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Handbook on the role of non-state actors in Russian hybrid threats
No full textRussia’s employment of non-state actors is a staple of its approach to hybrid threat operations, whether through attacks on German military and industrial facilities by individuals, sabotage of French rail infrastructure by loosely co-ordinated groups, disinformation campaigns run by private companies, or cyber operations by hacktivist collectives.
This handbook provides an overarching assessment of Russia’s approach to working with and through various NSAs across different operational domains, mapping both the empirical depth and breadth of the phenomenon. It establishes a much-needed baseline for understanding the logic behind Russia’s use of NSAs and lays the groundwork for determining appropriate measures and countermeasures at a time when operations below and above the threshold of war are on the rise
Analysis of ill-health burden on small-holder agricultural households' welfare in Nigeria
Get PDFThis study empirically examined the economic burden of ill-health and the pathway of negative consequences of ill-health disability on small-holder agricultural households’ welfare (income and food spending) in Nigeria. The Nigeria’s Living Standard Measurement Study - Integrated Survey on Agriculture panel data (2010/11, 2012/13 and
2015/16) were used. Data analysis tools were descriptive statistics, cost of illness approach, and panel data instrumental variable regression model. Agricultural households whose members experienced ill-health disability had high direct and indirect costs of ill-health, with negative welfare consequences on the affected households. Direct costs included the Out of Pocket (OOP) healthcare and other related costs; indirect cost was the cost of lost productive time to the households. The proportion of indirect cost to the average total cost of ill-health was 65%. As a proportion of households’ income, estimates of direct cost was about 19%, and indirect cost was 39%. Results revealed that the pathway by which the burden of ill-health disability affected households’ welfare is through increased OOP healthcare expenditure and reduction in food budget. This study recommended the expansion of government-funded healthcare insurance to cover small-holder agricultural households and
protect them from the direct and indirect burden of ill-health. Recognizing that findings are ceteris paribus, other complementary health financing efforts through the private sector, community-based initiatives and non-profit organizations in form of grants, loans and/or
health related social corporate responsibility services are advocated to reduce productive days lost to ill-health and OOP payments which undermine agricultural production and household welfare
Reforming consumer alternative dispute resolution in Thailand
No full textThis research aims to reform consumer alternative dispute resolution (CADR) in
Thailand by identifying the causes of court backlogs and proposing effective
solutions. Three contributing causes are legislative and practical burdens, consumer
behaviour in the digital era, and the capacity of redress authorities. The legislative
issues stem from the Civil Procedure Code and the Consumer Case Procedure Act,
where provisions such as the ‘speedy process’ do not meet the target, and class
action procedures remain underutilized. Additionally, inconsistent interpretations
of the Consumer Protection Act, such as the shifting of roles between consumer and
business parties and the Consumer Protection Board’s restriction to representing
only one consumer per case, highlight the need to revise the legal definition of
‘consumer’. Consumer behaviour in the digital era plays a part in the backlogs, as
the rise in online transactions has led to an increase in consumer complaints.
Furthermore, courts and the Office of the Consumer Protection Board (OCPB) face
personnel and budget shortages, with mediation services lacking sufficient capacity
to ease case volume. While several authorities now provide CADR services, the
schemes are still under construction and development. A comparative study of the
EU instruments supported by instruments from the UN, OECD, and ASEAN, offers
valuable models for improvement. Based on these insights, this research proposes
a set of solutions. That is, (1) revise the definition of ‘consumer’ and ‘business’ to
have ‘consumer case’ unidirectional, (2) enhance redress authorities’ capacity, (3)
develop CADR mechanisms, and (4) maintain and develop a package of measures:
complementary authorities’ measures, business guidelines, and consumer education
and awareness. Specifically, it recommends introducing mandatory mediation
using digital tools through the Court of Justice and developing a national online
dispute resolution platform under the OCPB aligned with the ASEAN ODR
guidelines, to provide consumers with an accessible and efficient means of
resolving disputes
Recessions and competitive leapfrogging: evidence from manufacturing industries
No full textPurpose This study investigates how manufacturing firms can leverage recessions to gain and sustain long-term market share advantages, a phenomenon referred to as competitive leapfrogging. For that, we analyze the mechanisms that explain competitive leapfrogging due to recessions. We develop hypotheses in two stages. Initially, we propose the expected effects of recessions on competitive isolating mechanisms in the short run. Next, we analyze the conditions that enable companies that gain market share during recessions to maintain their position in the longer term, thereby elucidating the factors that contribute to the persistence of these changes. Design/methodology/approach We analyze the market share evolution of firms across 64 US manufacturing industries in the three recessions that occurred between 1982 and 2015. We tested the hypotheses by employing several regression models with panel-corrected standard errors and fixed effects, to examine the mechanisms