Ten-year Anniversary Research Articles

China’s BRI in Central Asia & Its Impact: An Appraisal of the 10 Years

The year 2023 marked the ten-year anniversary of Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurating the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) during his state visit to Kazakhstan. This article discusses China’s approach towards Central Asian countries under the BRI and their responses. While China has evidently profited from expanding connectivity along the ancient silk road and meeting its strategic interests, it is essential to understand whether Central Asian states have equally benefited from this initiative. Furthermore, the concern of debt-trap diplomacy has been prevalent in low-income countries where BRI has been operational. In this context, the article seeks to locate Central Asia in BRI, evaluating its impact on the region to determine if the BRI is a win-win for both the parties involved as touted by China. This article argues that despite differing interests and concerns about potential debt-traps, the BRI has been largely beneficial for both China and Central Asia given that BRI investments and projects remain crucial for the growth and development of these states and the region.

A Decade of [in]Transition

“A Decade of [in]Transition: Reflecting on Past Challenges and Future Possibilities” describes the editorial experience of the award-winning, peer-reviewed journal [in]Transition on the occasion of its ten-year anniversary. After an introduction on the journal’s initial theoretical framing, the first part considers the production of new knowledge historically by engaging with select pieces published throughout the past decade while also reflecting on challenges the journal faced in the first decade of publication. It also considers early challenges faced by the editorial team such as the problem of establishing scholarly legitimacy for a new methodology and making the videographic method accessible to both junior and senior scholars. The second part considers the production of new knowledge via newer provocations, such as vidding, the embrace of YouTube, and other videographic modes that push against traditionally-defined boundaries of the “essayistic.” Our reflections occur on the eve of in[Transition] migrating—after a decade as a joint venture with MediaCommons—to the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), joining a roster of other open access scholarly journals.

The ten-year anniversary of public procurement reforms: a critical assessment of the European Union public procurement Directives

This article evaluates the objectives of the legal framework on public procurement in the European Union and assesses its contribution to the internal market. The author provides for a critical analysis of the evolution of the public procurement acquis, which reveals an environment occupied with conceptual and regulatory interfaces, exhibiting advanced interoperability with legal systems of Member States and faced with continuous market-driven modality changes in awarding and financing public contracts for the delivery of public services.

Flint community science leadership: co-production of knowledge around environmental and public health action

ABSTRACT At the ten-year anniversary of the Flint water crisis, Flint residents continue to work to improve the well-being of their community and advance community leadership in science. While the water crisis is remembered by most as just an egregious example of government mismanagement, a lesser told story is that of the ongoing leadership and mobilization of Flint residents. Our paper reflects on a collaborative project as part of a larger, sustained partnership in co-producing knowledge about Flint residents’ experiences with the water crisis, their expertise in responding to public health crises, and concerns and curiosities that may be explored as scientific research questions. We detail our investigative effort over five years focusing on understanding Flint residents’ expertise in responding to the water crisis and our processes of working with residents to connect personal experiences to explorable questions. We align the activities of our engagement (focus groups, workshops, a technology co-development pilot study, and interviews) with an iterative process of listening, dialogue, and action consistent with Paulo Freire’s processes for advancing collective consciousness. We position our work as an implementation of liberation sociology by working to explore scientific questions that are meaningful and impactful to disenfranchised populations.

Parody in Literature: A Culture-Determined View

The integration of the author into the cultural context is a two-faceted problem. In the post-information age, literary parody is regarded as a way of socio-cultural communication. The article features the congeniality of two chronologically distant works of science fiction against their contemporary context, namely Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Loss of Breath vs. Ray Bradbury’s Emissary and There Was an Old Woman. This pioneering research is an attempt to trace how the genre of science-fiction short story changed from the age of European Gothic to the era of mass literature, as well as to define the role of the cultural and social context of the New World in this process. The author reduced the short stories into two conditional pairs to demonstrate the hidden connections between the two sets. The methods of narrative analysis, literary comparison, and the theory of intertextuality revealed a multiple latent presence of other texts. In his Ligeia, E. A. Poe borrowed the genre conventions of the English Gothic novel while parodying the grandiloquent style of the French Romantic literature and the rhetoric of fear typical of the German Gothic style. R. Bradbury, in his turn, imitated the style and subject matter of Poe-esque extravaganzas while parodying the plot composition and artistic language employed by his older contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. Ultimately, the study revealed the evolutionary similarity of the two poetics of parody. In their early career, both Poe and Bradbury mocked the style of popular magazines. Later, both writers came to the parody of the literary classic and focused on high examples of parody art. Poe and Bradbury contributed to the development of the genre of parody in the XIX and XX centuries, respectively. The article marks the ten-year anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death.

