Suchergebnisse

This paper considers certain implementation problems of Ukrainian Constitution statements as to implementation and protection of main rights and freedoms of Ukrainian citizens. There are considered implementation problems of right for education and medical services. The legality of reformation of educative and medical branches is analyzed.Recommendations as to the legal support of reformation of aforesaid branches for their correspondence of constitutional norms are given. The problem of democracy implementation in Ukraine is considered. Based on the formation principle and peculiarity of bodies of state and representative power, implementation peculiarities of its delegated right and duties, it is offered to limit the right of Verkhovna Rada deputies for introducing changes and additions to the Ukrainian Constitution. Analyzing implementation features of democracy in Ukraine, it is offered to change the system of candidates' admission to the participation in Verkhovna Rada elections. At the same time there is substantiated a necessity to eliminate the majority system of election and chose the party one. Taking into account article 1 of the Constitution, establishing the social directionality of the Ukrainian development, based on the analysis of separate Laws, there is substantiated the non-observance of social norms of the Constitution by state power bodies. Thus, analyzing the statements of the Law of Ukraine "On the living wage", "On the minimal consumption budget", it is established, that the minimal living wage is corrected according to the present budget and not to requirements of the Laws, establishing the special order. There are analyzed separate statements of the project of the Labor Code of Ukraine that differ from the actual Code of the Labor Laws and don't increase socio-labor protection of workers, but on the contrary, worsen and make them socially depended on an employer that is rightless ; В данной статье рассмотрены некоторые проблемы реализации положений Конституции Украины по реализации и защите основных прав и свобод граждан Украины. Рассмотрены, вопроси реализации права на образование и медицинское обслуживание. Проанализирована законность осуществления реформирования образовательной и медицинской отраслей.Данные рекомендации в отношении правового обеспечения реформирования выше указанных отраслей их соответствия конституционным нормам. рассмотрен вопрос реализации народовластия в Украине. Исходя из принципа и особенности формирования органов государственной представительной власти, особенностей реализации ею делегированных прав и выполнения обязанностей, предложено ограничить право депутатов Верховной Рады на внесение изменений и дополнений в Конституцию Украины. Анализируя особенности реализации народовластия в Украине, предложено изменить систему допуска кандидатов в депутаты к участию в выборах в Верховную Раду. Кроме этого обоснована необходимость ликвидации мажоритарной системе выборности и переход на партийную. Учитывая положения ст.1 Конституции устанавливающую социальную направленность развития Украины, на основе анализа отдельных Законов, обосновано отсутствие соблюдения социальных норм Конституции органами государственной власти. Так анализируя положения закона Украины «О прожиточном минимуме», «О минимальном потребительском бюджете» установлено, что пересмотр минимального прожиточного минимума производится с привязкой к существующему бюджету, а не по требованиям Законов устанавливающих особый порядок. Проанализированы отдельные положения проекта Трудового Кодекса Украины, которые в отличие от действующего Кодекса Законов о Труде не улучшают социально-трудовую защищенность работников, а наоборот ухудшают и делают его социально зависимым от работодателя, то есть бесправным ; У даній статті розглянуті деякі проблеми реалізації положень Конституції України щодо реалізації та захисту основних прав і свобод громадян України. Зокрема розглянуто, питання реалізації права на освіту та медичне обслуговування. Проаналізовано законність здійснення реформування освітньої та медичної галузей. Надані рекомендації щодо правового забезпечення реформування вище зазначених галузей їх відповідності конституційним нормам. Розглянуто питання реалізації народовладдя в Україні.Виходячи з принципу та особливості формування органів державної представницької влади, порядку реалізації нею делегованих прав і виконання обов'язків, запропоновано обмежити право депутатів Верховної Ради на внесення змін і доповнень до Конституції України. Запропоновано змінити систему допуску кандидатів в депутати до участі у виборах до Верховної Ради. Крім цього обґрунтовано необхідність ліквідації мажоритарної системи виборності і перехід на партійну систему. З огляду на положення ст.1 Конституції України що встановлює соціальну спрямованість розвитку України, та на основі аналізу окремих Законів, обґрунтовано відсутність дотримання соціальних норм Конституції органами державної влади. Так аналізуючи положення закону України «Про прожитковий мінімум», «Про мінімальний споживчий бюджет» встановлено, що перегляд мінімального прожиткового мінімуму проводиться з прив'язкою до існуючого бюджету, а не за вимогами Законів що встановлюють особливий порядок. Проаналізовано окремі положення проекту Трудового Кодексу України, які на відміну від чинного Кодексу Законів про Працю не поліпшують соціально-трудову захищеність працівників, а навпаки погіршують і роблять його соціально залежним від роботодавця тобто безправним

