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Censorship's Diminishing Effects in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Pakistan
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Third Sector Across Two Realms: International and Domestic Norm Dynamics of Chinese Environmental NGOs
Get PDFThe Belt and Road Green Development Coalition, established in 2019, was created for the purpose of developing a set of ‘green’ project development standards to be utilized by Chinese and BRI host country stakeholders in the construction of BRI projects. These forthcoming standards are reflected in BRIGC reports and informed by an assemblage of industry, government, and NGO actors. Curiously, environmental NGOs (eNGOs) with outsized impacts on China’s domestic environmental governance through the use of environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) are all but unrepresented within this coalition. Instead, eNGOs shaping industry standards like climate disclosures and novel ideas such as energy grid interconnectedness are represented in the BRGIC. This paper builds upon existing constructivist literature regarding China and the BRIGC’s norm localization and subsidiarization to understand the forces that compel Chinese eNGOs influence governance in primarily domestic or international realms created by political leadership. Using People’s Court Case Database EPIL case rulings and BRIGC reports, it argues eNGOs with strong international norms crystallized into international law best leverage their experience and expertise in domestic realms while those with engaged with moderately strong or weak norms best influence governance in organizations like the BRIGC. Qualitative content analysis of norms mentioned in BRIGC reports and their strengths is conducted to support the claims of this paper
Computationally Confined in Cook County: Pretrial Electronic Monitoring as a Failed Alternative to Incarceration
No full textElectronic monitoring is used widely throughout the United States as an alternative to physical detention. While it is often presented as a reform to incarceration, recent research has shown that electronic monitoring is an ineffective alternative that expands carceral space and power rather than limiting it. This paper analyzes pretrial electronic monitoring in Cook County in support of this scholarship. It argues that pretrial electronic monitoring, specifically the program operated by the Cook County Sheriff, recreates harms of incarceration and creates new harms unique to electronic monitoring. Recent ameliorative reforms were made to the program in the SAFE-T Act, a piece of omnibus criminal justice reform passed in Illinois. These reforms made meaningful, though not radical, changes to the program in an attempt to improve the conditions of monitoring. In response, Sheriff Tom Dart decided to shut down the program due to purported safety concerns, placing all electronic monitoring under the control of the Office of the Chief Judge. That these ameliorative changes caused the Sheriff to determine the program unviable further reinforces electronic monitoring in Cook County as a vehicle of carceral power and oversight
Central Planning and Peripheral Protest: Contested Urbanism and Suburban Annexation in Paris (1852-1871) and Chicago (1889-1909)
No full textWhile scholars have established the architectural influence of Second Empire Paris (1852-1870) on Chicago, few have investigated how the political and economic ideologies embodied in Haussmannization were adopted by the Burnham Plan of 1909, nor have they compared how those plans were received by affected populations. This paper positions Paris and Chicago both as cities connected by cultural exchange and as sites of comparison by analyzing two processes of modernization: urban planning and the annexation of suburban municipalities into the expanding cities. The collections of prominent Chicagoans in the Progressive Era (1889-1909) trace the influence of Paris’ renovation and establish the cities’ shared political and economic ideologies, including the prioritization of capital circulation and rationality over lived experience. Response to annexation is compared by analyzing residents’ statements from the industrial suburbs of La Villette and the Town of Lake given in 1) an official enquête carried out in 1859 by the Second Empire and 2) citywide and local newspapers that discuss Chicago’s 1889 process of annexation. This analysis finds that while cultural exchange between Paris and Chicago generated similar priorities and urban plans aimed at creating economic growth and unified—“civilized”—societies, suburban municipalities reacted to annexation processes by emphasizing the unique legal, economic, and social properties of their town, and viewed themselves as vital—but distinct—contributors to the central city’s existence. This paper concludes that while city planners responded to the exigencies of capitalist modernity with similar solutions, governmental structure and neighborhood-level particularities shaped how these plans were implemented and received
Remeasuring Status in the International Relations
Get PDFThis thesis develops a multidimensional framework for measuring international status, addressing the methodological gap between theoretical conceptions of status and their empirical operationalization. Drawing on insights from realism, constructivism, and social identity theory, the study conceptualizes status as comprising both attribute-based dimensions (material capabilities and institutional integration) and network-based dimensions (diplomatic recognition and prestige). Using Principal Component Analysis and network analytics on data spanning 1960-2015 for over 1,500 country-year observations, the research identifies distinct, yet correlated status dimensions and quantifies the degree of status inconsistency—the misalignment between a state's attributes and received recognition. Through cluster analysis, the study empirically validates a fourfold status typology (great powers, major powers, middle powers, and minor powers) that aligns with traditional international relations classifications. The findings confirm that status inconsistency generally decreased as the international system matured, though with significant variations across states and time periods. This research contributes theoretically by advancing our understanding of status as a multidimensional construct, methodologically by providing a replicable measurement framework, and empirically by documenting status hierarchies and their evolution over five decades. The results suggest that integrating both material capabilities and social recognition is essential for comprehending status dynamics in international relations
