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In Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial, Stuart Blume provides an in-depth analysis of vaccines, emphasizing their role beyond medicine into social, political, and economic realms. The book traces the history of vaccine hesitancy, linking it to socio-political changes, such as neoliberalism and commercialization processes. Blume highlights the dual nature of vaccines as public health instruments and commercial products, and how this duality contributes to vaccine hesitancy. He challenges common views on vaccine disparities between developed and developing nations, and examines the evolution of public attitudes towards vaccination. The transition from public to private vaccine production and the focus on profitable vaccines, often at the expense of less developed countries' needs, are some of the key themes in this book. Blume also discusses the redefinition of health risks and diseases, influencing vaccination policies and public perceptions. The book delves into the historical and evolving nature of resistance to vaccination, ultimately arguing that vaccine hesitancy is deeply rooted in both the commercial and public health significance of vaccines.

During the Great Patriotic War, on the territory of the USSR there were created military formations consisting of representatives of peoples, whose main 'ethnic array' was located outside the USSR. The Executive Committee of the Comintern, the foreign bureaus of the Communist Parties and established in 1941 the All-Slavic Anti-Fascist Committee were directly involved in the creation of foreign military units. The activities of these socio-political structures had several directions, including preparatory and propaganda work aimed at motivating the transition of soldiers of enemy armies to the Soviet side and the entry of prisoners of war (POW) into the ranks of foreign military units created in the USSR, direct participation in the creation of these formations and their further political and propaganda support. One of the most effective forms of work were anti-fascist schools and courses created in POW camps. The activities of the Comintern and the All-Slavic Committee were carried out on a common ideological platform that corresponded to the guidelines of Soviet policy.

The survival of Mexico as we know it is at stake in this election, with two radically different options. On one hand, the traditional parties (PAN, PRI, PRD) aim to preserve the 1917 Constitution and the spirit of the democratic transition (1977-1996) to protect their legacy. On the other hand, Morena and its allies (PT, PVEM, MC) propose a new political order still without a defined outline but with AMLO and his group at the center. How different Morena's new order will look depends on the electoral support they get. In the more extreme scenario, it could lead the country down the path of a constitutional convention, establishing the foundation for a stable competitive authoritarian regime, in which "formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. However, incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy."

The traditional media are currently immersed in an accelerated structural change, driven by the irruption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which cause the emigration of their audiences towards other forms or modalities of reception and consumption. The appearance and popularization of the so-called social networks in the framework (ICT) brings with it a set of challenges for traditional radios. Consequently, the objective of the research consisted of describing some political challenges of the radio in the scenario of the digital revolution, as a condition of possibility to stop its extension as mass media. To achieve the proposed objective, the phenomenological and hermeneutical methodology was used with a predominance of documentary sources in digital format, which were analyzed and discussed to draw up the conclusions of the study. The results obtained allow us to conclude that the Ecuadorian state does not establish the necessary political guidelines to carry out a systematized and orderly transition from analog to digital broadcasting, which implies a technological backwardness in terms of ICT in the country.

AbstractDuring a week in September of 2016, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) held its tenth guerrilla conference, the Décima, in the plains of Yarí in southern Colombia. The guerrilla group blew the event open to the media, orchestrating a festival cum eco-conflict-tourism extravaganza to mark its transition to legal politics. This photo/ethnographic analysis of the Décima illuminates the FARC's symbolic and discursive formation at a pivotal transitional moment and how the group imagined its political possibilities at the cusp of its demobilisation. By engaging with Guy Debord's concept of 'integrated spectacle', I argue that the FARC's vanguardist structure led it to brand itself as the leader of a broad political mobilisation, even as it struggled to retain the allegiance of its former combatants. The article considers the ongoing relevance of the integrated spectacle for scholars and activists and opens a path for further research into politics of spectacle in Latin America.

Given the legacies of colonialism and the inequities of the global capitalist system, consolidated democracies in the Global South were the exception prior to the third wave of democratization in the 1970s. As democratization in the Global South grew, a first generation of work by sociologists challenged mainstream political science's preoccupation with electoral and liberal democracy and brought popular mobilization to the center of the analysis. This literature made key contributions to the debate on democratic transitions and consolidation. A more recent wave of work has focused on the democratization of democracy, examining civil society, movements, participatory democracy, transnational activism, and the wide range of political actors and forms of collective action that have emerged in a democratizing Global South. Variation across and within democracies remains high, but there have been clear cases of democratic deepening. Improving our understanding of the fabric of democratic institutions and practices, including recent cases of regression, calls for more research, especially in subnational and local contexts.

The civil war broke out on March 15, 2011 with the political tension between either domestically legitimate or illegimate actors in Syria so that many people had impelledly or forcedly to migrate neighboring countries via crossing the land or maritime boundaries. These demographic transitions, in which many people, particularly children lost their lives, led admittedly European and Middle Eastern authorities to pursue the state of migratory exception policies. The state of exception revealing the homo sacer through including the exclusion of bodies, considering the use of Giorgio Agamben, corresponds to the temporary suspension of de facto legal norms, but the permanent state of this temporality. By problematizing the exemplary cases from European and Middle Eastern countries, this paper therefore copes not only with the exclusion of Syrians as homines sacri who are the subject of inclusionary techniques with regard to the spatial management of boats, cities and camps but the outlawry of existing juridico-political capabilities, also which may flexibly rule over the ways encompassing their lives and deaths.