As almost the whole world is currently living in the waves of the most dramatic global public health emergency of our time and the consequent economic, social and human crisis touching all key dimensions of our lives, there is a historic and real opportunity to encourage a transformative resilience and a new directionality for the path of structural change of our economies and societies (Di Tommaso, 2020), in order to pursue the goal of human flourishing and shared prosperity for all (UN, 2015). In particular, the Covid19 pandemic seems offering an opportunity not simply to appreciate the constructive role of public action to keep all people, households and businesses afloat (UN, 2020), but rather more profoundly to rethink and propose a new and different framing to structure government intervention properly to serve the public interest and guide societal development on the desirable path. In this regard, industrial policy can be considered a central pillar of the recovery strategies, in light also of the momentum gained in the academic and policy-making debate (Cimoli et al., 2009; Bailey et al., 2015; Aiginger and Rodrik, 2020; Chang and Andreoni, 2020; Di Tommaso et al., 2020; Oqubay et al., 2020) about its role in, on the one side, dealing with the prolonged international crisis and the ensuing Great Recession in Western countries and, on the other side, leading the process of industrialization, economic growth and poverty reduction in several emerging countries. Such reliance on industrial policy lies also in the growing appreciation of its relevance and pertinence to promote and govern a desired structural change of the economy (Bianchi and Labory, 2006, 2011; Chang, 1994; Di Tommaso et al., 2013, Stiglitz and Lin, 2013), by reshaping the industrial structure and the organisational configurations of the production systems, thus setting the economy towards a specific path of structural transformation. All in all, industrial policy is increasingly conceived as a vehicle to achieve broader societal goals of nations or regions (Di Tommaso and Schweitzer, 2013) for the sake of long-run collective interest (Aiginger and Rodrik, 2020), placing on centre stage the societal development vision underlying its design and implementation and the sustainability of structural change (Di Tommaso et al., 2020). Despite these premises, two gaps still appear to affect the current debate on industrial policy. Firstly, while new analytical frameworks and empirical analysis have been advanced to link industrial policy to ecological parameters, the ones focusing on a more integrated notion of sustainable human development do not seem to have yet reached the same level of sophistication and comprehensive coverage. Secondly, the theoretical foundations of industrial policies are not fully able to capture and explain the variety of real government intervention models on production dynamics driven by societal goals at national and local level. Thus, there is wide and increasing dissatisfaction with the relationship between theory and practice on industrial policy, due in particular the inability of established theory to go beyond the simple correction of certain market failures in explaining the reason for a wide range of interventions of our present. What is still needed is a holistic policy-making approach able to design robust industrial policy for the simultaneous expansion of collective productive capabilities, creation of good quality jobs and socially sustainable structural change, both at national and local level. Taking together these gaps in the long-lasting literature on industrial policy, the general objective of this collection of papers is to explore why and how national and local governments can shape the future of their societies by promoting industrial policy (within the boundaries of their spheres of intervention) able to simultaneously favour a structural transformation of their economy and increase social progress and collective well-being. In particular, this collection of papers deals with three specific research questions: First, what is the theoretical nexus between the debate on industrial policy and its effects in terms of sustainable human development? Second, how can we measure national development performances keeping into account an integrated notion of the sustainability? Third, how can industrial policy be designed and implemented by national and local governments as a leverage to steer the structural change of the economy and the society? All in all, providing preliminary answers to these research questions should be conceived as an impulse to rethinking the theoretical foundations of industrial policy, as well as its design and implementation processes, for a new role in the Covid19 era. In order to deal with these questions, the research design underlying this collection of papers primarily combines a strong focus on theoretical advancements and new analytical frameworks with a case-study design, leveraging on the mutual engagement between theory and practice of industrial policy keeping and them tied to each other according to real-world conditions.