Maturation of a Discipline

In celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the journal, this brief editorial note reviews the ways the field of Islamic archaeology has developed in the last decade, and the ways in which the journal has generated growth, facilitated innovation and collaboration, and given visibility to the field.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Jürgen Habermas and the Public Intellectual in Modern Democratic Life

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Jürgen Habermas and the Public Intellectual in Modern Democratic Life

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Reflections on the “Autonomous Alternative Justice System Institutions” in Kenya’s Alternative Justice Systems Policy Frameworks

On 27th August 2020, the Kenyan Judiciary together with its partners formally launched the AJS Framework Policy and the AJS Baseline Policy (AJS Policy Frameworks) which coincided with the ten-year anniversary of the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution of Kenya. The launch of the policy was awaited with huge expectations, as it was hoped that it would provide an appropriate framework for the operationalisation of “Autonomous Alternative Justice System” (AAJS) which is one of the institutions approved by the AJS Policy Frameworks to anchor Kenya’s emergent alternative justice system. This paper evaluates some of the options adopted by the AJS Policy Frameworks in the conception and implementation of the AAJS. Comparative lessons from the jurisprudence of ‘customary arbitration’ in Nigerian and Ghana, which are similar to the AAJS, are utilised to argue for more care and caution in the operationalisation of the AAJS Institutions in Kenya.

Embroidery with a Cause: Ten-year Anniversary of Semne Cusute (Sewn Signs)

The article is presenting the art project Semne cusute (Sewn Signs), focusing on on traditional embroidery’s patterns’ revival, and launched in 2012. It has already reached a community of 44,000 members. It is an enterprise that brings together cultural and artistic actions, embedded as heritage project. During all these years Semne cusute’s activity has been presented to the public by means of exhibitions, and educational workshops. The members of the community embroider to emphasize the need to preserve and teach ancient symbols, but also to coin their country (Romania) on the international map of luxury embroidery, responsible fashion, and European heritage.

The Arbitrability of Corporate Disputes After Fulham Football Club V. Richards: A Decade On

In Fulham Football Club (1987) Ltd v. Richards and The Football Association Premier League Ltd, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales settled a controversial matter, finding that unfair prejudice petitions under section 994 of the English Arbitration Act 1996 could be referred to arbitration. At the time the judgment was handed down, it was met with some scepticism with commentators arguing that it would lead to inconsistency and confusion in the arbitrability of disputes and the remedies that can be awarded in arbitration. In the years that followed, the Court of Appeal’s judgment has been relied on in the development of the arbitrability of corporate disputes in England and Wales and several other common law jurisdictions. On the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the Fulham decision, this article explores whether the confusion and inconsistency that commentators predicted have, in fact, materialized. Arbitrability, Arbitration Act 1996, Corporate disputes, Fulham Football Club v. Richards, Remedies, Section 994, Unfair prejudice

Spherical Poisson point process intensity function modeling and estimation with measure transport

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the application of methods and techniques commonly associated with machine learning and artificial intelligence to spatial statistics. Here, in a celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the journal Spatial Statistics, we bring together normalizing flows, commonly used for density function estimation in machine learning, and spherical point processes, a topic of particular interest to the journal’s readership, to present a new approach for modeling non-homogeneous Poisson process intensity functions on the sphere. The central idea of this framework is to build, and estimate, a flexible bijective map that transforms the underlying intensity function of interest on the sphere into a simpler, reference, intensity function, also on the sphere. Map estimation can be done efficiently using automatic differentiation and stochastic gradient descent, and uncertainty quantification can be done straightforwardly via nonparametric bootstrap. We investigate the viability of the proposed method in a simulation study, and illustrate its use in a proof-of-concept study where we model the intensity of cyclone events in the North Pacific Ocean. Our experiments reveal that normalizing flows present a flexible and straightforward way to model intensity functions on spheres, but that their potential to yield a good fit depends on the architecture of the bijective map, which can be difficult to establish in practice.

