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The violent disconnection: the logic of protest violence in contemporary Latin America
No full textScholars have extensively debated the causes of recent anti-government protests in Global South democracies. However, little attention has been given to explaining why and how some of these protests became more violent than others despite occurring under relatively similar circumstances. In contemporary Latin America, most countries have experienced mass anti-government protests, but only a few escalated into highly destructive, nationwide, and prolonged street violence. This puzzle set the central question of this PhD research: How can we explain variation in the intensity of protest violence in low-middle quality democracies? I argue that the intensity of protest violence is shaped by the degree of deterioration in state-citizen relations through two mechanisms: the strength of intermediary organisations (political parties, unions, social movements) in the political system, and the endurance of memories of state violence. Strong intermediaries help channel grievances, facilitating negotiations with state authorities and preventing radical factions from gaining traction. Conversely, weak intermediaries fail to address solutions, increasing public alienation and legitimising violent actors. Societies with strong collective memories of state repression are more likely to avoid violence, as both authorities and protesters recognise its costly consequences. When these memories fade, the likelihood of both state repression and radical behaviour rises. I claim that the interplay of these two factors results in three distinct patterns of protest violence: restrained, disruptive or transgressive. Using extensive historical research, newspaper reports, cross-national surveys, written testimonies, protest art, video footage, political cartoons, and 63 in-depth interviews conducted during fieldwork, I undertake a process-tracing controlled comparison of protests in Argentina, Chile and Colombia. I focus on the largest mobilisations in each country between 2017 and 2020. My analysis shows that differences in the strength of intermediary organisations and the significance of past state violence in collective memories help explain the distinct trajectories of protest violence. In Argentina, where strong intermediaries engaged with authorities and memories of state violence remained vivid, protest violence remained largely restrained. In Colombia, weak intermediaries combined with strong memories of state atrocities resulted in disruptive violence. Meanwhile, in Chile, where intermediaries were weak and collective memories of past repression had faded, protests escalated into transgressive violence. This PhD research contributes to existing literature on contentious politics in three ways. First, it builds a novel theory on the variation in protest violence, shedding light on the black box of mechanisms by which certain mobilisations become more violent than others. Second, by challenging prevailing theories on deterministic understandings of violence, this research provides a more nuanced and interactional analytical framework for studying protest violence. Finally, it advances into new empirical terrain by offering fresh ground-level data on variations in protest violence from a cross-national comparative perspective
The myth of big data
No full textIncreasingly, institutions in the fields of research and policymaking, as well as the corporate realm, base decision-making and knowledge production on metrics calculated from what is metaphorically called ‘big data’. In his 2013 inaugural lecture ‘A Necessary Disenchantment: Myth, Agency and Injustice in a Digital World’, Nick Couldry discusses the mythical claim that big data is generating a new and better form of social knowledge
Carbon Performance assessment of coal mining companies: note on methodology
No full textThe TPI Centre’s Carbon Performance assessments have historically assessed companies’ emission pathways on an emissions intensity basis – that is, the volume of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per unit of economic output. Coal mining is the first sector that we assessed based on absolute emissions rather than emissions intensities. This approach reflects the unique decarbonisation challenges specific to coal mining. Achieving net zero in this sector ultimately requires an almost complete phase-out of coal production. Unlike other industries, where efficiency improvements and new production methods can reduce emissions intensity while maintaining output, coal mining’s main decarbonisation strategy of phasing out production cannot meaningfully be assessed on an intensity basis. This is because coal production and Scope 1-3 emissions would reduce roughly proportionally. To account for these sector-specific characteristics, we introduce the Emissions Contraction Approach (ECA). The ECA remains grounded in the Sectoral Decarbonisation Approach (SDA), which the TPI Centre applies to all its Carbon Performance assessments. This section outlines the rationale behind using the ECA and explains why an alternative method is necessary for assessing the sector’s alignment with international climate goals
Life reversed: dementia and care in Southern China
No full textIn China, most people with dementia continue to live at home, despite the increasing institutionalization of eldercare in recent decades. However, family- and communitybased dementia care remain ethnographically understudied. This dissertation examines how people, especially caregiving families, understand and cope with dementia in their everyday life. It draws on twenty-two months of multi-sited fieldwork (2021–2023) in rural and urban households, community-based centres, and hospitals in Shunde, Guangdong Province, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study explores dementia as a situated phenomenon in the context of rapid social change, highlighting how dementia care can become contingent and uncertain due to the elusive, sometimes incommunicable, illness experiences of people with dementia. The ethnography presents individuals’ everyday experiences of living with dementia in the context of a contested landscape of eldercare during a time of a healthcare crisis and economic decline. Family relationships were challenged, even ruptured, by increasing care responsibilities for specific dementia symptoms. However, healthcare professionals in institutional and community-based settings addressed such issues under an increasingly market-oriented framing as public funding for welfare services significantly decreased. In this context, my elderly interlocutors, with limited socioeconomic resources and physical abilities, faced social isolation and negligence at home. Some relived traumas from unsayable collective histories as manifested in hallucinations and memory disorders, indicating a reversal of life between the past and the present. For others, the home becomes a space of confinement and even abandonment in the face of unravelling kinship ties, social distancing policies, and the local place-making process. Overall, this dissertation explores dementia and care ‘negatively’ by interweaving stories of elusive experiences, negative kinship, displaced memories, illegible histories, and the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic. It contributes to the anthropology of care by providing relationally and sociohistorically situated accounts of the contingency of dementia in contemporary China