Civics Education in the United States: A Legacy of Failure and Hope for the Future
Get PDFCivics education is essential for developing an informed and politically engaged electorate. Recent declines in civics proficiency across the United States have prompted state legislatures to pass reforms to bolster the subject in schools. This study is an evaluation of recent civics education reform efforts in the United States between 2017-2020. Comparisons are made between trends in national NAEP civics exam data and civics test score trends in Florida and Virginia, which both passed civics reforms during this period, but maintained civic republican and liberal standards in their curricula. Louisiana is used as a control case, as the state has not passed any reforms regarding civics. The data suggests no correlation between civics reform efforts and civics test scores for either Florida or Virginia. Furthermore, an analysis using previous research on the Student Voices program, founded by the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, is examined as a potential alternative to modern civics teaching, using data from their program sites in Philadelphia and Seattle. This paper advocates for a new form of civics education that addresses the lived experience of students to increase political engagement and to supplement or replace the current methods of teaching civics
The end-Cretaceous mass extinction restructured functional diversity but failed to configure the modern marine biota
Get PDFThe end-Cretaceous (K-Pg) mass extinction shows how large-scale taxonomic loss affects functional diversity over short and long timeframes. In a macroevolutionary model system, we find that, despite losing ~60% of genera and ~20% of family-level diversity, marine bivalves lost only ~5% of their functional diversity, inconsistent with random extinction. Even with evolutionary opportunities presented by a disrupted ecosystem, low-diversity groups prior to the extinction or those originating in the Cenozoic rarely reach higher ranks today, implying long-term diversity ceilings to certain ecological roles. Clades that survived the extinction tend to dominate functions today, 66 million years post-extinction, but both relative richness and phylogenetic structure of those functional groups have been significantly shuffled. Thus, neither the composition of the pre-extinction biota nor the set of taxa that survived the extinction fully accounts for the functional and phylogenetic structure of today’s biota. The extinction disrupted Mesozoic biodiversity but did not fully determine the present-day configuration
Study of self-assembly behavior and ionic conductivity of conjugated liquid crystals with T-shaped facial-polyphilic structure
Get PDFThe unique self-assembly of liquid crystals (LCs), combined with their potential application as organic semiconductors, has become a focus of recent research. Here, a joint experimental and computational study of the self-assembly and ionic conduction was carried out on a series of T-shaped conjugated LCs consisting of three incompatible components. By extending the EOn side-chain length, several experimental evaluations confirmed a decrease of the order-disorder transition temperature, while coarse-grained simulations revealed a structural evolution from a smectic phase to a columnar phase. Ionic conductivity of these molecules was achieved by adding Li salt, leading to a maximum conductivity of 1.1 × 10−3 siemens per centimeter observed at 120°C. All-atom simulations were performed to examine the Li-ion solvation environment and to evaluate the intrachain and interchain Li-ion hopping mechanisms. The molecule with a long EOn side chain was found to generate a densely distributed network of Li-ion solvation sites, which can facilitate effective interchain hopping to promote ion transport
Papaya Privacy: Empowering Web Users through AI-enabled Cookie Consent and Data Monetization Tools
Get PDFThe current online advertising data ecosystem is broken. Web-users are repeatedly deceived by dark design patterns into clicking “Accept All” on cookie consent banners, unwittingly opting in to a myriad of unintended data flows. These data flows can have drastic consequences, ranging from targeted advertisement all the way to social oppression. To combat these problems, we present Papaya Privacy, a new way to empower web-users using AI-powered cookie consent and data monetization mechanisms. We designed and implemented two interventions, Agent Papaya and Papaya Payback. With Agent Papaya, our Agentic AI-powered chrome extension, we give users the ability to set their cookie preferences once and execute this seamlessly across websites, mitigating the effects of dark design patterns. With users now able to effectively opt-out of data collection, we conceptualize an alternative data market, Papaya Payback, based on the theories of Data Unions and Contextual Integrity. Through simulation, we show that by allowing users fine-grained control of who gets to access what data of theirs and for what purposes, the Papaya Payback market creates greater social welfare than the current online advertising data market. Together, Papaya Privacy’s two interventions demonstrate a practical path toward a consent-enforcing, user-centered, and economically viable data economy for online advertising
The Double-Edged Sword of IP Location Disclosure: Caution or Discrimination? A Study of Regional Hate Speech on Chinese Social Media
No full textThis study investigates how IP location disclosure affects online hostility, with Weibo serving as the main platform for analysis. A fine-tuned Chinese RoBERTa model jointly classifies hate speech and sentiment in a dataset of approximately 100,000 user posts. The resulting labels serve as outcome variables in a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to evaluate behavioral shifts before and after the policy. The analysis finds that the policy led to a statistically significant decline in hate speech, reducing its probability by approximately 3.2 percentage points in the immediate post-policy period. This effect is particularly pronounced in posts involving regional identity, as revealed through heterogeneous analysis. These results are robust across model specifications and sampling windows. Validation exercises show high consistency between model predictions and human-coded labels. Taken together, the findings suggest that identity-based transparency can reduce online hostility by increasing perceived accountability, contributing to ongoing discussions about platform governance and social norms