Social media represents an important and omnipresent social environment that impacts human health. However, little is known about when and how health-related social media use influences health behaviors. Based on three manuscripts, including a theoretical framework and four empirical studies, this dissertation comprehensively examined how specific types of health-related social media use might influence health behaviors, emphasizing effects on eating behavior. The research conducted in this dissertation is theoretically embedded in the reasoned action approach and self-determination theory. In the first manuscript, I outlined a conceptual framework to better understand mechanisms of action underlying health-related social media effects. According to this framework, social media use can be characterized by four essential factors: (1) communication features used, (2) directionality of interaction, (3) communicated contents, and (4) engagement level. These factors are essential for identifying the active ingredients of health-related social media use and communication that might cause health behavior change (i.e., the behavior change techniques that might be contained or whose enactment might be triggered). Behavior change techniques are, in turn, assumed to cause health behavior change through changes in psychosocial determinants of health behaviors. I also pointed out that social media contributes to increased social influences on health behaviors due to its omnipresence and high accessibility. It might also intensify these influences due to the unique characteristics of the social media environment (e.g., omnipresence, curation algorithms, network homophily). In the second manuscript, I experimentally examined the effects of posting about fruit and vegetable consumption on the intake of senders (posters) and receivers of these postings (Study 1, N = 81) and the senders' intake in the context of a behavior change goal (Study 2, N = 128). I explored the effects' underlying mechanisms of action (i.e., active behavior change techniques and their effect on psychosocial determinants of health behaviors) and the temporal dynamics of effects using intensive longitudinal data. Results show that public intake-related social media postings lead to higher fruit and vegetable intake of senders and receivers (Study 1). It further supported eating behavior change goals but not more strongly than private self-monitoring of intake (Study 2), suggesting that self-monitoring might be the most active behavior change technique. The examined psychosocial determinants of eating behavior did not mediate potential effects on eating behavior change. There were positive dose-response relationships within-person on a daily level. On days on which senders used social media more than usual related to their postings, they reported higher fruit and vegetable intake, perceived social support, and goal commitment (but lower self-efficacy). Furthermore, on days on which they posted more intake-related postings than usual, they reported higher fruit and vegetable intake (only in Study 2), intentions, self-efficacy, goal commitment, and more favorable attitudes. The results suggest that eating-related social media effects might be more transient and in timely proximity to actual social media use and need more time to unfold. The effects are complex (especially regarding the effects on psychosocial determinants) and likely dependent on the intensity of social media use and the social responses in reaction to postings. In the third manuscript, I investigated need-support provision in health-related social media communication as potential mechanisms of action for supporting health behavior change. I developed a short educational video about need-supportive communication strategies. The effects of watching the video on the use of these strategies in written responses to fictive social media postings were experimentally tested (Study 1, N = 76). I found that these strategies can be learned and applied in written communication immediately after watching the intervention video and one week later. The effects did not translate to a real- world setting, a forum-based health behavior intervention supported by an online support community (Study 2, N = 537). Participants who watched the intervention video did not show higher use of need-supportive communication strategies compared to participants who watched a control video. Due to this missing effect on strategy use, they did also not report higher perceived need-support, goal attainment (regarding fruit and vegetable intake and physical activity-related behavior change goals), and more favorable values in psychosocial determinants. There were positive effects on participant engagement (i.e., higher number of postings and subjective forum visit frequency in participants who watched the intervention video). Possible reasons for the missing effect on the use of the strategies might be the high goal attainment in both experimental groups, a misfit of the communication strategies and posting content, and low overall participant engagement. The solid theoretical foundation suggests the usefulness of need-supportive communication for supporting health behavior change. Thus, future research should identify populations that might benefit from the video intervention and increasing need-support (e.g., individuals with behavior change barriers) and foster the application of need-supportive communication strategies (e.g., through incentivizing role models or training of content moderators). This dissertation emphasizes the relevance of social media in influencing health behaviors and supporting health behavior change, highlighting the positive role of social media. When and how social media influences health behaviors is dependent on the actual enactment of effective motivation and behavior change strategies. Future research should take the complexity of social media effects into account and examine both, within- and between- person effects, and the interactivity between senders and receivers of social media communication. Therefore, researchers should make greater use of experimental methods with high ecological validity, intensive longitudinal data with longer time periods, big data approaches and combining different data sources, and advanced analysis methods such as social network analysis. Social media environments need to be considered to better understand influence factors for health behaviors and for effective health promotion and prevention.

