Outbreak Of Violence Research Articles

US Bipartisan Consensus on China: The Making and the Implementation

According to the most experts, there is a bipartisan consensus in the United States regarding China: both parties recognize that China poses an existential threat to the United States, its economy, socio-political structure and the role as a global leader. This core conceptual consent represents a clear contrast with the endless battles between Democrats and Republicans in the domestic political arena, blocking any legislative initiatives and the development of a unified sociopolitical agenda for the country. This rare unity has made many observers to claim the emergence of a new external enemy, in the face of which America will be able to overcome its identical crisis and to come back to national unity. The political elite also actively uses the image of the enemy, calling on the Nation for unity. This article is aimed to understand what lies behind political slogans and the bipartisan concept of confronting China. The study is based on the analysis of several sources that make it possible to judge the attitude towards China in the United States along party lines, specific to each level of the party-political system party platforms at the federal level, legislative initiatives at the state and city levels, public opinion polls at the level of the society. The research hypothesis is that Democrats and Republicans, who agree on the conceptual vision of the Chinese threat, offer different ways to counter it. The difference in methods of struggle stems from different ideological and value models that manifest themselves in the implementation of both the socioeconomic agenda within the country and foreign policy strategies in the international arena. The unity of the parties ends exactly by the developing of a conceptual framework for confrontation with the opponent. The implementation of specific steps of the anti-Chinese agenda at the state and city levels is taking place in accordance with the ideological and political guidelines of each party, and the public attitude towards the Chinese threat demonstrates a clear split along party lines. The conceptual positioning of a new external enemy instead of unification brought to the United States anti-Chinese hysteria among conservative politicians at the state level, which was realized in the adoption of discriminatory laws in Republican states against Chinese citizens and a new wave of anti-Chinese sentiment in society, manifested in outbreaks of violence against Asian minorities.

Statelessness of Rohingyas and their Right to Bangladeshi Citizenship

Abstract Since the outbreak of violence and persecution against Rohingyas in 2017 they have been fleeing Myanmar and taking refuge in Bangladesh. A significant number of them are married to a Bangladeshi citizen and their children are entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship by descent. However, these Rohingyas are not registered as Bangladeshi citizens. As a result, a significant number of Rohingyas and their children have become stateless. As Bangladesh is not a party to the statelessness conventions, the issues surrounding the statelessness of these Rohingyas can hardly be addressed under these conventions. This article explores the citizenship rights of these Rohingyas outside of these conventions. It argues that, although Bangladesh is not a party to the statelessness conventions it is a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international human rights treaties under which it is obliged to grant citizenship status to the Rohingyas who are married to a Bangladeshi citizen or born to a Bangladeshi parent.

Drogue, violence et résilience : consommateurs de drogue en cure et anciens délinquants violents à Dakar

In Senegal, violent delinquency and illicit drug use are on the increase. This study focuses on two distinct groups: drug users (DUs) undergoing rehabilitation and violent ex-offenders (VEs). The methodology adopted includes a quantitative survey of the general population (n=1009), followed by a qualitative survey of fifteen participants, including eight DUs undergoing treatment at the Centre de prise en charge intégrée des addictions de Dakar (CEPIAD) (Integrated Addictions Management Center of Dakar) and the Centre Jacques Chirac de Thiaroye, and seven former VEs from the Grand Yoff district. This neighborhood, known for its violence, is juxtaposed with the Grand Yoff social housing estate, a residential area also affected by outbreaks of violence. This study aims to establish the link(s) between drug use and criminal violence by analyzing the life stories of young adults who have managed to leave drug use and delinquency behind. It then looks to identify the determinants of resilience in certain young people. The study revealed delinquent violence among young people does not systematically result from drug use. Rather, drug use is a factor conducive to violence. The links between drugs and violence depend on individual predisposition, the type of drugs used, and the level of addiction. Resilience results from a web of individual, sociocultural, and environmental factors. It is not static, but rather the result of a series of successes, failures, and even relapses.

