empowerment and food sovereignty (i.e., community power, urban agriculture, risk of gentrification). Five exogenous factors moderate feedback dynamics: neighborhood crisis, neighborhood investments, household costs, government benefit funding, and voter participation. We identified nutrition equity as an overarching goal for local food systems, which reflects a state of having freedom, agency, and dignity in food traditions resulting in people and communities healthy in body, mind, and spirit. It is a transformative goal designed to spur system-level interventions that further racial equity through improved local food system dynamics.

Exploring the Agency of the Affiliates of Transnational Jihadist Organizations: The Case of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

The ability of trans-national jihadist organizations to exploit war, state collapse and geopolitical upheaval in the Middle East to expand and consolidate their global networks, is of major concern. This has led to a growing literature that investigates the factors that may or may not lead to the expansion of organizations such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State, but this literature has focused less on the continued agency of the affiliate once integrated into the trans-national jihadist organization. This article contributes to ongoing debates on inter-organizational dynamics within trans-national jihadist organizations by using the proxy war literature to explore the factors that may foster or inhibit the agency of local affiliates of trans-national jihadist organizations. It uses the case of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to explore how a local affiliate navigates between the local and international. Specifically, the article suggests that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula displays substantial agency in how it navigates between local integration and its relationship to al-Qaeda central. In doing this, the article underscores the need to look beyond rhetoric aimed at an international audience to get a fuller understanding of the affiliates of trans-national jihadist organizations.

Blowback Operations as Rebel Strategy: How Sectarian Violence Spread from Syria into Lebanon, 2013–14

ABSTRACT Why and how do conflict and violence spread across international borders? This article introduces a new theoretical framework for blowback operations, where a civil war combatant launches terrorist attacks in the home country of a foreign actor to compel this actor to end a military intervention. Using this framework, we explain how military intervention by Hezbollah in Syria sparked a bombing campaign by Sunni jihadi groups inside Lebanon. Novel quantitative and qualitative evidence reveals how perpetrators deployed violence strategically to maximize their coercive leverage. Rather than indiscriminately attacking Lebanese Shia civilians—as their hardline sectarian discourse would suggest—Jihadi groups, including local Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, primarily targeted Hezbollah political strongholds to force it to withdraw from Syria. Hezbollah, seeking domestic stability due to its strong position in the Lebanese political system, generally responded with restraint and thereby avoided escalating the episode into civil war. The growing reach and prominence of armed non-state actors, especially across the Middle East, increasingly make their cross-border operations an important feature of sub-state conflict.

Rationalization of the Establishment of Local Government Investing-Funding Affiliates(LGIFAs) in Korea

Rationalization of the Establishment of Local Government Investing-Funding Affiliates(LGIFAs) in Korea

Multinational Banks and IMF Conditionality

AbstractWe find firm-level evidence that US banks receive preferential treatment in countries under IMF conditionality. We rely on investment location decisions to infer firms’ expectations about future profits and find that US firms are approximately 53 percent more likely to acquire financial firms in countries under financial conditionality. IMF programs without financial conditionality and FDI in other sectors serve as placebo tests. Financial conditionality has weak effects on investment decisions by non-US firms, which implies a political-economy interpretation. Firm-level data indicate that the distinctive behavior of US firms is not due to advantages of scale or to a US-firm fixed effect, but to US influence in the IMF. Firms from other major IMF shareholders benefit as well, but the effects are much weaker. The effects are concentrated in the politically relevant firms that have local affiliates, which is consistent with the interpretation that firms lobby for preferential treatment.

Loans from my neighbours: East Asian commercial banks, financial integration, and bank default risk

This study investigates the impact of financial integration on recipient country bank default risk and, in particular, if that relationship is moderated by the type of financial integration. Using the system generalized method of moments (GMM), the study finds that financial integration lowers bank default risk in the recipient countries. The impact is primarily driven by the foreign claims extended by Asian lenders and the foreign claims extended via local affiliates. These results show that the close proximity of lenders and borrowers or ‘local’ knowledge via an affiliate presence alleviates information asymmetry, allowing for effective monitoring and disciplining of the loan relationship. The result supports the fostering of financial integration, promoting deeper intra-regional connectedness throughout East Asia. When foreign claims come from outside East Asia, policy makers should encourage presence through local affiliates, as this has an equivalent impact.

