Normative Dilemmas Research Articles

EXPLOITATION OF WOMEN IN THE CHANGING POWER DYNAMICS

This research examines the role of women in political oligarchy and their potential to change power dynamics. Political oligarchy concentrates power in the hands of a few, often overlooking women's roles within this structure. Feminist intersectionality reveals that social class significantly influences women's involvement in oligarchy, with greater barriers for women from lower economic classes. Women's participation in politics, both as leaders and members of political parties, is crucial for representing their unique needs in policy-making. However, women in decision-making roles often face cultural and normative dilemmas, needing to overcome negative stereotypes. The feminist movement plays a vital role in addressing gender inequality by changing cultural norms and raising awareness of gender bias. Although the Constitution of Indonesia and international conventions affirm gender equality, implementation requires specific policies. This research employs a qualitative descriptive method, collecting data from literature, official documents, and news sources. Findings indicate that women's roles in political oligarchy are often tied to kinship relations, political clans, and dynasties. Despite affirmative action policies promoting 30% female representation in legislative candidate lists, this representation often serves to validate the interests of certain groups. Nonetheless, women's involvement in politics is a positive step toward gender equality. Addressing gender inequality and increasing women's participation in decision-making requires robust efforts to support women's rights and dismantle social and political barriers. Further policy implementation to support women's political representation is essential for a more inclusive and gender-equal society.

Complexity of mentalization.

The ability to understand other people’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors is associated with an individual’s ability and his attitude in the context of relationships. The development of this process is associated with different psychosocial factors: parental competence, building a secure attachment and reduced risk of violence in the family as well as the future intrapersonal relationships and social reality of one person Mentalization is empirically associated with resolving psychological tasks in normative dilemmas and also, can influence on the outcome of personal and situational crises. And so forth, passing through the different stages of life and prevention of dysfunctional patterns in the family is facilitated. This text aims to investigate the main characteristics of mentalization, its connection with the etiopathogenesis of some main mental disorders, their course and prognosis. Several studies in recent years confirmed that these connections can enroll mentalization to prevention and psychological therapy in some mental disorders and dysfunctional thinking patterns. On the other hand, it serves as a basis for psychotherapeutic competence expressed in the ability to connect, differentiate, and separate, as the main interactional stages of the psychotherapeutic process.

Reflection on action by activation workers as professional learning strategy

ABSTRACT In this article, social work theory on reflective practice is used to explore the potential value of reflection on action for professional learning by activation workers who support people receiving welfare benefits to find work. The article focuses on the role of reflection on action in professional learning concerning three challenges which activation workers face: dealing with normative dilemmas, translating formal and informal knowledge into decision-making and dealing with power relations. The article presents tentative findings stemming from qualitative research on Dutch activation workers participating in reflection on action. Participants report multiple learning outcomes concerning these challenges. The theoretical and empirical exploration suggests that reflection on action can support learning by activation workers to better deal with professional challenges inherent to their work. However, these empirical findings are preliminary and based on a specific context. Further exploration by both scholars and practitioners is therefore suggested, in which the social work profession has a lot to offer.

How to account for the dark sides of social innovation? Transitions directionality in renewable energy prosumerism

Social innovation is gaining attention as a pivotal dimension of socio-technical transitions with renewable energy prosumerism as a prominent example. However, this example also highlights that social innovation evokes concerns about purposes, beneficiaries, normative dilemmas and legitimacy. This paper addresses recent calls to confront the perceived ‘dark sides’ of social innovations. As debates on these dark sides often get stuck in either naive optimism or paralyzing critique, the paper investigates how transitions theory can inform nuanced understandings. The key concept is transitions directionality. The analysis shows how it conceptualizes the dark sides as manifestations of socio-technical path dependence, as disempowering ideological ‘landscape’ factors, as internal contradictions within institutionally complex regimes, as niche-regime dialectics, and as transition phases. Rather than proposing a particular normative position, the paper presents a heuristic that supports well-considered engagement with the dark sides.

The Everything But Arms (EBA) scheme and the EU’s normative dilemma: the case of Myanmar’s garment sector

Amid the escalation of the so-called Rohingya crisis and rising human rights concerns, EU institutions have repeatedly threatened a suspension of the Everything But Arms (EBA) trade arrangement with Myanmar, which is conditional on respect for fundamental human and labour rights. Despite Myanmar’s human rights situation having dramatically deteriorated, when in February 2021 the military seized power in a violent coup, the EU has failed to invoke a withdrawal of trade preferences. This article seeks to explore the rationale for the EU trade approach, which has so far received limited attention in the literature. By examining the case of Myanmar’s garment industry, which has been one of the most important sectors benefitting from EBA preferences, this article highlights the fact that, contrary to EU claims of a more assertive trade policy, EU trade decisions have been primarily influenced by normative dilemmas connected to the unwanted consequences of punishing trade instruments. In turn, the article shows that the EU’s normative dilemmas are paving the way for a targeted withdrawal of trade preferences.