Teaching presence in video virtual scenarios in higher education in Arequipa

The contribution of information technologies in the teaching of higher education has not been synchronized, considering that the accelerated technological transformations left traces followed by pedagogical adaptations, the violent outbreak of COVI19 made this distance more evident, with traditional pedagogical systems; The objective is to identify the value of the teaching presence in the virtual auditorium by identifying the motivation and trust relationships of the students.

The Missing and the Marginalized: A Biocultural Approach to Forensic Anthropology at the US/Mexico Border

Violence and trauma are nestled in human rights violations worldwide. Since the 1980s, several international and domestic organizations have formed to conduct investigations following instances of political unrest and sociocultural violence. These inhumane events are evidenced by structural violence, an invisible trauma that exacerbates societal discrepancies within a population and can manifest harm to marginalized groups. Structural violence can be observed in both living individuals and through the treatment of human remains. Individuals who are missing or remain unidentified from violent outbreaks are often from marginalized groups. Therefore, a biocultural approach is necessary as it emphasizes the interplay between biology, environment, and culture. Recent work on human rights violations in the Americas has focused on fatalities due to increased migration at the US/Mexico border. Multiple organizations from the United States and other countries have developed strategies to assist in the recovery, identification, and repatriation of migrants. We aim to highlight the biocultural approach in these humanitarian actions, especially the practice of forensic anthropology, with structural violence and humanitarian identification efforts related to the missing and unidentified persons found along the US/Mexico border.

The aftermath: Community workers as place-makers in conflict-riven societies

Social workers play a vital role in making violence-stricken communities into safer places for human development. However, research examining the experiences of community practitioners in political conflicts is scarce. Using a place-making analytical framework, this study addresses this gap exploring community practitioners’ practices around outbreaks of violence in Israeli Jewish-Arab mixed cities. Based on 50 semi-structured interviews, the findings reveal three modalities of place-making: place-developing, place-protecting, and place-remaking. The study highlights community practice’s significant role in constructing spaces in light of practitioners’ sense of place. It encourages the inclusion of place-making as a framework to understand social work within conflict zones.

Endogenously driven de‐peripheralization through political secession: The case of the Donbas region

AbstractThis paper presents a case study of the Donbas region, located in eastern Ukraine, focusing on efforts to de‐peripheralize the region prior to and after the outbreak of violence that engulfed it with the Russian invasion in early 2022. It sets out to use the lens of regional science and its sibling field, peace science, to impose some structure for understanding the still ongoing war. It does this by developing an economic history of the Donbas and a conceptual model for thinking about conflict and conflict resolution there. The implications of the model are explored using data on public opinion from 2014, a time of great uncertainty in the region. The model is also used to consider various counterfactual scenarios, and ultimately, to highlight the manner in which a peaceful solution escaped and the region's future was shattered by war. Overall, the paper represents an attempt to use the perspective of regional science to understand a complex and shifting conflict in real time. The project was undertaken with the aspiration that, by adding to knowledge on the Donbas and helping to disseminate awareness of its situation, it may contribute to the eventual recovery of Ukraine and its people.

Why We Don’t Fight: A Review Article

Abstract Wars are the exception, not the rule, as Christopher Blattman, a political scientist and development economist from the University of Chicago, reveals in his new book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. Blattman makes the case that both strategic and psychological factors explain most outbreaks of violence, whether they are gangland beefs over urban turf, asymmetric counterinsurgencies, or conventional wars like the current conflict in Ukraine. The book is a helpful compendium for scholars of international relations and comparative politics on the causes of conflict, drawing on lessons from game theory and the rational choice school to explain why nations and nonstate actors fight. Much of the analysis is drawn from Blattman’s own distinguished career as a development economist in Africa, and he helpfully intersperses the prose with first-person vignettes from some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones, including Liberia, Uganda, Colombia, and inner-city Chicago.