behind competitive leapfrogging. Findings We observe that the increase in market share for companies based on supply-side isolating mechanisms tends to persist in the aftermath. Similarly, the decrease in market share for firms that relied on demand-side isolating mechanisms also tends to endure. Furthermore, our findings indicate that gains in market share for companies with higher financial flexibility also persist in the aftermath. Additionally, we find evidence of a significant tradeoff between financial flexibility and supply-side isolating mechanisms. Research limitations/implications While our study offers valuable insights, several limitations also present opportunities for future research. First, our focus on a single country and sector enhances internal validity but may limit generalizability to other political and economic contexts. Second, we rely on indirect accounting-based proxies for isolating mechanisms, which, while practical and scalable, do not capture the full richness of firms’ capabilities and qualitative factors. Third, although our findings support the presence of persistent market share shifts during recessions, we do not directly test competitors’ ability to recover, so our interpretation of competitive leapfrogging is partly based on inferred counterfactuals. Finally, while we emphasize pre-recession conditions, we recognize that post-recession decisions also shape long-term outcomes, creating an important avenue for further exploration. Practical implications The study emphasizes the importance of managers planning for future recessions when developing strategic plans. This requires an integrated approach, recognizing that long-term success stems from understanding the isolating mechanisms firms rely on and how these interact with financial flexibility. Social implications As recessions severely impact organizations, economic contractions not only reduce economic but also social value, with long-term implications. Our research assists companies in preparing to navigate through recessions, an endeavor that holds fundamental social implications. Originality/value The paper offers a detailed analysis of mechanisms driving competitive leapfrogging during recessions and supports emerging research on a firm’s financial strength influencing competitive advantages. A key aspect of our contribution is the focus on the dual relationship between short and long-term effects and how sources of competitive advantage relate to market share changes during recessions. Our study emphasizes crucial managerial implications, urging strategic planning to account for potential future recessions
Sound strategies: music as ideological apparatus
No full textApplying the tools of critical theory, the book does not treat music as a series of case studies that test out theoretical concepts, but rather asks how the particular artistic practice that is the kind of music made by bands might be seen through the lens of political and philosophical writing, and how in turn such practice might illuminate ideas of this sort. We are interested not only in how music is made, but also in how art more broadly, as a kind of liminal space that always has as its horizon an outside to labour, nevertheless mimics the organisation of work in society in general. Labour is an explicit concern for many of the bands surveyed, but the book also asks how specific work conditions delimit what is possible in artistic expression and how these limits become aesthetic parameters. The book's fulcrum is the 1990s as a point of rupture, a time when "a culture of margins collapsed around a centre" and the music that we considered subcultural or alternative lost its oppositional status, submerged in a new pluralism. It opens with an account of transgression as a recurrent theme in industrial music that has been embraced by the right as a bulwark against politically correct censorship. Concentrating on Throbbing Gristle, we consider the function of extreme noise and violent imagery in the band's efforts to reassert the real in the face of mediated culture. But if transgression is foreclosed to us as a strategy today, there may yet be others to excavate within the project of industrial music. By looking at Lukács' articulation of critical realism, we suggest that it is actually in their less obviously transgressive moments that Throbbing Gristle's music most successfully captures the reality of the industrial decay from which they emerged, the horror of the everyday rather than the horror of the forbidden. The second chapter surveys minimal synth cover versions of rock 'n' roll classics, centring on The Flying Lizards. Like the minimalist art of the period, this music represents a modular understanding of commodities as comprised of units to be modified and rearranged at will. Rejecting modernist tropes of originality and invention, they used new technical capacities not to efface the role of the musician or singer as author or performer, but to foreground the construction of these figures. Our third chapter is devoted to Manic Street Preachers' project of media infiltration as counter-hegemonic strategy. Exploring Gramsci's ideas about the barriers to the emergence of a working-class organic intellectual, we consider the band's work in terms of its educational function. Living Marxism, a Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) publication notorious for its contrarian takes on the British left was hugely influential for both the Manics and Stereolab, who are the focus of our fourth chapter. Here, we track RCP's evolution from Trostkyist fringe to the heart of the tory establishment as a corollary to the musical transformation of Stereolab from Marxist indie band McCarthy to retro-futurist mutant lounge combo. We by no means claim that Stereolab took the same kind of reactionary turn. But their abandonment of straightforwardly anti-tory guitar music for an increasingly ambivalent quasi-Marxist dreampop made of ambient loops and burbling analogue synthesisers sits within the same post-political moment