Constructivism, Democracy and Symbolic Representation: A Formal/Stylistic Perspective

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the normative dilemma raised by the constructivist turn in representation theory by focusing on a neglected aspect of such dilemma: under which conditions representation − taken in its existential and symbolic senses − can enhance democracy. By developing sustained readings of Laclau and Voegelin, it shows how stylistic/formal features such as a figurative and evocative language and a capacity to persuade both rationally and extra-rationally can be key elements for making representation democratic.

The Normative Dilemmas of the Feminist Struggles Against (Trans-)Feminicide in Mexico

This paper explores women’s and feminists’ struggles against feminicide in Mexico. The author analyzes the dominant notions of gender and violence at the core of the Mexican case. First, the article adopts a historical approach, highlighting some critical moments of women’s struggles to criminalize feminicide. In this section, the author briefly reconstructs the genealogy of the concept in the Americas, presenting the legal definition of feminicide and violence against women in the existing legal framework in Mexico. Second, the approach addresses the challenges and problems that trans feminicide poses to the current legal framework. This part discusses the violence emanating from a binary notion of gender-based violence and the binary conception of cis and heterosexual gender identity in the law. Here follows an introduction of two central concepts for the analysis of gender: cissexism and heteronormativity. Finally, the article addresses the structural dilemma of the criminalization of feminicide and the juridical strategy of framing women’s rights against gender-based violence as special rights.

Deriding the Rising: Joyce, Joyceans, and Political Sacrifice in Ulysses

In this essay, I examine Joyce's derision in Ulysses of Irish republicans executed by the British state and engage with Joyceans' responses to that derision. Two main Joycean perspectives are addressed —historical revisionism and postcolonialism. Revisionists universally and postcolonialists predominantly view Joyce's derision positively. This assessment is justified by contrasting republicans' violent, emotional, and mythologizing celebration of sacrifice with Joyce's pacific, rational, and realist antipathy to it. I seek to demonstrate that these contrasts are irrelevant, false, or weaker than claimed. I argue that Joyce's antagonism towards executed republicans was largely the result of his contempt for collectivist challenges to his sense of individual autonomy. So deep was his contempt that it blinded him to the effectiveness of sacrifice in galvanizing the Irish population during the period he was writing Ulysses. Nor is this just an empirical problem; postcolonialist Joyceans face a normative dilemma because acceptance of Joyce's portrayal of republican deaths as farcical is not consistent with the anticolonialism that is purportedly at the core of their chosen paradigm.

When ‘street-level bureaucrats’ act as cultural brokers: The normative dilemmas and personal commitment of government officials in southern Ethiopia

Following the implementation of ethnic federalism in 1995, for the first time, government officials have been appointed from among the various ethnic groups rather than being only drawn from the central Ethiopian highlands. As such, they carry the responsibility of mediating and translating between two rather different worlds and value systems: those of the state and state law and those of the local population, many of whom continue to widely apply customary law. Many of these native government officials find themselves in a normative dilemma, as they have to balance the, often contradictory, expectations of the government and the local population.

Approaches in Energy Exclusive Security: Theories of Energy Security and the Dominance of Realism

Energy security is an important component of power politics, which explains the distribution of limited resources and the consequences thereof. Yet contemporary international relations theories tend to focus more on the “security” element when it comes to energy security and somewhat underplay the “power” component that lies behind it. This may limit their purchase and nuance in explaining contemporary and future energy security developments. This article offers an initial theoretical argument that reveals and emphasizes how energy changes and shapes power and security concepts and, thus, requires an improved conceptual model in international relations theory. I provide a conceptual overview of energy and security before adapting and empirically examining existing international relations theories (realism, neorealism, liberalism). I then conceptualize energy security within the scope of realism and aim to emphasize the specific importance of power that energy security theory and policy requires. To do so, I investigate the Energy Security Development Capability and identify the elements that could contribute to the advancement of energy security. I also note why realism is still seen as a dominant approach to understand energy security.Related ArticlesAsh, John. 2010. “New Nuclear Energy, Risk, and Justice: Regulatory Strategies for an era of Limited Trust.” Politics & Policy 38 (2): 255‐284. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00237.xKhodr, Hiba, and Isabella Ruble. 2013. “Energy Policies and Domestic Politics in the MENA Region in the Aftermath of the Arab Upheavals: The Cases of Lebanon, Libya, and KSA.” Politics & Policy 41 (5): 656‐689. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12033Wood, Steve. 2009. “Energy Security, Normative Dilemmas, and Institutional Camouflage: Europe's Pragmatism.” Politics & Policy 37 (3): 611‐635. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00187.x

