Power In Crisis Research Articles

The power of crisis: how three threats—and our response—will change the world

The power of crisis: how three threats—and our response—will change the world

Building Civic Power in Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed inequities and injustices that have existed in the United States for decades and are fundamentally built into our institutions, including our democracy. This article argues that building a stronger democracy based on civic power requires opening the policy-making process up to the public, especially to those who have been most marginalized. It offers illustrative case studies of best practices to tap into hyper-local citizen expertise by implementing principles of CrowdLaw and concludes with recommendations to guide research and practice.

Why COVID-19 Will Not Change the Global Art Market

This article investigates the valuation of artworks during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines how art market participants employ fictional expectations of the future to stabilize valuations during uncertain times. A total of 86 forecasts originating from both the center and periphery of the global art market were analyzed. Taking a meta-analytic approach, focus was placed on what each analysis predicts, how it constructs the future it purports to know, and how the expected value of artworks and methods for their purchase are justified. This uncovered the paradoxical reality of art market forecasts—their authors are convinced that the power of crisis could reformulate the art market, but their conclusions do not assume the possibility of real change. Further, the argument is made that speculation about the future is at the core of today’s art economy. Therefore, in a crisis, market participants conservatively orient themselves toward artworks that already have established value.

Executive Power in Crisis

Major crises can threaten political regimes by empowering demagogues and promoting authoritarian rule. While existing research argues that national emergencies weaken formal checks on executive authority and increase public appetites for strong leadership, no research evaluates whether crises increase mass support for the president’s institutional authority. We study this question in the context of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic with an experiment embedded in a national survey of more than 8,000 U.S. adults. We find no evidence that the public evaluated policies differently if they were implemented via unilateral power rather than through the legislative process, nor did the severity of the pandemic at either the state, local, or individual levels moderate evaluations of executive power. Instead, individuals’ partisan and ideological views were consistently strong predictors of policy attitudes. Perhaps paradoxically, our results suggest that elite and mass polarization limit the opportunity for crises to promote public acceptance of strengthened executive authority.

El sacramento olvidado: la confirmación en la archidiócesis de Santiago, fines del XVI a 1833

Confirmation is the sacrament to which the Catholic Church gave less importance in the Counter-Reformation by not considering it necessary for salvation and entrusting it only to bishops. This has generated the idea of a general careless in its fulfilment, so in this paper we study the real application of this sacrament in the archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela, the third in importance of the Crown of Castile, very populated and large, making it difficult to visit by the archbishops. For this purpose we use normative texts and above all, hundreds of confirmed lists, which has allowed us to date, measure and diagnose the attention to this sacrament and in a special way, analyse the important changes occurred in the transit of the Early Modern Age to the Contemporary Age, when the capacity of the confirmation to reaffirm an episcopal power in crisis was perceived.

Kernkraft in der Krise?

Die Katastrophe von Fukushima stürzte die zivile Kernenergienutzung in eine ihrer bis dato schwersten Krisen und ist somit ohne Zweifel das prägende Ereignis des Atomkraftdiskurses der jüngeren Zeit. Jedoch eröffnen die Umstände des Unglücks, nämlich die Verschränkung von Naturkatastrophe und technologischer Katastrophe, verschiedene Möglichkeiten seiner Darstellung vor dem Hintergrund nationaler Atomkraftdiskurse. Gegenstand des vorliegenden Artikels ist die kontrastive Analyse der Frames und Argumentationsmuster in den offiziellen Katastrophendiskursen der deutschen und französischen Regierung. Im Zentrum des Interesses stehen dabei sowohl die diskursive Verortung der Ereignisse im Spannungsfeld zwischen Reaktorunfall und Reaktorkatastrophe einerseits und Natur- und Atomkatastrophe andererseits, sowie die argumentative Rekonstruktion der Umstände, die schlussendlich zur Katastrophe führten.