Cover Image

COVER ILLUSTRATION This cover illustration is the Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium's logo, depicting a human brain surrounded by genetic information. The logo reflects the focus of the consortium which is to study the human brain from around the world through neuroimaging and genetics. This marks the ten-year anniversary of the consortium, with the work and efforts of its 50 working groups and over 2000 members in 45 countries highlighted throughout this special issue.

Allocating Unlimited Money: What Explains Super PAC Spending in Congressional Elections?

Abstract How do Super PACs allocate their resources? The question is both timely and relevant, particularly as we reflect on the ten-year anniversary of the Citizens United ruling. Super PACs now outspend – sometimes by huge margins, as in the 2016 presidential election – all other groups’ independent expenditures including those of parties, unions, and 501(c) organizations. The issue is especially important in congressional politics, where Super PACs have an opportunity to shape the institution every two years through congressional elections. Utilizing outside spending data from the Center for Responsive Politics, we analyze four U.S. House election cycles since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United ruling (2012–2018). The likelihood that Super PACs invest in a race is strongly determined by the electoral context, even after controlling for the legislative influence of the incumbent member of Congress.

JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques: Celebrating 10 Years of Innovation

The ten-year anniversary of JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques comes at a dramatic time in medical history: technological innovations have enabled and improved the techniques for teaching surgeons, traditional print publications have yielded to online platforms, and real-time analytics are utilized to gauge viewer interest. We are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic that has highlighted the value of learning from each other, and opened new avenues for doing so remotely. As we announce the 2020 JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques Award winners, we celebrate the evolution and progress of the orthopaedic community and of our journal. Over the past decade, we have seen continuous advancement in the quality of our peer-reviewed articles, which serve the important task of demonstrating surgical techniques with published outcomes. This year’s award winners continue that trend. Notably, the award-winning articles for both Subspecialty and Key Procedures focus on computerized navigation. In their Subspecialty Procedures article, Polly and Holton address the problem of sacroiliac joint pain, aptly performing arthrodesis with use of unique implants that result in less morbidity1. In their Key Procedures article, Gothesen et al. produced an elegant treatise on the use of computerized navigation in total knee arthroplasty, showing how best to achieve optimal implant alignment, size, and positioning2. These articles are sterling examples of how to utilize multimedia to demonstrate and articulate the fine details of a surgical procedure. Since the inception of JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques, we have been steadfast in our mission to provide high-quality, peer-reviewed content that can be utilized as a teaching tool for surgeons at all levels of experience. We provide instructive video articles that describe the best and latest surgical techniques that are supported by published outcomes. As such, we continue to innovate within the journal and for our authors, including: Reducing burden by providing templates for articles and video storyboards Adding in-line video to the article text, as well as other multimedia to enhance viewer understanding of the procedure Migrating from a largely written article to an all-video, online format featuring an enhanced abstract Increasing learning efficiency by enabling variable playback speed for video viewing Adding English-language captioning to broaden outreach internationally and provide greater accessibility When evaluating the impact of these changes, 1 metric to assess the value of an article is the interest that it generates. For that, we also present the top-10 most viewed JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques articles3-12. Although the frequency with which a procedure is performed plays a role in the viewership metrics, all of these articles are outstanding examples of the high-quality content we aim to provide. We will continue to push the envelope and lead by searching for and incorporating additional features as they become possible.