[eng] This thesis consists of four self-contained but related papers trying to uncover different aspects of banking and sovereign risk in the member countries of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). From a methodological point of view, they all have in common the contingent claims model from the theory of finance, which is used to value call options on a stock. The first paper, "Bank risk behavior and connectedness in EMU countries", studies the structural differences in banking sector and financial regulations at country level to measure and analyze the banking sector risk behavior. Deviating from the current view, which in our opinion is excessively focused on Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs), we introduce a micro approach to emphasize the role of smaller financial institutions in build-up of risk. The paper starts with a discussion of the reasons that are needed to consider this choice. Contingent claims analysis model is employed to calculate the risk of individual banks which is then aggregated at country level. The remaining of the paper tries to highlight the information content of country level banking risk indices. It is shown that if banking sector risk is calculated at country level using a bigger sample of banks, it can provide a simple, convenient and intuitive forward looking risk measure. The risk measures differentiate countries based on the structural differences in their financial sectors and show strong correlations with national and regional market sentiment indicators. They outperform the regulatory risk measures based at the European level and the causal linkages run from them to the latter indicators, suggesting better information content. And even though they have high correlations, causality and connectedness tests reveal no systemic component. The second paper, "Sovereigns and banks in the euro area: a tale of two crises", attempts to quantify the directional intensity of sovereign-bank linkages in the euro area countries. To this end, we borrow the indicator of banking sector risk in each country from the first paper, and use a traditional measure of sovereign risk (10-year government yield spreads over Germany). The paper starts with the review of channels via which banks and sovereigns are linked in a vicious cycle. We apply a dynamic approach to testing for Granger causality between the two measures of risk in each country, allowing us to check for episodes of significant and abrupt increase in short-run causal linkages. The empirical results indicate that episodes of causality intensification vary considerably in both directions over time and across the different EMU countries. The directionality suggests the presence of causality intensification, mainly from banks to sovereigns, in the crisis periods. Our findings also present empirical evidence about the existence of an adverse feedback loop between sovereigns and banks in some euro-area countries. The third paper, "Incorporating creditors' seniority into contingent claim models: Application to peripheral euro area countries", develops and uses a seniority structure of sovereign's creditors to analyze the impact of sectoral distribution of debt on the sovereign credit risk. Specifically, this paper highlights the role of multilateral creditors (i.e., the ECB, IMF, ESM etc.) and their preferred creditor status in explaining the sovereign default risk of peripheral euro area (EA) countries. Incorporating lessons from sovereign debt crises in general, and from the Greek debt restructuring in particular, we define the priority structure of sovereigns' creditors that is most relevant for peripheral EA countries in severe crisis episodes. This new priority structure of creditors, together with the contingent claims methodology, is then used to derive a set of sovereign credit risk indicators. In particular, the sovereign distance-to-default indicator, proposed in this paper (which includes both accounting metrics and market-based measures) aims to isolate sovereign credit risk by using information from the public sector balance sheets to build it up. Analyzing and comparing it with traditional market-based measures of sovereign risk suggests that the measurement and predictive ability of credit risk measures can be vastly improved if we account for the changing composition of sovereigns' balance sheet risk based on creditors' seniority. In the last paper, "Revisiting the sovereign-bank linkages: Evidence from contingent claims analysis", we reconsider the sovereign-bank nexus as discussed in the second paper to check the robustness of our findings. Using the banking sector risk indicator developed in our first paper, together with the sovereign risk index build in the third paper we re-inspect the bank-sovereign linkages. We use three different statistical measures of interconnection based on principal components analysis, Granger causality network and Diebold-Yilmaz's connectedness index. We also compare our results with alternative specifications using existing market-based indicators of banking and sovereign risk. Our results suggest strong connectedness and co-movement between country-level banking and sovereign risk indicators. We also find evidence of an increasing role of idiosyncratic risk factors driving the evolution of all risk indices in the post-crisis period, thus supporting the "wake-up call hypothesis" that the sensitivity of financial market participants to fundamental differences increased during the crisis. Country-wise analysis of time-varying bi-directional linkages using dynamic Granger-causality suggests the development of a bank-sovereign doom loop in Spain corroborating for this country the findings of our second paper. Connectedness analysis also suggest that increasingly the risk is being driven away from market-based uncertainty to the idiosyncratic risk factors, which are better captured by the contingent claim based indices.