The Roots of Violence in the Rivalry between Football Club Fans and Supporters Using the ABC Triangle Theory of Johan Galtung

Sport is universal, loved by many people in almost all countries worldwide. As a sport that can be played by many people from all walks of life, football has the potential to be a sport capable of bringing about a spirit of unity and solidarity in a society. However, football can sometimes spark conflict and violence. Excessive football enthusiasm can lead football fans and supporters to become anarchistic and assault individuals who support other teams. This can result in material damages, injuries, and even the loss of life. This essay will examine football fanaticism and football fan violence. Using the ABC conflict triangle theory introduced by Johan Galtung, researchers will analyze how attitudes, behaviors, and contradictions that fans and supporters of football clubs own can trigger football fanaticism and violence. The researchers concluded that these three factors played a role in the outbreak of violence, coupled with other factors such as educational level and socio-economic conditions. The researcher believes that the government, through football organizations, can play a role in suppressing football fanaticism and preventing violence from occurring before, during and after football matches are held. As the core and main part of football, fans and supporters of football clubs must be self-aware and try to be more rational, calm, and not easily provoked to make football a sport that truly unites and is full of solidarity.

Predicting political violence using a state-space model

We provide a proof-of-concept for a novel state-space modelling approach for predicting monthly deaths due to political violence. Attention is focused on developing the method and demonstrating the utility of this approach, which provides exciting opportunities to engage with domain experts in developing new and improved state-space models for predicting violence. The prediction is made on a grid of cells with spatial resolution of 0.5 × 0.5 degrees, and each cell is modeled to have two mathematically well-defined unobserved/latent/hidden states that evolves over time and encode the “onset risk” and “potential severity”, respectively. This offers a certain level of interpretability of the model. By using the model for computing the probability distribution for a death count at a future time conditioned on all data observed up until the current time, a predictive distribution is obtained. The predictive distribution typically places a certain mass at the death count 0 (no violent outbreak) and the remaining mass indicating a likely interval of the fatality count, should a violent outbreak appear. To evaluate the model performance we—lacking a better alternative—report the mean of the predictive distribution, but the access to the predictive distribution is in itself an interesting contribution to the application. This work merely serves as a proof-of-concept for the state-space modeling approach for this type of data and several possible directions for further work that could improve the predictive performance are suggested.

Social Discontent or Criminality? Navigating the Nexus Between Urban Riots and Criminal Activities in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal Provinces, South Africa (2021)

Post-apartheid South Africa is characterized by the proliferation of public protests, which occur in various contexts. These include urban riots that are typically carried out by individuals who live in residential areas who are relatively politically, socially, and economically marginalized. In this perspective, the study seeks to navigate the nexus between urban riots and criminal activities in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa. This will be performed by looking at the recent urban violence that erupted in Johannesburg and Durban cities of South Africa following the arrest of the former president of South Africa Jacob Zuma on 7 July for contempt of court. As a result of the incarceration of Zuma, his supporters took to the streets to demand for his release, ending in protests which quickly evolved into widespread lootings, vandalism, and an outbreak of violence that denoted elements of criminality. The two provinces, Gauteng (the country's economic hub) and KwaZulu-Natal (on the east coast), bore the brunt of this violence. What began as a call for the release of Jacob Zuma transpired into something that was heavily coordinated, controlled and, to a larger extent, dangerous, and perhaps the worst post-apartheid urban riot. However, behind these riots, there are seeds of discontents that triggered these violent riots and these include: the frustrations of hungry and cold people whose prospects were already constrained by the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, rising inequality between rich and poor, unemployment, intra-party tensions, and ANC-factionalism, including stereotypical Zulu nationalism and racial tensions in South Africa. On the other hand, the riots that occurred in both KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng were accompanied by criminality such as looting, torching, and burning of private and public properties and, to a larger degree, murder of civilians. Findings are that the urban riots in both Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces have resulted in human (in)securities such as exacerbation of poverty, food and fuel shortages, effects on the health sector (amid the COVID-19 crisis), loss of lives, and increase in unemployment. Methodologically, the study relies on a mixed method of research and content analysis.

Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy by Tim Buchen

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy by Tim Buchen Joshua Shanes Tim Buchen. Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Translated by Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller. New York: Berghahn, 2020. 326 pp. In 1898, anti-Jewish violence exploded in over four hundred communities across western Galicia, an ethnically mixed province on the outer rim of the Habsburg Empire. Throughout the spring, Polish Christians attacked their Jewish neighbors, destroying and looting Jewish-owned homes and businesses. By late June, the emperor had declared a state of emergency in thirty-three counties and martial law in two others, and over 5,000 perpetrators were charged in court. [End Page 213] Tim Buchen's fascinating book is one of a few recent publications that finally address this understudied episode. Buchen uses this moment to rethink the nature of antisemitism itself, offering a new methodological approach that sees it as a "social process" rather than as an object or ideology. Following Rogers Brubaker's postmodern reframing of nations as "a situational experience that must be constantly reproduced, each time differently," Buchen presents antisemitism similarly, as a "process" enacted by non-Jews in an evolving dynamic of speech and action. This perspective follows David Engel's pathbreaking essay, "Away from a Definition of Antisemitism," which argued similarly that the term has been too reified by historians, though Buchen surprisingly does not engage with Engel here. Buchen identifies three foci of power in Habsburg Galician discourse—print media, physical violence, and the imperial diet—each of which, in turn, constitutes one of the three main chapters of the book: agitation, violence, and politics. The chapters are roughly chronological—negative ideas about Jews are introduced and encouraged, leading to violent conflicts on the ground that then play out on the imperial stage—but Buchen emphasizes that they overlap as processes resulting from the "interplay between political meaning-making and social practice" (27). Chapter 1 focuses on the first leg of power, agitation, "speech or writing that addresses a public with the intention of inciting it to act" (44). Buchen moves quickly from 1868—when the Galician diet overwhelmingly voted to confirm Jewish emancipation at the provincial level—to the rise of new peasant and Catholic political parties in the 1890s. The breakdown of the feudal order and loosening of traditional economic roles of Jews and Christians might have led to a notion of Polishness that included Jews, but instead—as Brian Porter has documented—it went the other way. New economic rivalries and the centering of the Polish peasant in nationalist agitation led to antisemitism forming the basis of the entire spectrum of Polish politics, most obviously with the rise of three competing Polish peasant parties, all of which defined themselves as anti-Jewish. Whereas Polish nationalists in the 1860s expected Jews to assimilate into the Polish nation, as many Jewish elites intended to do, a generation later they feared and rejected such assimilation, deliberately seeking out tension with Jews in the only venues they could then access: popular newspapers and rural meetings. Buchen then moves to discuss the violence itself, which he argues was a kind of "theater," almost literally a drama following a script with roles assigned to perpetrators and victims that allowed them to make sense of their new world. In one case, the end of an incident of looting was literally announced with a blast of a trumpet (139)! In other words, he argues, the violent outbreaks were not primarily a result of economic tensions between Christians and Jews due to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but rather were spectacles that served to define Christian communities. The pogroms, he insists, did not reflect a breakdown in Jewish-Christian relations and did not intend to inflict permanent destruction, but rather were a performance designed to define Christian communities in this new environment. "By jointly committing crimes against the others," he writes, "the Christian peasants experienced themselves as a community. They became a village unit" (150). He particularly emphasizes the role of rumors in this regard, [End Page 214] especially the rumor of warrant by the state...

BORDERING ASSAM THROUGH AFFECTIVE CLOSURE: 1971 AND THE ROAD TO THE CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT ACT OF 2019

In 1971 when nearly ten million refugees crossed the border between East Pakistan and India following the outbreak of violence in Dacca on 25 March 1971, it would have surprised many to know that nearly fifty years later that date would be the dividing line between India's putative citizens and those it deemed ‘foreigners’. This article takes a look at the immigration debate in Assam, and the protests against the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act to argue that it is the erasure of 1971 from the latter that gives rise to the backlash against it. I argue that the events of 1971 produces a moment in which both an affective border emerges against the refugees, followed soon after by an effective legal border through citizenship legislation pertinent to Assam. This article investigates the peculiarity of this moment to determine citizenship within India, its consequences and by doing so rewrites the history of 1971 back into debates about citizenship in India.

