Ongoing Fight Research Articles

Food security in times of war: problems and ways of ensuring it in Ukraine

The peculiarities of the manifestation of the food crisis in Ukraine in times of war are investigated and the foreign experience and the experience of international organizations and political institutions in overcoming it are analyzed. The analysis is based on the concept of food security developed by the UN, which defines it as sustainable physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. It also uses the comprehensive approach with four pillars of food security: food availability, access, utilization, and stability. In the context of the study of food security in Ukraine, two areas for analysis are identified: a decrease in the availability of food for the population and a violation of nutritional stability; a decrease in the economic access of the population to food and essential goods. The article focuses on the issue of economic access to food for vulnerable groups of the population (including internally displaced persons and people living near the demarcation line, and in the occupied and liberated territories), compares the incomes of households of internally displaced persons in Ukraine at different moments since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of russia in February 2022, and presents the results of the assessment of the population's food needs in Ukraine. The prevalence of food insecurity and the ongoing fight against it at the international level have made it possible to develop clear mechanisms to overcome it. Based on numerous studies and taking into account the experience of countries where the food crisis was caused by natural disasters or the impact of climate factors and states whose territories became the arena of military conflicts, in the context of finding ways to overcome the food crisis, the author examines the comprehensive approach of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to achieving food security in crisis conditions, which combines two areas: Sustainable development of rural areas and stimulation of agriculture; development and implementation of targeted programs to provide direct access to food for vulnerable groups. The areas of the comprehensive approach of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are defined as complementary and aimed at reinforcing each other's positive results. Moreover, the article analyzes the European Union's approach to rural development in the Common Agricultural Policy, which provides for the definition of two equally important directions: support and stimulation of the agricultural sector; strengthening the social, environmental, and economic sustainability of rural areas in the context of overcoming the risks inherent in this type of territory.

Solidarity with Chrystul Kizer: On Disparate Failures of Knowledge-Attribution and Survivors of Sexual Violence

AbstractI write in solidarity with Chrystul Kizer, a criminalized Black teen survivor of sexual violence in Wisconsin, to detail how her ongoing legal fight occurs in a tilted sociopolitical and epistemological landscape with weighted opponents. I offer a theory of disparate failures of knowledge-attribution for survivors of sexual violence, a structural epistemological problem that I call constructed pragmatic encroachment (CPE). CPE explains that pragmatic encroachment is a nonneutral knowledge-attribution problem whereby attributors are empowered to affirm or deny a subject's knowledge-claim based on the subject's constructed practical stakes. Constructed practical stakes here refers to the potential costs/consequences of acting on knowledge of some p for some subject, “S,” constructed by their practical environment. Examining CPE in Kizer's self-defense case, I highlight why real-world pragmatic encroachment is exceptionally alarming for survivors of sexual violence, especially criminalized survivors. The epistemological problem is not merely whether people in powerful positions are frequently fallible, but the convergence of sociopolitical and epistemic power to deny what survivors know about our own experiences of violence, and power to punish survivors for acting on what we know.

АКТУАЛЬНІСТЬ КРИТИЧНОГО ДИСКУРС-АНАЛІЗУ ДЛЯ ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ ДЕЗІНФОРМАЦІЇ

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is one of productive research methods in the realm of Political Science. It is urgent to specify the relevance of critical discourse analysis as a method of studying disinformation in view of the ongoing fight between democracy and authoritarianism worldwide. For the purpose of outlining the relevance of critical discourse analysis as a method of studying disinformation, the author has utilized the method of case study. As a result, it can be stated that critical discourse analysis is a productive method for studying disinformation. Critical discourse analysis stresses construction of social identities, which can help to study the nature of disinformation campaigns aimed at creating and promoting particular political narratives and reaching wider audiences with the purpose of misleading and confusing. Critical discourse analysis of disinformation spreading can help to deconstruct mechanisms with the help of which the issues of language and power can be manipulated to achieve particular political gains. This is especially urgent in the current so-called era of «post-truth» when opinions and biases can often be more influential than facts and figures. Disinformation campaign have been widely spread globally, especially since 2016 U.S. presidential elections and Brexit referendum in Great Britain. Disinformation is also widely utilized in the information dimension of the ongoing russia-Ukraine war with the purpose of misleading different audiences and achieving political and military gains. It can be concluded that critical discourse analysis is one of the promising qualitative methods of disinformation research. In particular, it is urgent in the context of strengthening of the global confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy. This method can be productively used for researching disinformation in political contexts.