The normativity of educational psychology practice

This article addresses how the current mental health challenges among children and young people call for new educational psychology perspectives, and even more importantly, how the current challenges also call for normative reflections about the reasons behind the rising mental health issues. In the paper, it is claimed that many of these normative reflections tend to be overlooked in educational psychology practice. The paper further claims that when taking a closer look at educational psychology practice, focus has mainly been on how EPs most effectively can support schools in their everyday work by providing therapeutic interventions or by supporting different educational aims. However, less emphasis has been put on the why of educational psychology practice. Based on empirical evidence, it is shown how EPs often are faced with normative dilemmas. The article concludes by introducing a distinction between an affirmative and a non-affirmative approach to educational psychology practice.

Trust in the Process: Renewable Energy Governance in Malaysia and Indonesia

Studies on renewable energy (RE) policies and policy making have generally focused on the Global North. This article homes in on how trust, an underexamined concept in the multi‐level governance literature, affects RE trajectories in Malaysia and Indonesia. Through comparative analysis, we find that different levels of trust result in similar degrees of RE policy support, but dissimilar degrees of engagement between state and societal actors in RE policy making. Negative expectations of the social grievances engendered by RE transitions contribute to reluctant, though legitimized, pursuits of clean energy production and consumption. Meanwhile, trust in actors' nationalism—that is, in opposing a Global North environmental agenda and demonstrating constitutionally aligned resource management in Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively—facilitates more inclusive policy making. Due to greater nationalism, Indonesia's state‐society engagement in RE governance is stronger and leads to a civil RE movement that outpaces Malaysia's overall.Related ArticlesAsh, John. 2010. “New Nuclear Energy, Risk, and Justice: Regulatory Strategies for an era of Limited Trust.” Politics & Policy 38 (2): 225‐284. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00237.xKhodr, Hiba, and Isabella Ruble. 2013. “Energy Policies and Domestic Politics in the MENA Region in the Aftermath of the Arab Upheavals: The Cases of Lebanon, Libya, and KSA.” Politics & Policy 41 (5): 656‐689. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12033Wood, Steve. 2009. “Energy Security, Normative Dilemmas, and Institutional Camouflage: Europe's Pragmatism.” Politics & Policy 37 (3): 611‐635. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00187.x

Central‐local tensions in the decentralization of social policies: Street‐level bureaucrats and social practices in the Netherlands

AbstractEuropean welfare reforms often involve the decentralization of social care services. This potentially creates central‐local tensions for professionals implementing and delivering policies on the ground. Using the capability approach (CA) as a conceptual frame, this article compares local professionals' experiences in the decentralization of social work and care services in an urban and a rural mid‐sized municipality in the Netherlands. It offers a missing insiders' perspective on central‐local tensions, focusing on front‐line workers' capabilities to effectively implement policy on the ground. It finds that perfect policy implementation is hardly achievable locally and that policies are translated through implementation and on‐the‐ground delivery. This leads to central‐local tensions and the absence of reflective space for professionals to deal with normative dilemmas. We conclude that the CA is both useful for identifying these tensions as well as providing a normative framework to guide professionals in reflecting on and negotiating street‐level issues.

To Sanction or Not to Sanction? Normative Dilemmas in the Promotion of LGBTI Human Rights

A rights-based approach to development, a cornerstone of the European Union’s (EU) development policy, can be interpreted as an attempt to govern development assistance through impartial rules and standards. Yet, such an approach might also run into a number of difficulties when introduced to a complex, real-world context. In this working paper, I emphasise that the practice of rights-based development policies is closely bound to the process of context-specific application. Through an examination of the path through which the EU and the United States decided on their approach to an anti-gay bill introduced in Uganda in 2014, I show that human rights conditionality is not applied in an automated fashion in accordance with impartial rules and standards. Rather, the path through which US and EU executives operate is weighing normative dilemmas connected to the unwanted consequences of human rights sanctions and public shaming. While these executives ultimately chose different responses, they arrive at their decision through weighing similar dilemmas. Accordingly, the paper highlights the importance of normative dilemmas for shaping and determining foreign policy decisions and calls for more research into this under-studied phenomenon.

Zasada aglomeracji i dylematy moralne

A Deontic Logic for Normative DilemmasAbstract: Standard deontic logic does not tolerate normative conflicts. If we assume that one ought to do A and ought to do B, but cannot do them both, we get a contradiction within deontic logic. Philosophers who deny that there could be genuine moral dilemmas treat this fact as the proof that dilemmas are logically impossible. At the same time, the advocates of the possibility of moral dilemmas propose to reject or restrict standard deontic principles. What consequences does it have for the resulting logic? Some of them are too strong because they contain the theorem of normative triviality or “deontic explosion,” which says that if there is any case of normative conflict, then everything is obligatory. On the other hand, some of them are too weak, since they are not able to validate more important deontic inferences especially the Smith Argument. Lou Goble introduces three criteria of adequacy that any deontic logic should meet if it is to accommodate normative conflicts successfully. First, I present these conditions and then I introduce a new logic of ought that fully meets all of them.