Burning urban cities of South Africa due to civil turmoil 2021: Socio-economic and environmental consequences

A violent outbreak of civil unrest (Jul 7–19, 2021) triggered immediately after the incarceration of the former South African president claimed 337 lives and brought disruptive damages to societal movements, environment, and COVID-19 containment measures. The present work aimed to analyze the hotspots of fire sites, its significances on societal activities, air quality and COVID-19 pandemic using ground based and geospatial data. The results revealed steady rise in air pollution levels all through the region due to increase in fire activities. Positive influence on the regional air quality was observed to be high than the limits set forth by WHO. The daily mean values of PM2.5 (62.37–104.34 μg/m3) and PM10 (108.86–156.78 μg/m3) presented potential short and long-term risks to public health. Similarly, COVID-19 cases also increased during the social unrest period even when the community mobility was less than the normal conditions. This type of cost benefit analysis proves to provide evidence of deteriorating air quality and aids to examine the adverse impacts on human health during the global pandemic.

Ethnic faultline in the farmer–pastoralist conflict (FPC) – when does ethnicity matter to the FPCs? A case study of Adani-Nimbo area in South-Eastern Nigeria

The farmer–pastoralist conflict (FPC) has been discussed and given ethnic and religious appellations in some countries of West Africa, such as Ghana and Nigeria. In Nigeria, such a reading of the conflict is rampant in the media and dominant in national political discourse. However, these ethno-religious insinuations have not received serious scholarly treatment in Nigeria or been downplayed. In this paper, I examine the context in which ethnicity becomes vital to the FPCs, based on fieldwork in the Nimbo-Adani area of Uzo-Uwani municipal council of Enugu State affected most by the conflict in South-Eastern Nigeria. This area is an essential hot spot of the FPCs that has not been explored in analyzing the FPCs in Nigeria. The study is based on field observations and semi-structured in-depth interviews. The paper draws on the FPCs literature regarding the influence of ethnic identities on the conflict. It shows that the difference in ethnicity between pastoralists and farming communities is not the primary root of the conflict. At the first outbreak of violence, the difference in ethnicity was not the cause of the conflict. Ethnic identity only gets cited after the first brutal fighting between the nomads and the farming community. Non-violent conflicts often occur because of cattle destruction of farm crops and pollution of water sources. Although the herders are accused of various atrocities, such as rape and kidnapping, the first outbreak of violence was caused by retaliation for killing a herder in one of the villages. Heightening ethnic identity amplifies the construction of the herders’ identity and social status as non-indigenous and non-belonging in the villages. Thus, the villages seek the eviction of the herders based on their social status as non-indigenes. The paper argues that ethnic faultlines matter to the FPCs but only after other factors have initiated the conflict. Therefore, we should pay attention to the primary root of conflicts and how they get the basis for social exclusion activated.

Italy, the second Libyan war, and the Frontex Irini Operation

In 2011, Libya plunged into a civil war after the outbreak of the Arab Spring, a revolutionary movement characterized by massive civil protests which tried to build democratic societies in the Middle East and North Africa and put to an end the old repressive political regimes. After several months of civil war and bombings over Libya, longtime Muamar Ghaddafi’s dictatorial regime fell. Although the U.S. did not directly intervene in Libya, it supported the overthrow of Ghadafi through the intervention of NATO, providing aerial support and airstrikes for the opposition force (it also established a no-fly zone over Libya, authorized by the United Nations). In 2014, contested parliamentary elections led to the formation of two rival political power centers — one in the east, based in Tobruk and backed by military commander Khalifa Haftar, and another in the west of the country, an UN-supported administration in the capital of Tripoli. Each side was supported by a variety of militias and foreign powers, who competed for influence and oil resources, raising fears that oil-rich Libya could become the theater of a regional conflict. In April 2019, Haftar and his forces, backed by Russia (the Russian military contractors of the Wagner Group), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates launched an offensive to capture the capital. His campaign collapsed after Turkey and Qatar offered their military support to the Tripoli government with hundreds of Turkish troops and thousands of Syrian mercenaries, belonging to the Free Syrian Army. The outbreak of violence in Libya in April 2019 severely affected the institutional reunification and stability of the country. Warning that the situation in Libya could become "a second Syria", with a new large wave of refugees directed towards the EU, Germany offered to call a peace conference for the conflicting sides, held on 19th January 2020 under the auspices of the United Nations. The aim was to stop the military support for the civil war parties and uphold an existing UN arms embargo, re-launching the peace process for a political settlement, after nine months of fighting over the capital. Operation EUNAVFOR MED IRINI was launched by the European Union on 31 March 2020, as part of the European Union's contribution to the Berlin conference. The core task of the Operation is the implementation of the UN arms embargo on Libya through aerial, satellite, and maritime assets, an embargo that had been decided in 2016 by the United Nations Security Council Resolution. This ongoing mission replaced the Sophia Operation, which had been in place for five years, combating the organized crime and trafficking of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. In June 2016, the European Council decided to extend Sophia’s mandate until July 2017, adding two supporting tasks: training the Libyan coastguards and contributing to the implementation of the UN arms embargo on the high seas off the coast of Libya. This paper attempts to analyze the response of the European Union to the Libyan crisis by launching the Irini operation, a military-naval Joint force, setting out to secure the Berlin Conference’s commitments. Finally, we try to explain if Italy which seems to have preferred to stay on the sidelines, succeeded in reinserting itself into the Libyan equation, a significant diplomatic area for the Chigi Palace.