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

The nature of the Education Cleavage in four Eroding Democracies1

Abstract In recent years, weaker and consolidated democracies alike were in many instances caught by a wave of autocratisation. However, given the protractedness in the time of the phenomenon of democratic erosion, it is not unlikely that the process overlaps with multiple electoral cycles. This gives to those parties committed to liberal democracy a window to organise themselves and challenge the incumbent at the ballots. The present study investigates whether the political division between incumbent parties and organised pro-democratic opposition in Poland, Hungary, Bolivia and Turkey coincides with a political cleavage that fits Baiern and Maier’s three-dimensional conceptualisation of the term. Through a quantitative approach, it emerges that indeed authoritarian and liberal values (Normative dimension) substantially account for the divergence in political support (Organisational dimension) by the different educated groups (Social dimension) in all the countries under observation. These findings not only support the existence of an educational cleavage outside of Western and Northern Europe, but also highlights its centrality in the ongoing fight for democracy. Furthermore, Hungary appears as a peculiar case, since democratic commitment accounts more than the authoritarian-liberal scale in explaining the support (or lack of it) for the incumbent party by the Hungarian educational groups.

Advances in Next-Generation Coronavirus Vaccines in Response to Future Virus Evolution.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has spread to more than 230 countries and territories worldwide since its outbreak in late 2019. In less than three years, infection by SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in over 600 million cases of COVID-19 and over 6.4 million deaths. Vaccines have been developed with unimaginable speed, and 11 have already been approved by the World Health Organization and given Emergency Use Listing. The administration of several first-generation SARS-CoV-2 vaccines has successfully decelerated the spread of COVID-19 but not stopped it completely. In the ongoing fight against viruses, genetic mutations frequently occur in the viral genome, resulting in a decrease in vaccine-induced antibody neutralization and widespread breakthrough infection. Facing the evolution and uncertainty of SARS-CoV-2 in the future, and the possibility of the spillover of other coronaviruses to humans, the need for vaccines with a broad spectrum of antiviral variants against multiple coronaviruses is recognized. It is imperative to develop a universal coronavirus or pan-coronavirus vaccine or drug to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as well as to prevent the next coronavirus pandemic. In this review, in addition to summarizing the protective effect of approved vaccines, we systematically summarize current work on the development of vaccines aimed at suppressing multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern as well as multiple coronaviruses.

The illusion of abundant communications and the ghost of Red Lion.

Twentieth-century communications law was built on the assumption of scarcity-radio spectrum as a scarce natural resource and telephone networks as a natural monopoly. Scarcity justified both rate regulation and content regulation of the services offered over these communications resources. Telephone networks were subject to the nondiscrimination rules of common carriage, and the Supreme Court in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC famously upheld the "fairness doctrine," which required that both sides of public issues be discussed fairly over broadcast media, expressly on the rationale that the scarcity of the airwaves justified content-based regulation under the First Amendment. As the century drew to a close, however, technological developments cast doubt on the assumption of scarcity and, therefore, much of the legal framework of communications law. In this chapter, I explain how both incumbent and startup providers reacted to this seeming technological abundance with acts aimed at creating or re-creating economic scarcity97strongly resisting encroachments on exclusive franchises or collusively slowing or halting the rollout of alternative networks97and how communications law has failed to keep up. It is widely acknowledged that our current statutory law is maladapted to modern technology, but in this work I recast the ongoing fights over net neutrality, affordable broadband, and platform speech regulation in terms of scarcity and abundance and argue that Red Lion is still with us in spirit97communications law should address the sources and effects of economic. I sketch out what such regulation might start to look like and conclude with some thoughts about what this story means for the central thesis of this volume.

A postcolonial and pan‐African feminist reading of Zimbabwean women entrepreneurs

AbstractThis paper challenges the Eurocentric entrepreneurship narrative from postcolonial and pan‐African feminist perspectives. Based on interview research conducted with 24 Zimbabwean women entrepreneurs, we narrate their microstorias in order to expose the legacy of entrepreneurial colonialism and patriarchy in Africa. The microstorias reveal the colonial past as well as the patriarchal norms that disenfranchise women entrepreneurs in Zimbabwe. Yet, they also reveal their struggle, resilience, resistance and their ongoing fight to construct their own identities as entrepreneurs. The paper contributes to enhance and advance further postcolonial, decolonial and critical voices in entrepreneurship and organization studies by challenging the prevailing western discourse of entrepreneurship from the introduction of necroentrepreneurism; giving support to intersectional postcolonial and Pan‐African feminist perspectives that voice global South women entrepreneurship and, by decolonizing and decentring the theoretical debates on entrepreneurship and organization.