Refugees, EU Citizenship and the Common European Asylum System A Normative Dilemma for EU Integration

This article argues that the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in the European refugee crisis as a crisis of EU integration extend beyond refugee policies into what we may call ‘the citizenship regime’ of the European Union in ways that are consequential for refugees, member states, and the European Union. It advances arguments for the relatively rapid access to citizenship of refugees, demonstrates that this norm has at least some acknowledgment in the policies of EU member states and considers what further differentiation of refugees from other classes of migrant might be a part of developing a just and legitimate Common European Asylum Regime. It argues that there are some reasons to favour a CEAS in which refugees receive EU citizenship prior to national citizenship in a member state.

Economic and non-economic values and objectives in the EU’s international trade: Normative tensions, actors and processes

This Europe and the World: A law review special issue comprises selected papers presented at a RENFORCE workshop on the theme of tensions between the EU’s trade and non-economic values, held at Utrecht University in November 2017. The symposium addresses normative dilemmas underlying the EU’s trade law and policy. Normative dilemmas subsist between, on the one hand, the EU’s basic pursuit of its commercial interests and trade liberalization, and, on the other hand, the EU’s mandate to promote and safeguard a number of non-economic values, including human rights and sustainable development. The journal symposium aims to unveil normative tensions existing in the EU’s trade and investment policy, and understand some of the key actors and processes through which normative tensions are created and also mitigated. While the tensions between economic and non-economic values in the EU’s trade law and policy have been extensively discussed in literature, the present symposium highlights some of the recent developments in the EU’s trade relations, analyses not only human rights but also sustainable development, and examines the impact of new technologies.

О нормативных следствиях одной импликации

The paper treats the “ought implies can” principle as a normative dilemma in relation to epistemic and moral obligations. It shoes that the standard interpretation of this principle as a contraposition is not the only possible one or heuristically interesting. The author draws on the examples of obligations and actions of different types to show how it is possible to shift the focus from the modality of possibility to the modality of obligation. It allows to explain a number of actions not adequately described in traditional moral theory. It also helps to understand the links between moral and epistemic imperatives.

O Conhecimento e a construção de ameaças

This article seeks to understand the political impacts of knowledge and its consequences on the processes of threat construction, as described in the international security constructivist literature. For this, the work is based on the bibliographical reviewand problematization of theorists that, to some extent, equate the dynamics of the power-knowledge binomial, namely Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and their correspondents in the field of International Relations, as Peter M. Haas and Jef Huysmans. The argument is that, in the context of international security, two dominant tendencies coexist: one of a more rationalist and positivist character, which understands the existence of a neutral relation between the production of knowledge and the decision making in the political arena, and another, with a critical foundation, for which the production of concepts invariably impacts political structures. In terms of international security, this impact is described by Huysmans’ concept of “normative dilemma”, whose principle is the idea that there is no innocent knowledge in this subfield, something that is attested by the analysis of the processes of securitization and threat construction and its relation to the reproduction of certain analytical and conceptual lenses. From a similar locus of observation, this work aims to explore the arguments of the two currents mentioned, in order to apprehend the impacts of knowledge and the normative dilemma in the threat construction. With this, it is intended to locate such a discussion in the broader debate on the sociopolitical role of academia in contemporary times.

Violent Conflictition: Armed Conflicts and Global Competition for Attention and Legitimacy

The persistence of violence in international politics is often depicted in terms of a gap between the normative ideal of non-violence on the one hand and the actual behavior of governments and other actors on the other. This paper proposes to see this gap as an object of empirical research rather than just as a normative dilemma. We argue that the institutionalization of global norms of non-violence since the mid-to-late nineteenth century has changed the conditions for the reproduction of violent conflicts by embedding local conflicts into global competitions for attention and legitimacy. At the heart of this process, we see a type of observer that we call universalized third parties: international organizations, social scientists, journalists, and similar agents who, by positioning themselves as proponents of universal norms and by objecting violence in the name of humanity, have made violence particularly likely to attract the attention of the so-called world public opinion. This global attention, however, can impact conflicts in different and contradictory ways: On the one hand, violence now is particularly likely to undermine the legitimacy of conflict parties, incenting them to refrain from violence or to try to direct attention to the violent behavior of their opponent; on the other hand, violence attracts attention to the conflict, incenting conflict parties to make deliberate use of it in order to call attention to their cause. This complex interplay between local conflicts and global competition is what we call violent conflictition—a neologism coined to indicate the concurrence between conflict and competition.