The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia by Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne and Barbara C. Batson

Reviewed by: The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia by Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne and Barbara C. Batson Louise M. Newman The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia. By Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne, and Barbara C. Batson. (Charleston, S.C: The History Press, 2020. Pp. 206. Paper, $23.99, ISBN 978-1-4671-4419-3.) This book accompanies an excellent exhibition at the Library of Virginia to commemorate the centennial of woman suffrage (https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/wedemand/), offering a detailed account of the campaigns conducted by the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in the early twentieth century. These campaigns have generally been overlooked by historians because they failed to get the all-male General Assembly in Virginia to reform the state constitution. By the time the Equal Suffrage League did make some progress in March 1920, the process was no longer needed because the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect (without Virginia’s ratification) later that year. Nonetheless, this account is a welcome addition to the historiography on woman suffrage because, as Sandra Gioia Treadway argues in the foreword, it highlights the “divergent opinions of white Virginia suffragists as they debated whether their goal should be an amendment to the state or to the federal constitution, [End Page 142] whether their tactics should rely on persuasion or militancy and how to address the issue of race in a state that had substantially disfranchised its black male citizens” (p. 8). Apart from two early chapters, which cover Virginia women’s political activities from 1619 through 1920, and a final chapter that examines the period after 1920, the bulk of the book focuses on the campaigns of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, an exclusively white organization founded in 1909 by about twenty Richmond women and led by Lila Hardaway Meade Valentine through 1920. The authors also attempt to document the activities of African American women, whose engagement in the suffrage movement was carried out through local affiliates of the National Association of Colored Women and the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Due to difficulty locating records, the discussions of African American women’s activities are brief, taking up only a few pages in this 171-page narrative. However, there is an excellent section explaining the particular impediments that African American women faced when they sought to register to vote after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, as well as a frank discussion of the complex and racist ways that white suffragists responded to antisuffragists’ claims that enfranchising women would endanger white supremacy. The book is well illustrated, with photographs of individuals, parades, broadsides, pamphlet covers, signed membership forms, letters, and other ephemera. Although the authors are familiar with a scholarly literature on southern suffragism, the narrative contains no historiographical analysis but instead presents detailed evidence to document the range and extent of Virginia women’s decades-long commitment to the suffrage cause. Scholars wanting to know more about the elite white women who made up the bulk of the leadership of this movement will find useful material here—but the book seems focused on increasing appreciation among a general audience for “those women [who] deserve recognition right alongside the heroes of the American Revolution and the civil rights movement for their work to expand democracy in the state” (p. 13). Louise M. Newman University of Florida Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

The Impact of New Member Orientation Programs on Union Member Commitment: Evidence from a National Study in a Post-Janus Setting

This article presents the findings of a study that examined local union new member orientation programs and their impact on member attitudes toward the union. Data for this study were collected through a survey of new members of six geographically dispersed local and regional affiliates of a large national public sector union. Members were asked about their experiences as new members. The findings provide strong evidence that high-quality new member orientation programs have a positive impact on member commitment to the union and that unions and union leaders can invest resources in initiating or improving these programs with the confidence that they will have a positive and significant impact on member attitudes. It also provides specific insights into the elements of effective new member orientation programs and includes action recommendations on how unions can use new member orientations programs to build stronger organizations.

Loans From My Neighbors: East Asian Commercial Banks, Banking Integration, and Bank Default Risk

This study investigated the impact of banking integration on recipient country bank default risk and, in particular, whether the type of banking integration moderates that relationship. Using the system generalized method of moments (GMM), the study found that banking integration lowers bank default risk in recipient countries. The foreign claims that Asian lenders extend and the foreign claims that banks extend via local affiliates primarily drive the impact. These results show that the close proximity of lenders and borrowers or “local” knowledge via an affiliate’s presence alleviates information asymmetry, allowing for effective monitoring and disciplining of the loan relationship. The result supports the fostering of banking integration, promoting deeper intra-regional connectedness throughout East Asia. Where foreign claims come from outside East Asia, policy makers should encourage their presence through local affiliates, as this has an equivalent impact.

Price discrimination in political advertising: Evidence from the 2012 presidential election

AbstractIn 2010, the US Supreme Court loosened contribution limits to Political Action Committees (PACs), sparking fears that big donors could exert outsize influence on elections by funding PAC advertising. However, PACs are potentially handicapped when buying advertising time; data from 2012 reveal that PACs pay 32% above regulated campaign rates. I estimate a model of demand for advertising by PACs, exploiting the misalignment of state and media market borders to address price endogeneity. I find that prices reflect willingness‐to‐pay for viewer demographics rather than media bias. The estimates further suggest that network‐owned stations discriminate more successfully than do local affiliates.