Competitiveness of Serbia and Macedonia and the accession to the EU in a time of crisis

The elapsed global economic and financial crisis has caused economic instability around the world and the consequences of crisis will be manifested in different forms for a long time. Destructive power of crisis has not bypassed developed countries that due to previous economic stability and financial strength managed to overcome the crisis waves quickly. However, for developing countries that are still economically unstable and financially very weak the crisis can indeed be fatal. The destruction of the domestic economy, the slowdown of economic trends, the decline in the standards of the population, the growth of external debt, constant inflation threats are just some of many effects of the crisis faced by Serbia and Macedonia. These republics of the former Yugoslavia in addition have shared history, similar institutional design and economic and political environment, and they have the same status in the EU accession process and similar levels of economic competitiveness. Following achieved levels of global and individual competitiveness of Serbia and Macedonia in the past five years, it will be explained how the crisis affected their key pillars of competitiveness, in which period the worst results were achieved and when the recovery and noticeable improvement began. Constant efforts to improve the competitiveness of these countries will provide faster and more efficient treatment of the effects of the crisis while intensifying their relations with the EU. The primary aim of this paper is to prove the existence of relations between the achieved level of competitiveness and the current EU status of analyzed countries while highlighting the fact that the enhancement of national competitiveness, fostering relations with the EU and the acceleration of the accession process also represent a primary weapon in the continuation of struggle with the consequences of the crisis.

US Financial Power in Crisis

This essay examines the questions raised by the present financial crisis through an enquiry into the institutional foundations of American finance. We view with some scepticism strong claims concerning the disastrous outcome for the structural dynamism of the global financial system and America's position in it. Many critical political economists tend to take the system of global financial markets as their point of departure and then locate the US in this system. Such approaches, however, generally fail to do justice to the decades-long build up of US financial power and do not capture many of the organic institutional linkages through which the American state is connected to the world of global finance and which are responsible for its imperial sprawl. In many ways, financial globalisation is not best understood as the re-emergence of international finance but, rather, as a process through which the expansionary dynamics of American finance took on global dimensions. Because the present system of global finance has been shaped so profoundly by specifically American institutions and practices, it will not do to evaluate the changes and transformations of this system on the basis of either an abstract, generic model of capitalism or mere extrapolations from conjunctural crises. Crisis and instability are part and parcel of the dynamics of imperial finance and so are the managerial capacities developed by the US state. The most important questions that should occupy critical political economists therefore have to do not with what appear to be external challenges to US financial power (or the putative opportunities for progressive change opened up by them), but, rather, relate to the ways in which the imperial network of intricate, complex and often opaque institutional linkages between the US state and global finance is managed and reproduced.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Nina: Kul'turnyi mif zolotogo veka russkoi literatury v lingvisticheskom osveshchenii, byPen'kovskii, A. B. See No Evil: Literary Cover‐Ups and Discoveries of theSoviet Camp Experience. Russian Literature and Thought, by Tolczyk, Darius. Sight and Sound Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry, by Janecek, Gerald. Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers, byLaird, Sally. English Counter Russian: Essays on Criticism of Literary Translationin America, by Sendich, Munir. Brief Lives: A Handbook of MedicalPractitioners in Muscovy, 1620–1701, by Unkovskaya, Maria V. TheRussians. The People of Europe, by Milner‐Gulland, Robin. AlexanderHerzen und die Schweiz: Das Verhältnis des russischen Publizisten und Aristokraten zureinzigen Republik im Europa seiner Zeit, by Bontadina, Nadja. MakingPeasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia,1861–1914, by Kotsonis, Yanni. Siberian Survival: The Nenets andTheir Story, by Golovnev, Andrei A. and Gail Osherenko. A History of theSoviet Union from the Beginning to the End, by Kenez, Peter. ReinterpretingRussia, by Hosking, Geoffrey and Robert Service, eds. A Prayer for theGovernment: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920, byAbramson, Henry. Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, byZipperstein, Steven J. The Tsar's Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, andSubversion in Late Imperial Russia, by Rich, David Alan. Zabytaiakar'era “russkogo Mol'tke”: Nikolai Nikolaevich Obruchev(1830–1904), Airapetov, Oleg Rudol'fovich. Russian Voices onthe Kennebec: The Story of Maine's Unlikely Colony, by Jaster, Robert S. The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System, by Harris,James R. Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution,by Geifman, Anna. Plans for Stalin's War Machine: Tukhachevskii andMilitary‐Economic Planning, 1925–1941, by Samuelson, Lennart. TheFifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War, by Friedman, Norman. Interpreting America: Russian and Soviet Studies of the History of American Thought, by Ryder, John. Russian Workers: The Anatomy of Patience, by Ashwin,Sarah. Russia's Workers in Transition: Labor, Management and the Stateunder Gorbachev and Yeltsin, by Christensen, Paul T. The Transition fromCommunism to Capitalism: Ruling Elites from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, by Lane, David andCameron Ross. Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post‐Soviet Russia. PittSeries in Russian and East European History, by Wegren, Stephen K. Queerin Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other, by Essig, Laurie. ConsumingRussia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev, by Barker, Adele Marie, ed. Russia's Air Power in Crisis, by Lambeth, Benjamin S. Marriages in Russia: Couples during the Economic Transition, by Vannoy, Dana, et. al.