of cold war certainties being re-evaluated. Considered from the vantage point of an accelerationist response to an unfettered capitalism, both Stereolab and the RCP push the idea of progress to its limit. Their conclusions ultimately differ significantly, and yet identifying the continuities underpinning them may be useful in reformulating an idea of what the left might look (and sound) like today, or at least locate the points of tension that currently seem to be hindering this very necessary regrouping. Using Chicks on Speed's "We Don't Play Guitars" as our starting point, our fifth chapter discusses the performance of gender, framed by a consideration of why there have been no great women guitarists (to paraphrase Linda Nochlin). To answer this, we examine the circumstances under which such performances take place and their relationship to the conditions of labour that underpin the production of music in the context of electroclash. Our juxtaposition of Laibach and Britpop in the next chapter looks at several theorisations of nationalism and ideology, from Benedict Anderson to Louis Althusser, we propose that popular music is part of a wide constellation of cultural commodities that constructs identification with the nation as a form of fiction that constantly fluctuates between the sublime and the mundane. Our final chapter examines post-imperial Britain from without. Using a detailed analysis of Israeli band Mashina's appropriation of the music of Madness, we explore the consequences of an internalised orientalist view of the middle east. At the same time that Britain was trying to come to terms with its multiculturalism and xenophobia, 1980s Israel was rapidly moving towards market capitalism and caught in a bloody military conflict in Lebanon. Rejecting Adorno's dismissal of popular music as mere market ideology, we argue that duplication and circulation of ideas inherent in the medium can actually be used as critical tools. Throughout, we argue that these bands have used specific methods from which we can learn, not just as regards music production, but also conceptually, in terms of how cultural artefacts perform politics in different ways. The arguments that we make throughout the book about particular bands and movements all concern the relationship between music and ideology and consider music as a cultural strategy for producing new subjectivities. Sound Strategies therefore proposes new ways of listening to, thinking about and perhaps even making music as an artistic and political strategy
Limited aggregation’s non-fatal non-dilemma
Get PDFLimited aggregationists argue that when deciding between competing claims to aid we are sometimes required and sometimes forbidden from aggregating weaker claims to outweigh stronger claims. Joe Horton presents a ‘fatal dilemma’ for these views. Views that land on the First Horn of his dilemma suggest that a previously losing group strengthened by fewer and weaker claims can be more choice-worthy than the previously winning group strengthened by more and stronger claims. Views that land on the Second Horn suggest that combining two losing groups together and two winning groups together can turn the losing groups into the winning groups and the winning groups into the losing groups. This paper demonstrates that the ‘fatal dilemma’ is neither fatal nor a dilemma. The First Horn is devastating but avoidable and the Second Horn is unavoidable but not devastating. Nevertheless, Horton’s argument does help to narrow down the acceptable range of views
The Google dilemma: as hyper-profits generation continues apace, the EU Commission’s enforcement approach fails to deter Google from engaging in exclusionary multi-market anti-competitive activities
No full textRecently designated as an EU Digital Markets Act “gatekeeper”, this article examines Google’s history of engaging in exclusionary anti-competitive practices in Europe, leveraging its dominance from one online market to another, adversely affecting consumers and competition along the way, and raises the question whether current fining levels are a sufficient deterrent to large online platforms who generate hundreds of billions of dollars every year
Effects of dietary hemp co-product inclusion on laying hens performances and on egg nutritional and functional profile
Get PDFThe European Union promotes a circular economy by valorising food industry scraps as co-products for animal feed. Hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) co-products are promising for their nutritional and functional profile, but their use in animal nutrition remains limited. This study evaluated the effect of increasing levels (0%, 3%, 6%, 9%) of a hemp co-product (variety Futura) from hempseed cleaning, included in laying hens’ diets (control, T3, T6, T9), on performance and the nutritional/functional quality of egg yolks, focusing on total phenolic content (TPC) and antioxidant activity (FRAP and ABTS assays), also assessed after green chemical extraction and in vitro digestion. Including up to 9% hemp co-product in diets did not affect dry matter and protein digestibility but improved the functional profile. A 9% inclusion significantly increased egg mass production (p < 0.01) and reduced saturated fatty acid content (T9: 7672 mg/100 g; T6: 8534 mg/100 g; T3: 8837 mg/100 g; control: 8742 mg/100 g), alongside an improved n-6/n-3 fatty acid ratio. Cholesterol levels were significantly lower than the control in all concentrations tested, with better results for T9 (p < 0.01). Antioxidant activity, measured via ABTS after in vitro digestion, increased significantly (control: 601.12 ± 42.40 mg TE/100 g; T3: 773.17 ± 43.77 mg TE/100 g; T6: 765.64 ± 38.71 mg TE/100 g; T9: 843.48 ± 38.71 mg TE/100 g; p < 0.05), despite no differences in TPC. In conclusion, the inclusion of 9% hemp co-product in laying hens’ diets improved egg production and yolk quality, highlighting its potential for animal feed. However, the composition variability requires further evaluation to ensure future large-scale application