This article focuses on the impact of the pandemic coronavirus (COVID-19) on Sino-US relations. It describes Sino-US relations before and after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Particular attention is paid to the ongoing trade war between the PRC and the US, as well as the development of the information war caused by the politicization of the epidemic. The reasons for the deterioration of Sino-US relations under the influence of the coronavirus are considered. The author highlighted the following factors: US fears about the transition of world economic and political leadership from Washington to Beijing; the disagreement between China and the United States over the anti-epidemic in the framework of multilateral cooperation; problems caused by objectively accelerated changes in the world order. It is concluded that the epidemic plays a limited role in the deterioration of economic and political relations between China and the US. The fundamental reason remains the discrepancy between the unilateralism advocated by the US and multilateralism called for by China.

AbstractA long‐run view of well‐being over the last one‐and‐a‐half centuries is presented using an Augmented Human Development Index (AHDI) that combines achievements in health, education, material living standards, and political freedom. The AHDI shows substantial gains in world human development since 1870, although significant room for improvement still remains. The AHDI spread unevenly until 1960, in absolute terms, and up to 1929 in relative ones, and reversed this trend thereafter. The main relative gain went to world countries' middle class, but the main absolute gain accrued to the top decile. AHD trends and distribution do not match, but compare favourably with, those in per capita income. The absolute gap between present‐day advanced countries and the rest of the world deepened over time, though fell in relative terms. Life expectancy has led progress in AHD, particularly until 1970, and drove the catching‐up by the rest of the world during the epidemiological transition. Political and civil liberties took over thereafter.

Brain drain is one of the important aspects of development economics/Demographic transitions. A populous country has the potential to export human capital. There are so many determinants of Human Capital Outflow (HCO). Some like economic, social, and political drivers are already discussed in the previous studies. This study compares the impact of various classes of variables on the HCO. Furthermore, it gives recommendations for controlling HCO based on such results. Data is collected in the form of questionnaires from three rural and three urban areas of Peshawar. Random sampling is used. Probit models are used for comparing the significance of variables. The study shows that not only the classic variables, i.e. economic, social and political are important but also the newly introduced religious and environmental factors have a great impact on HCO. The forthcoming researchers can do further study by considering even more factors affecting the HCO. They can conduct studies for different areas and on different scales.

The principal threat most autocratic leaders face stems from within the regime. To control militaries and mitigate the risk of coups d'état, many autocratic leaders repeatedly purge strong officers from the military. What are the causes and consequences of such purges? Despite its importance, scholars rarely have studied the question, as they have lacked a systematic and comprehensive dataset. The Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset contains information on the dates and characteristics of 1,007 military purges, and covers 566 political leaders in 116 authoritarian countries over the period 1965 to 2005. In this article, I describe MPD, compare it with other datasets, present descriptive statistics on the data, and suggest its applications. By coding the timing and various characteristics of military purges, MPD facilitates empirical study of the relationships between autocratic leaders and their militaries, and thus is useful for researchers studying political violence, repression, civil-military relations, coup-proofing, leader survival, and regime transition.

South Korea and Japan are two large contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. In October 2020, President Moon Jae-in and Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide declared that their countries would aim for carbon neutrality by 2050. The Moon administration presented the Korean version of the New Deal that includes its Green New Deal, whereas the Suga administration completed its strategy aiming for green growth. Both countries emphasize the importance of energy transition through the expansion of green energy in power generation. However, they show some significant differences in dealing with nuclear energy. The purpose of this article is to compare the two countries' energy policies and analyze the rationales and political dynamics behind their different approaches to nuclear energy. The study reveals that the contrast between the two political systems has resulted in differences between their policies. This study depends on comparative methods that use primary sources, such as governmental documents and reports by local news media.

The principal threat most autocratic leaders face stems from within the regime. To control militaries and mitigate the risk of coups d'état, many autocratic leaders repeatedly purge strong officers from the military. What are the causes and consequences of such purges? Despite its importance, scholars rarely have studied the question, as they have lacked a systematic and comprehensive dataset. The Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset contains information on the dates and characteristics of 1,007 military purges, and covers 566 political leaders in 116 authoritarian countries over the period 1965 to 2005. In this article, I describe MPD, compare it with other datasets, present descriptive statistics on the data, and suggest its applications. By coding the timing and various characteristics of military purges, MPD facilitates empirical study of the relationships between autocratic leaders and their militaries, and thus is useful for researchers studying political violence, repression, civil-military relations, coup-proofing, leader survival, and regime transition.

This article examines recent renewable energy initiatives in two hydrocarbon rich states of Eurasia: Kazakhstan and Russia. The global nature of challenges surrounding energy and natural resource use demand that sustainability and "energy transition" policies be understood as geopolitical issues, which are increasingly (re)defining political relations among and within states. Existing research and media coverage of international energy politics in Eurasia is overwhelmingly dominated by a focus on oil and gas extraction, especially in Kazakhstan and Russia, due to their central place in traditional hydrocarbon fuels markets. As elsewhere in the world, however, political and economic leaders in both countries have started to adopt the language of promoting environmental sustainability, the "green economy," and renewable energy infrastructures. Taking a critical geopolitics lens to recent developments, this article considers who is involved in advancing renewable energy in contexts that have traditionally been dependent on traditional energy sources, and what this may portend for the shifting energy landscape of Eurasia. ; Peer reviewed