University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine

University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine

Framing anti-Americanism in Turkey: An empirical comparison of domestic and international media

Anti-Americanism is a growing tendency among people in Turkey, and the media is one source of this negative sentiment. After the failed military coup attempt in Turkey on 15 July 2016, more than 150 domestic media outlets were shut down, including television channels, daily newspapers, radio stations, news websites, and even social media. Local affiliates of international media companies such as Deutsche Welle Turkish, however, have remained immune to such government interventions to some extent. Considering the difference in the level of independence from Turkish government influence, this study aims to explore how the anti-American sentiment in the news varied across different media outlets. With the content of 690 online news reports, a sentiment analysis compared the pro-government Sabah and Yeni Şafak daily newspapers with two internationally owned and more independent media outlets, BBC News Turkish and Deutsche Welle. The results showed a significant discrepancy between the two groups in terms of how they framed news related to the United States. The domestic media framed and reported the US-related news with a more negative slant, including the use of offensive and pejorative narratives about the United States and its politics. BBC Turkish and Deutsche Welle, however, reported news about the United States with a relatively more neutral and objective language.

A Double-Edged Pluralism: Paradoxes of Diversity in the International Institute Movement, 1945–1965

Abstract As a study in US pluralism, this article examines the International Institute movement—an urban network of liberal pluralist social welfare and intercultural agencies—in the early post-1945 era. It argues that the institutes were practitioners of a double-edged, or paradoxical, pluralism, in which progressive and conservative elements coexisted in tension with each other. An assessment of Institute records from the national headquarters and several local affiliates dealing with group and cultural programs and casework methods considers the possibilities, limits, tensions, and ironic implications of institute theories and practices. The analysis highlights the challenge of attaining that ever-elusive “balance” between promoting cultural diversity (and integration) and ensuring a degree of assimilation. It sheds light on a major irony—namely, that the application of modestly relativist cultural insights often generated hypotheses of im/migrant pathology. And, in regard to processes of racialization, it illuminates a paradox: that race could inflect institute “cultural” theory and practice with respect to both ethnic and racialized im/migrants and minoritized Americans. Finally, the authors suggest their framework might be of wider applicability and that critical historical thinking about contemporary multiculturalism and its long roots is both timely and important.

Deep Participation in Underserved Communities: A Quantitative Analysis of Hearken’s Model for Engagement Journalism

ABSTRACTHearken is a proprietary news engagement platform growing in popularity. Under the Hearken approach, audience members are invited to participate in the newsmaking process. Hearken strives to assist news organizations in providing local and hyperlocal content that meets audience needs and demands while preserving elements of the journalist’s role as gatekeeper. Hearken has also worked to help news organizations reach underrepresented populations with mixed results per its own anecdotal analyses. This study employs a quantitative content analysis comparing one year’s worth of coverage at four different local NPR affiliates in the United States to provide a breakdown of Hearken content versus traditional reporter-driven content in the following four categories: emphasis on hyperlocal coverage, story topic prevalence within local and hyperlocal coverage, emphasis on coverage of underrepresented communities, and story topic prevalence within coverage of underrepresented communities. Findings reveal listener-driven Hearken content favors hyperlocal news on lifestyle issues while reporter-driven stories emphasize state-level governance and politics as well as local crime. These indicate a stark contrast between the content audiences want and that which journalists tend to report. The nuanced normative implications, possibilities and limitations of Hearken’s model of “deep participation” are addressed in some detail.

Banks beyond borders: internationalization, financialization, and the behavior of foreign-owned banks during the Global Financial Crisis

An internationalizing wave swept through many developing and emerging countries’ banking systems in the years before the onset of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. Early critics of the influx of foreign banks worried that local affiliates of international behemoths could serve key nodes for transmitting turbulent conditions in the global financial hubs to the peripheries of the world economy. The eruption of the GFC and its aftermath, it would appear, decisively settled the dispute over the merits of foreign control of national banking systems in the critics’ favor. Yet the simple foreign/domestic ownership distinction cannot answer the questions that animate this article: why did foreign-owned banks play an amplifying role during the crisis in one region (post-communist Central and Eastern Europe) but not in another (Central and South America)? What accounts for the difference in how foreign-owned banks responded to a common financial shock across the two regions? I argue that financialization of banking systems in the post-communist European group of countries is a key mediating factor that explains why the heavy foreign bank presence in the region amplified the regional effects of the global credit crunch in 2008 and the years that followed.