The Impact of Performance Appraisals on Employee Productivity: The Case of the Lebanese Retail Sector

Employee motivation is an ongoing fight for organizations. Arousal, direction, and persistence of planned activity with a purpose are all characteristics of motivation. A company's workers are critical to its future development and success. In many ways, they represent a company's image. Employees are the most critical resource a business may utilize to complete its tasks since they are the most valuable, expensive, and inconsistent. The research focused on quantitative methodology for collecting data and for evaluating the impact of performance appraisals on the performance of employees in the workplace. Data from primary and secondary sources will be gathered and merged to provide a complete picture of the relationship between 360-degree performance evaluations and employee motivation. The survey had been distributed using google forms over a sample of 100 respondents in Lebanese Companies, and the data had been treated using SPSS statistical tool and the results had been displayed in the form of descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed a direct relationship between management by objectives, 360 degree appraisal, performance appraisal, and organizational performance.

Robust therapeutic effects on COVID-19 of novel small molecules: Alleviation of SARS-CoV-2 S protein induction of ACE2/TMPRSS2, NOX2/ROS, and MCP-1.

While new variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) constantly emerge to prolong the pandemic of COVID-19, robust and safe therapeutics are in urgent need. During the previous and ongoing fight against the pandemic in China, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has proven to be markedly effective in treating COVID-19. Among active ingredients of TCM recipes, small molecules such as quercetin, glabridin, gallic acid, and chrysoeriol have been predicted to target viral receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) via system pharmacology/molecular docking/visualization analyses. Of note, endothelial dysfunction induced by oxidative stress and inflammation represents a critical mediator of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and multi-organ injuries in patients with COVID-19. Hence, in the present study, we examined whether quercetin, glabridin, gallic acide and chrysoeriol regulate viral receptors of ACE2 and transmembrane serine protease 2 (TMPRSS2), redox modulator NADPH oxidase isoform 2 (NOX2), and inflammatory protein of monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) in endothelial cells to mediate therapeutic protection against COVID-19. Indeed, quercetin, glabridin, gallic acide and chrysoeriol completely attenuated SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S protein)-induced upregulation in ACE2 protein expression in endothelial cells. In addition, these small molecules abolished S protein upregulation of cleaved/active form of TMPRSS2, while native TMPRSS2 was not significantly regulated. Moreover, these small molecules completely abrogated S protein-induced upregulation in NOX2 protein expression, which resulted in alleviated superoxide production, confirming their preventive efficacies against S protein-induced oxidative stress in endothelial cells. In addition, treatment with these small molecules abolished S protein induction of MCP-1 expression. Collectively, our findings for the first time demonstrate that these novel small molecules may be used as novel and robust therapeutic options for the treatment of patients with COVID-19, via effective attenuation of S protein induction of endothelial oxidative stress and inflammation.

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox

THE SULTANATE OF OMAN’S FOREIGN POLICY TOWARDS THE YEMENI CRISIS: PILLARS AND LIMITATIONS

The study started from the question: What is the role played by the Sultanate of Oman in the Yemeni crisis? What are the most important auxiliary factors and the most prominent obstacles to performing this role?
 The problem of the study was the difference of the foreign policy of the Sultanate of Oman towards the crisis in Yemen from the policies of other regional countries, especially the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
 The study adopted the hypothesis that there is an effective and important role played by the Sultanate of Oman in the Yemeni crisis, which it plays through the positions and foreign policy decisions that it has committed to towards the crisis in its neighbor Yemen. The study adopted both the decision-making approach and the descriptive analytical approach.
 The study analyzed the priorities of the Sultanate of Oman in Yemen, the developments of the Omani position on the Yemeni crisis, and the components and determinants of the Omani role in Yemen.
 The study concluded a number of results, the most important of which is that the Sultanate of Oman has invested its political neutrality and moderation diplomacy in order to activate channels of dialogue and diplomacy in order to end the ongoing fighting in Yemen, and that despite the difficulty of the Yemeni file, the Sultanate of Oman remains more qualified than others to play the role of a neutral mediator. This is reinforced by the fact that the Sultanate is not a party to the conflict in Yemen, as is the case with other regional and international parties.