A confidential survey among medical practitioners on workplace violence in Tamilnadu

Hospital is a place where mixed emotions, from rejoices of begetting a baby to lamenting the loss of our loved ones, co-exist. Recently a third emotion in the form of violence against Medical Practitioners is creeping in. It is high time to unveil the extent of these violent incidents. Hence we have attempted to bring out the reality of this burning issue. This cross-sectional study included responses from 540 victims of violence among 800 medical practitioners. The participants were randomly chosen across Tamilnadu and were given a pretested questionnaire through Google forms after obtaining consent and disclosing confidentiality. Data were analyzed using Microsoft SPSS software Version 24.0. In this study, 68% of medical practitioners had experienced some form of workplace violence. Most of them were working in private establishments. Verbal threats were the most common form of violence. Emergency and critical care areas were the most vulnerable locations, relatives of the patients committed most of the violent attacks. Only 6% of the 540 victims had sought legal intervention. Violent outbreaks against medical practitioners are still rampant in our society despite the government's preventive measures. We can curtail such occurrences by implementing stringent Laws and bringing a change of attitude in a soft-skilled medical man to report such incidents and seek timely legal intervention.

EVERYDAY FEARS OF THE ORTHODOX POPULATION ON UKRAINIAN LANDS AS A REFLECTION OF DAILY ROUTINE IN EARLY MODERN TIMES

The article highlights a little-studied problem of role of fears in the everyday life of Orthodox believers in the Ukrainian lands of the second half of the 16th – 17th centuries. It is noted that in the early modern period, the society suffered from an outbreak of violence, and this influenced the formation of the atmosphere of fear among the population. The types of fears from which the society suffered the most are analyzed on an example of most typical cases: fear of war and violence, illness, mutilation, premature death, fear of armed people, foreign invaders and representatives of other denominations. In addition to these objective fears, Orthodox society felt irrational ones, the greatest of which was to sin. To a large extent, everyday life of the Orthodox was characterized by fear of the Last Judgment and Hell, Evil Spirits. Fears inherent in a modern man, manifested in everyday life of an orthodox man of the 16th - 17th centuries much stronger due to much more dangerous living conditions. Fear was a characteristic feature of everyday life in the early modern Orthodox society.

Between violent outbreaks and legal disputes: the contested cityscape of Frankish Jerusalem through the prism of institutional and socio-economic conflicts

ABSTRACT Focusing on the case of Frankish Jerusalem, this article engages with recent advances in the study of medieval urban conflicts in order to shed new light on their role in socio-ethnically heterogeneous urban environments, such as those formed in the Latin East. It examines several episodes of conflict that occurred in Jerusalem between the 1130s and the 1150s, involving key figures in the city's institutions and population. I propose an analytical framework that places these episodes within a mutual municipal context, linking broader socio-economic mechanisms that were at play in each episode to the renegotiation and reshaping of contested and symbolically significant areas inside Jerusalem. This approach unveils strategies of urban transformation that oscillated between violent outbreaks and legal resolution of property disputes, and were affected by tensions between social, religious and institutional configurations.

Brief Synopses of New Arabic Language Publications

Brief Synopses of New Arabic Language Publications