A folk theory of the EEC: popular euroscepticism in the early 1980s

ABSTRACT The 2016 EU Referendum has renewed the focus of historians and social scientists on Britain’s historical relationship with Europe as they aim to develop a better understanding of ‘the road to Brexit’. The development of Euroscepticism in Britain has often been approached from an elite perspective, with a focus on the conflicting ideas and arguments between politicians, political parties, and the media. This article builds on existing studies by focusing on popular attitudes to Europe during the early 1980s. We analyse responses to a ‘special directive’ issued by the Mass Observation Project in the autumn of 1982 to mark the ten-year anniversary of Britain joining the European Economic Community (EEC). Reading this previously overlooked material for categories, storylines, and other cultural resources, we identify four key grievances MO panellists shared as common-sense evaluations of Britain’s membership of the EEC. We argue these grievances constituted a wider folk theory of Euroscepticism circulating in British society six years prior to Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech and subsequent debates about further integration in the early 1990s. In developing this argument, we contribute a better understanding of the content and origins of popular Euroscepticism in the 1980s.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note C. Damien Arthur It is nearly impossible to explain the depth and complexity of Robert C. Byrd in a journal volume, especially the vastness of his connections to policy, implemented power, and his involvement in sociohistorical events and ideologies. This scholarly, commemorative journal volume on the ten-year anniversary of his death could never fully address the aforementioned. Yet, even as Byrd said during his life, his involvement in racist groups, ideologies, and actions would follow him forever—even in death. As the guest editor of West Virginia: A Journal of Regional Studies, I offer this editor's note as a very brief summary of a larger, more nuanced history on Byrd and his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist rhetorics, which will be published by Oxford University Press in the definitive biography of Byrd and his life. Was Byrd a racist? This is the question that people, in all the conversations and interactions the author has had, with nearly every interested party, want answered definitively. In asking the question, most already have a preconceived answer they want confirmed by the explanations of my research. Most want to simply say that he moved beyond those early days of Klan behavior and rhetoric and fought for civil rights, which is both true and a completely naïve interpretation of Byrd's latter behavior and rhetoric—nonetheless. Many want to dismiss Byrd, both his legacy and good works, because of the racist ideas he espoused, which are venomous and legion. There is no debate—Byrd did and said racist things. He also did and said antiracist things. This tension is why many called him an enigma. Nevertheless, the public is interested, however, in historical figures of importance precisely because they are flawed, inspiring, and complicated, which challenges our perceptions of conventional archetypes. Byrd's story is a part of the United States' collective story, the American story—his life is paradigmatic of this long, legendary tale. This story is about a promise that all people are created equal and the profoundly real and consequential failure of America and its leaders to implement this for everyone—expressed in the racist, violent institutions that murdered and tortured black humans, or the capital and wealth accumulation from slavery that has not been truly shared with those that earned it, or the perpetuation of the new Jim Crow structures in mass incarceration and disenfranchisement. There is no doubt that it is a difficult story. It is a difficult realization and [End Page v] acknowledgement for anyone to process. Americans should weep each time they think of it. Many Americans are all part of it, participate in it, benefit from it, and, often, continue to perpetuate it. Nevertheless, it is a story that must be told; it must be acknowledged—it is a central part in the American story. Doing so is the only way to move forward. America, and many of those that love their country, did this to other human beings—murdering, torturing, and destroying people in the name of white supremacy, both overtly and inadvertently. In some ways, this is still happening to black Americans. America had, and continues to have, in some instances, political and economic systems that perpetuate white supremacy. By design, the system is difficult to change. So, for those at the helm of, and within, that system that have acknowledged their mistakes, made attempts to rectify the system, tried to close those stunning gaps, dismissing them outright without hearing their story undermines progress and disincentivizes others from acknowledging that more change is necessary for justice for all to be realized. Acknowledgement and change, however, small and incremental, are steps in the direction America must go to fulfill those promises in our founding epiphanies. Of course, Byrd was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, and later in the immutable Southern Bloc's attempt to dismantle civil rights, and few people deny it—to do so irradicates any semblance of scholarly credibility. The controversy will be further complicated when the full story is told in the aforementioned book and it is known that his involvement was more vicious than previously acknowledged or known. Byrd should...