This Thesis addresses the issue of peer-effects in the context of school. From analysis of a large database produced by a Chilean national study (SIMCE 2004), this work investigates the mechanisms through which pupils with different levels of scholastic, human and cultural capital influence each other. These influences seem present for a diverse range of school outcomes, including academic achievement. Drawing on the literature produced by different disciplinary approaches —sociology, economics, social psychology and education— the study focuses on ways of identifying and measuring peer-effects. The presence of subjective dimensions capable of reflecting, in part, the school experience of pupils is also taken into consideration. Beside, those dimensions are connected both with peers presence and peer interactions. In addition, the thesis re-examines the existing literature on the Chilean school system, including its social and academic segregation and its relationship with the voucher system. Within this framework, three main points of interrogation organize this work. First, whether study practices which involve peer assistance have a clear impact on standardized school test scores. Second, the likely presence of influences, —in the form of "capitals transfers"— between pupils with different backgrounds who practice peer assistance. Finally, the visible relationships between peer assistance and feelings of well-being at school or academic self-concept, but also, between the latter and school achievement. A sequence of analysis was undertaken out to provide robust foundations for possible answers to those questions. Among other things, different sets of hierarchical and quantile regression analysis were conducted in four school subjects. The main research findings show, on the one hand, that peer assistance between pupils is fairly widespread in the school context (between 22% and 41% in average) but its prevalence varies according to the subjects and the directionality of the assistance. Further, those peer assistance is significantly related at school achievement. In all subjects and at similar conditions, poor achievers benefit from help by their classmates. At the same time, those that help their classmates always showed a strong academic profile related to the higher and greater gains in test scores. In the other hand, we find that pupils with more cultural capital, all other things held constant, are more likely to report help other pupils. Finally, this research confirms that the relationship peer assistance and feelings of school well-being and academic self-concept is large and significant. Several secondary findings were also produced and discussed, including confirmation, for the first time in Chilean case, of the hypothesis associated with the paradigm BFLPE (Marsh, 1987). Those results are discussed with regard for their probable consequences in terms of educational policy, particularly in systems with high academic and social segregation. ; Le présent travail de thèse aborde la problématique des effets de pairs en contexte scolaire. A partir de l'analyse détaillée d'une large base des données issue d'une enquête nationale au Chili (SIMCE 2004), on s'interroge sur les mécanismes qui véhiculent les influences entre élèves différemment dotés d'un point de vue de leurs capitaux culturels, humains et scolaires. Ces influences sembleraient présentes sur différents résultats à l'école, y compris ceux de type académique. Considérant la littérature produite sous différentes approches disciplinaires —sociologie, économie, psychologie sociale et sciences de l'éducation — on s'attarde sur les manières d'identifier et de mesurer lesdits effets de pairs. En même temps, on considère la présence de dimensions subjectives capables d'exprimer, en partie, le vécu scolaire des élèves. Ces dimensions seraient, par ailleurs, reliées à la présence des pairs et aux interactions entre élèves. De manière additionnelle, on propose une révision de la littérature sur le système scolaire au Chili, notamment sur sa segmentation socio-scolaire et sa relation avec le mécanisme de vouchers. Dans ce cadre, trois interrogations principales organisent ce travail. D'une part, l'existence ou non d'un impact net sur les acquis scolaires des pratiques d'étude faisant appel aux camarades. Ensuite, la présence probable des influences sous la forme des « transferts des capitaux » entre élèves différemment dotés et déclarant pratiquer