Mental health burden and predictors among Egyptian healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is known to have negatively affected the physical and mental well-being of healthcare workers. Estimating such a burden in a limited-resource setting may be essential in the ongoing fight against the pandemic. This research aims to assess the prevalence of mental health problems, that is, depression and anxiety, among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Egypt and their associated factors and predictors. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted through an online survey to screen for anxiety using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) score and depression using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) score among healthcare workers in direct or indirect contact with COVID-19 cases. Results: Analysis of participants’ responses showed that 36.7% suffered from depression, while 30.7% had moderate to severe anxiety. Independent predictors of depression were feeling unsure or dissatisfied with one’s income (AOR =8.87 and 8.51, respectively), working exclusively in private or governmental hospitals (AOR = 8.15 and 5.1, respectively), and serving in central or insurance hospitals (AOR = 2.21). Meanwhile, independent predictors of anxiety were working in governmental hospitals (AOR = 5.87), working duration from 5 to 10 years (AOR = 4.65), and suffering from other comorbidities (AOR = 2.18). Working as a nurse was a protective factor against anxiety (AOR = 0.36). Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic considerably affected the mental well-being of health care workers in Egypt. Income, type of hospital, working duration, and other comorbidities were the main predictors of health care workers’ mental health. Examining the mental burden of the pandemic on health care workers is important so that current and future crises can be managed better.

Blueprint For the Future: Unhoused Tenant Organizing in Los Angeles

During the Covid-19 pandemic, an organized encampment at Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles built community infrastructure that articulated a clear vision of a world built on class solidarity. But the success of the community also made it a threat to the racial capitalist order, and in March of 2021, the city deployed hundreds of riot police to mass evict the encampment and fence the park. This strategy became a blueprint for displacement replicated across the city, one in which services were conjoined to enforcement. But those who organized at Echo Park Lake continued the fight, creating their own blueprint for the ongoing fight for housing liberation.

Rhetoric vs reality: The disconnect between policy and practice for teachers implementing Aboriginal education in their schools

In Australia, pervasive deficit representations and positioning of Aboriginal peoples continue to impact on teachers’ capacity to meaningfully embed Aboriginal curriculum and pedagogies into their teaching. This sits within a policy context driven by standardization, competition and market forces focused on closing the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal student outcomes to address the statistical dissonance caused by Aboriginal underachievement. Our analysis is informed by Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the ‘problem’ represented to be?’ analytical tool. We reveal discourses that position Aboriginal peoples as the ‘problem’ and the effects of these on teacher practice. Using the 2019 Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, which represents a national partisan vision of Australian education, we demonstrate how discourses of community engagement, Reconciliation and data-driven solutions continue to position Aboriginal peoples as incapable, and government as savior. This flags the silencing of Aboriginal peoples’ key concerns of racism, social justice, truth-telling, sovereignty, and treaty, all of which are central to the ongoing fight for voice, reparative justice and recognition. Until these concerns are heard and accounted for in policies, the gap will remain, teachers will continue to struggle to meaningfully engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policies and curriculum content and consequently fail Aboriginal aspirations.

Pennhurst and the Struggle for Disability Rights

Pennhurst and the Struggle for Disability Rights

Multi Case Analysis on The Development of Fact-Checking Organizations in Indonesia

The network of fact-checking organizations has expanded widely, and these organizations are seen as one of the important elements in the efforts to tackle the spread of disinformation, misinformation, or hoax in the society. Although the number of fact-checking organizations in all parts of the world continue to increase, scholarly studies which tries to capture the presence of fact-checking practices in Global South Countries, including Indonesia are still limited. This study uses a multi-case study method to analyze the development of fact-checking practices carried out by six organizations in Indonesia which already certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) namely: Liputan6, Suara.com, Tirto.id, Kompas.com, Tempo.co, and MAFINDO. Since fact-checking initiatives became popular about six years ago in Indonesia, we discovered that Indonesian fact-checking organizations have grown and strengthened their presence nationally, as well as engaged with various networks of global organizations that leading the ongoing fight against hoax. However, Indonesian fact-checking organizations are still facing several challenges in the context of standardizing fact-checking methodologies, measuring and evaluating the “impact” of their fact-checking activities and related to the management of fact-checking resources. While this study attempts to contribute an overview of Indonesian fact-checking organizations, further studies on fact-checking initiatives with various methodological approaches are still needed to comprehensively look at the role of fact-checking organizations in Indonesia.

Cholera in Haiti

The cholera epidemic that hit Haiti from October 2010 to February 2019 was the world's deadliest of the last 25 years. Officially, the successive waves caused 9789 deaths, although numerous additional casualties could not be recorded. The origin of this epidemic has been the subject of a controversy involving two opposing theories. The first hypothesis, put forward by renowned American academics, was that the cholera epidemic originated from the environment, due to the proliferation and transmission of aquatic Vibrio cholerae bacteria driven by a confluence of circumstances, i.e., the earthquake followed by a hot summer and, ultimately, heavy rainfall and flooding. The alternative hypothesis, which was subsequently confirmed by epidemiological and genomic studies, attributed the epidemic to the recent importation of cholera by UN peacekeepers recently arrived from Nepal, and to a river polluted with sewage. In late 2016, the Secretary General of the United Nations finally begged the Haitian people for forgiveness. This implicit recognition of the role of the UN in the cholera epidemic helped to fund the ongoing fight against it. Case-area targeted interventions aimed at interrupting cholera transmission were reinforced, which resulted in the extinction of the epidemic within two years. In the meantime, several phylogenetic studies on Vibrio cholerae during the seventh cholera pandemic demonstrated that local environmental and global epidemic Vibrio populations were distinct. These studies also showed that epidemics arose when the bacterium had diversified and that it had spread during transmission events associated with human travel.