Aeromobilities in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This Perspective piece marks the ten-year anniversary of Transfers’ life as a journal and its contributions to aeromobilities research. Reflecting on my own past decade learning and writing about aeromobilities, the article takes stock of some significant threads in the field, before charting out three key future directions for aeromobilities research prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and health crisis. Without prejudice to existing scholarly threads, the article discusses the burgeoning salience of new (aero)mobility injustices, automation, and aerial (in)civilities, amid an aviation industry struggling to reboot itself. The next ten years present enduring possibilities for aeromobilities inquiries, and the article hopes to inspire future thinking on the subject as societies connect again through aviation.

Editors' Note: A Decade In Which The People Marched

Editors' Note:A Decade In Which The People Marched The SAIS Review Editorial Board The year 2021 marks the ten-year anniversary of one of the most impactful global events in recent memory—the Arab Spring. The initial outbreak of protest in Tunisia sparked a chain reaction that led to the fall of several longstanding regimes—those of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt are particularly notable—and to protracted conflicts that continue to this day. The Arab Spring, however, was not the only instance of mass social mobilization during the last decade. Since then, the world has witnessed protests and social movements in Thailand, Mali, Russia, Turkey, Belarus, Chile, Hong Kong, the United States, and more countries. In this issue, Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press of Carnegie Europe write: "Protests have been a crucial barometer of whether governments are delivering for their citizens. The explosion in citizen mobilizations suggests that many governments are not." From liberal democracies to authoritarian regimes, people have risen up in protest either in digital spaces or in the streets—even in the midst of a global pandemic. This issue not only addresses the protests themselves; it also covers the way they are perceived by those on the ground and on the other side of the globe. Toni Morrison famously wrote: "Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgements…They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media."1 Journalists, in outlets as famous as the New York Times and as personal as their own social media accounts, have brought the events and framing to understand such events to others. The title of this issue is The Revolution Will Be Televised—a play on Gil Scott-Heron's 1971 song, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." This issue examines more than the fundamental social and political reasons behind protest movements; it studies the intersection of time, place, and audience and how these factors influence the development of social movements. The message of Scott-Heron's poetic lyrics was that protests and flashpoints might end up on the nightly news, but the larger, lasting consequences of these movements, good or bad, would not. Perhaps this issue in and of itself is an example of what Scott-Heron was referencing: a curated collection of articles covering protests from around the world that will not lead to institutional change and does not attempt to do so. That said, the articles seek to provide deeper, more contextualized descriptions [End Page 1] of movements, their causes, and their outcomes thus far. The authors who present their pieces in this issue provide thought-provoking descriptions of specific protests, overarching perceptions, and theories around social movements and change. Liah Greenfeld opens the issue by offering a historical view on how nationalism developed in the sixteenth century, how concepts of nationalism alter peoples' perceptions of self, and how those perceptions of self move people to act. Next, Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press discuss protests in authoritarian states and their often-limited results. Johns Hopkins SAIS professor, Hofung Hung, analyzes the consequences of Hong Kong's 2019 unrest and the July 2020 implementation of Beijing's National Security Law. Penchan Phoborisut introduces the specific case study of Thailand's student-organized protests and Bangkok "flash mobs" throughout 2020, highlighting how new forms of dissent fueled by social media and culturally relevant memes have been used to overcome harsh restrictions on speech. Thitinan Pongsudhirak goes further, examining how the ongoing protests in Thailand have evolved from their populist antecedents to challenge the military-royalist establishment. Moving to Latin America, Lucia Dammert and Diego Sazo write about Chile's 2019 riots, sparked by a seemingly innocuous increase in public transport fees. The authors discuss how the uprising took elites by surprise, and how they struggled explain it—using either "riff-raff" or "agitator" frameworks. Next the text traverses to Africa, where Lisa Mueller discusses sub-Saharan African protests since the Arab Spring, and Paul Melly provides a journalistic account of how protests and political action in Mali have unfolded over the...

Pinter Three and Pinter Four

Pinter Three and Pinter Four