Right‐wing ideologies among American Jews: The seductive myth of power in crisis

The liberal tradition has been noted by historians and social scientists for over half a century as a central factor in the ideological composition and collective identity of American Jews. In spite of this seemingly liberal trend, twice within a period of three decades during the twentieth century did a nationalist‐Jewish right‐wing movement flourish in the United States. During the 1940s the right‐wing Zionist Irgun delegation ‐ more commonly known as the Bergson Boys ‐ made its impact among American Jewry, while the late 1960s and early 1970s were punctuated by the appearance of Meir Kahane's militant‐nationalist Jewish Defense League (JDL). This essay examines the issue of historical continuity between these two groups and the movement they claimed as their ideological source ‐ the Revisionist‐Zionist movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky. It also discusses what the Bergson Boys and the JDL had to offer the seemingly liberal American Jewish community. By probing the history, structural and tactical patterns of the three organizations, the essay examines how the two American‐based groups took advantage of the structure of political opportunities ‐ particularly those presented by the uniquely American system of mass media ‐ to form a progressive pattern based upon what seems to be a single, developing model. Finally, the essay brings the issue of right‐wing Jewish nationalism up to the present and asks what we can learn from our conclusions regarding contemporary right‐wing trends in the American Jewish community.

The Awakening of the Soviet Union

Preface to the Enlarged Edition Preface to the First Edition 1. A Great Power in Crisis 2. Communities and Ideals in Russian Society 3. The Return of the Repressed 4. A Civil Society in Embryo 5. The Flawed Melting Pot 6. Religion and the Atheist State 7. The Paradox of Gorbachev's Reforms 8. From 'Informals' to Political Parties 9. Towards the Dissolution of the Soviet Union Conclusion Notes Index

Review: Nuclear Power in Crisis: Politics and Planning for the Nuclear State, the Politics of Anxiety: Sellafield's Cancer-Link Controversy, Public-Private Partnerships: Improving Urban Life. Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 36(2), the Funding of Political Parties in Britain, Sage Library of Social Research 162. The Decline of Urban Politics: Political Theory and the Crisis of the Local State, Rethinking

Review: Nuclear Power in Crisis: Politics and Planning for the Nuclear State, the Politics of Anxiety: Sellafield's Cancer-Link Controversy, Public-Private Partnerships: Improving Urban Life. Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 36(2), the Funding of Political Parties in Britain, Sage Library of Social Research 162. The Decline of Urban Politics: Political Theory and the Crisis of the Local State, Rethinking

Nuclear power in crisis: politics and planning for the nuclear state

Journal Article Nuclear power in crisis: politics and planning for the nuclear state Get access Nuclear power in crisis: politics and planning for the nuclear state. Edited By Andrew Blowersand David PepperLondon: Croom Helm. 1987. 327pp. Index. Pb.: £10.95. ISBN 0 7099 5048 9. Ian Smart Ian Smart Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 64, Issue 2, Spring 1988, Pages 280–281, https://doi.org/10.2307/2621874 Published: 01 April 1988