Where versus what: college value-added and returns to field of study in further education
No full textWe use administrative records on educational and labor market trajectories to estimate the value-added of English further education colleges in terms of educational and labor market outcomes and earnings returns to different fields of study taught at these colleges. We find that dispersion in college value-added in terms of labor market outcomes is moderate compared to differences in earnings returns across fields of study. We further show that value-added in labor market outcomes is correlated with value-added in academic outcomes. We conclude that in English further education, what one studies tends to matter more than where one does so
Gender promotion gaps and career aspirations
No full textUsing a representative survey of U.S. lawyers, we document a sizeable gender gap in early partnership aspirations, which explains half of the later gender promotion gap. We further document that the correlation between aspirations and effort provides a “mechanical link” between aspirations and promotion. Early workplace experiences, such as harassment and demeaning comments, are linked to promotion aspirations. Moreover, early aspirations provide insight into eventual promotion outcomes that goes beyond what can be drawn only from expectations. Our study highlights that measuring aspirations and adapting the corporate culture that shapes them are key components for firms to improve workplace environments
Structural reforms and economic performance: the experience of advanced economies
No full textThis article provides a comprehensive assessment of the theoretical and empirical literature on structural reforms in advanced economies. Structural reforms matter because they entail profound and systematic changes that affect economic welfare, productivity, growth, unemployment, macroeconomic stability, and income inequality. Here we focus on structural reforms in product, labor, and financial markets. After putting forward a set of stylized facts, we take stock of the literature on each of these three key structural reforms, and then assess their business cycle and political economy implications. We underscore various gaps in the literature and articulate a future research agenda that highlights four main areas: measurement, interactions among reforms, political economy considerations, and the timing of the implementation of reforms
A serious crisis that didn’t go to waste? The EU, the Covid-19 pandemic and the role of ambiguity in crisis-management
No full textWas the European response to the Covid-19 crisis coherent to the challenges posed by the pandemic? The paper argues that the response to the pandemic had little to do with the characteristics of the crisis at hand and was rather linked to pre-conceived priorities of key actors in Europe (particularly surrounding the need to foster the green transition). The pandemic was thus considered as the epitome of an exogenous shock, to which no clear long-term policy response could be given, if not one that strengthens on previous political economic plans. The paper contributes to the literature on crisis-management in the EU, arguing that the multiple streams framework's focus on ambiguity is a fruitful complement to the historical institutionalist emphasis on critical junctures, particularly when studying exogenous shocks
Homo anthropologicus: unexamined behavioural models in sociocultural anthropology
No full textInferences from ethnography in sociocultural anthropological arguments frequently rely on an unexamined model of the human mind and behaviour. Across a range of theoretical approaches, human thought and behaviour are implicitly understood as coherently following a single underlying cultural logic, described in terms such as ‘ontology’, habitus, political strategy. We term this implicit model Homo anthropologicus, by analogy with Homo economicus. Both simplify human behaviour and can thus lead to errors in its interpretation. We examine examples of Homo anthropologicus in anthropological approaches to ontology, caste, state evasion, and habitus. We propose that such accounts are erroneous in light of the multiple cognitive systems involved in human thought and behaviour, discussed with close reference to dual process theory. Unlike Homo anthropologicus, Homo sapiens’ behaviour is frequently inconsistent. Whilst anthropologists have long acknowledged this is the case, in practice, as we demonstrate through our examples, inconsistency is frequently seen as a problem to be explained away rather than as a feature of behaviour to be accounted for in its own right. We therefore conclude by calling for a greater degree of methodological reflexivity when making inferences from ethnography
The value of research activities “other than” publishing articles: reflections on an experimental workshop series
No full textPurpose: The purpose of this essay is to explore the opportunities and challenges that early-career researchers (ECRs) face when they seek to contribute to academic knowledge production through research activities “other than” those directly focused on making progress with their own, to-be-published, research papers in a context associated with the “publish or perish” (PoP) mentality. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing broadly on the notion of technologies of humility (Jasanoff, 2003), this reflective essay develops upon the experiences of the authors in organizing and participating in a series of nine workshops undertaken between June 2013 and April 2021, as well as the arduous process of writing this paper itself. Retrospective accounts, workshop materials, email exchanges and surveys of workshop participants provide the key data sources for the analysis presented in the paper. Findings: The paper shows how the organization of the workshops is intertwined with the building of a small community of ECRs and exploration of how to address the perceived limitations of a “gap-spotting” approach to developing research ideas and questions. The analysis foregrounds how the workshops provide a seemingly valuable research experience that is not without contradictions. Workshop participation reveals tensions between engagement in activities “other than” working on papers for publication and institutionalized pressures to produce publication outputs, between the (weak) perceived status of ECRs in the field and the aspiration to make a scholarly contribution, and between the desire to develop a personally satisfying intellectual journey and the pressure to respond to requirements that allow access to a wider community of scholars. Originality/value: Our analysis contributes to debates about the ways in which seemingly valuable outputs are produced in academia despite a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality. The analysis also shows how reflexive writing can help to better understand the opportunities and challenges of pursuing activities that might be considered “unproductive” because they are not directly related to to-be-published papers