Durable immunogenicity, adaptation to emerging variants, and low-dose efficacy of an AAV-based COVID-19 vaccine platform in macaques

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have devastating consequences on health and economy, even after the approval of safe and effective vaccines. Waning immunity, the emergence of variants of concern, breakthrough infections, and lack of global vaccine access and acceptance perpetuate the epidemic. Here, we demonstrate that a single injection of an adenoassociated virus (AAV)-based COVID-19 vaccine elicits at least 17-month-long neutralizing antibody responses in non-human primates at levels that were previously shown to protect from viral challenge. To improve the scalability of this durable vaccine candidate, we further optimized the vector design for greater potency at a reduced dose in mice and non-human primates. Finally, we show that the platform can be rapidly adapted to other variants of concern to robustly maintain immunogenicity and protect from challenge. In summary, we demonstrate this class of AAV can provide durable immunogenicity, provide protection at dose that is low and scalable, and be adapted readily to novel emerging vaccine antigens thus may provide a potent tool in the ongoing fight against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2).

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox

Reviewed by: No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox Meghan H. Martinez No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. By Karen L. Cox. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 206. $24.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6267-1.) In his seminal work Black Reconstruction ([New York, 1935], p. 714), W. E. B. Du Bois confronts the consequences of the erasure of slavery in American history, stating, "Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center." In No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, Karen L. Cox explores the enduring truth of Du Bois's statement and provides insight into exactly how and why this false version of American history persists. In this slim volume, Cox offers an important and accessible history of white supremacist monuments and myths. Conversations about public spaces are becoming more commonplace, and this book parses the nuance. Cox challenges readers to take Lost Cause supporters at their word. Although such supporters are both defensive of the institution of slavery and insistent that the "peculiar institution" does not define them, she paints a portrait of a region that is as unwilling to surrender the battle over memory as it was to admit defeat in the war over slavery. She explains how white women were complicit in perpetuating racial inequality, carrying the banner of the Lost Cause almost immediately following the end of the Civil War, not only to absolve the men they loved but also to make sure those men retained social and political power. Regarding how we should contend with Confederate statues in the current era, Cox moves the conversation forward by discussing the shortcomings of "counter monuments" as an attempt to "balance" a landscape dedicated to Dixie, and by examining how political disenfranchisement has limited what action can be taken in opposition to Confederate monuments (pp. 134, 141). Perhaps most important, Cox effectively contextualizes the battle over public spaces as a microcosm of a fight for political power. If monuments could perpetuate myths about the alleged civility of the Civil War, then southern white communities were never forced to admit their true cause was white supremacy, no matter what Alexander H. Stephens may have said. As Cox points out, "for black southerners, the living and breathing Confederacy, with all of its related symbols, made it feel as though Dixie never fell" (p. 82). Confederate monuments both mythologized a false history of the Civil War and cast so-called southern heritage as exclusively white. Cox expertly employs [End Page 431] Black newspapers and personal interviews to explore the southern heritage often left out of Confederate memory—Black southern heritage. Cox's work centers Black opposition to Confederate memorials, telling a story of continued resistance to white supremacy. Black resistance was ever-present and inherently political. Some individuals defaced monuments, while others organized civil rights protests in the shadows of Confederate monuments. Cox argues that Black opposition has had an important impact on the narrative surrounding Confederate memorials. She documents how the protests that toppled Confederate statues in 2020 built on a century of Black protest and activism. Cox argues that after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, southern states were empowered to pass legislation "protecting" Confederate monuments from removal, even in communities interested in reevaluating them. In gerrymandered districts, Confederate monuments were offered more protection than Black votes. These successful voter suppression efforts resulted in rendering Confederate monuments essentially untouchable. The author also takes care to document the amount of state money invested in Confederate monuments, highlighting the systemic nature of racial inequality. No Common Ground makes it clear why the contemporary battle over Confederate monuments and public spaces is so fraught. It is an important read for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of the conversation. Meghan H. Martinez Florida State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association