l'entraide. Enfin, les relations qui s'avèrent visibles entre ces pratiques et des dimensions telles que le bien-être à l'école ou le concept du soi académique, mais aussi, entre ces dernières et les acquis scolaires. Une séquence d'analyses est entreprise visant à donner des bases robustes aux éventuelles réponses à ces questions. Entre autres, différentes séries d'analyses de régression hiérarchique et par quantiles ont été conduites sur quatre disciplines scolaires. Les principaux résultats de recherche indiquent, d'un côté, que les interactions entre élèves sont assez répandues en milieux scolaire (entre 22% et 41% en moyenne), mais leur proportion varie d'une discipline à l'autre et selon la direction qui prend l'aide. Plus encore, ces interactions sont significativement liées aux résultats scolaires. A conditions comparables, les élèves académiquement faibles gagnent à être aidés par leurs camarades, quelque soit la discipline concernée. En même temps, les élèves qui aident leurs camarades montrent toujours un profil académique fortement associé à des gains de score assez importants. D'un autre côté, on trouve que les élèves possédant plus de capital culturel ont, toutes choses égales par ailleurs, de plus fortes chances de déclarer aider leurs camarades. Enfin, les analyses confirment que les interactions entre élèves sont, de manière importante et significative, liées aux sentiments de bien-être à l'école et au concept de soi académique. La construction d'indices pertinents pour ces derniers est, d'ailleurs, discutée. Différents résultats secondaires ont été aussi produits et discutés, notamment la confirmation, pour la première fois dans le cas chilien, des hypothèses associées au paradigme BFLPE (Marsh, 1987). Ces résultats sont discutés dans leurs probables conséquences en termes de politique éducative, notamment dans le cadre des systèmes éducatifs à forte ségrégation sociale et scolaire.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- SECTION I – IN THE BEGINNING -- CHAPTER 1. WADING IN ̶ INTRODUCTION TO THE FISH-BIRD -- General Discussion of Penguins and Substance of the Book -- An Impressive Number of Penguin Species: Evolution of Their Unique Capabilities -- Penguin Species Radiation and the Ontogeny of Their Watery World -- Penguin Evolution: Body Size and Climate -- Penguin Evolution: Radiation into Vacant Niches -- Penguin Evolution: Body Size and Crossing the Sea-Land Boundary -- CHAPTER 2. LAND AHOY! A TIRESOME BUSINESS -- Crossing the Land-Ocean Interface is Affected by Body Size -- Why and How Often do Penguins Come Ashore? -- Tying Land-life to the At-sea Life of Fish-Birds: Foraging and Breeding -- Success Vary with Prey Availability -- Molt ̶Necessary, Brief Respite from the Sea -- SECTION II – PENGUIN MARINE HAUNTS AND FOOD HABITS -- CHAPTER 3.FISH-BIRDS AT HOME IN THEIR OCEAN HABITATS -- Oceanographic Fronts and Water Masses Important to Penguins: General Discussion -- Penguins Require High Productivity Water Masses -- Large Scale: Oceanographic Boundaries and At-sea Distributions of Penguins -- Southern Boundary of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current -- Emperor and King penguins -- Adélie and Chinstrap penguins -- Antarctic Polar Front and Subantarctic Front -- Gentoo and Yellow-eyed penguins -- Macaroni and Royal penguins -- Northern and Southern Rockhopper, Fiordland, Snares penguins -- Subtropical Front and Continental Boundary Currents -- Galápagos, Humboldt, Magellanic, African penguins -- Little penguins -- Meso- and Small-Scale Ocean Processes Facilitating Penguin Exploits -- Island wakes -- Headland wakes -- Shelves and banks -- Submarine canyons -- Shelfbreak fronts -- Marginal ice zones -- Thermo-/haloclines -- CHAPTER 4. SEA FOOD ̶ THE FISH-BIRD MENU -- General Considerations -- Diet Quality: Survival in Cold Water -- Energy density of prey -- Prey size may or may not differ by penguin size -- Prey availability -- Diet Comparison among Penguin Species -- Polar/subpolar, mesopelagic penguins -- Subpolar, demersal/benthic, continental-shelf penguins -- Temperate, upper water column, continental-insular shelf penguins -- Polar, upper water column, continental shelf/slope penguins -- Subpolar, upper water column, continental slope/pelagic penguins -- Polar, upper water column, continental slope/pelagic penguins -- CHAPTER 5. ECOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF DIET COMPOSITION -- Intraspecific Competition among Penguins -- Foraging Range is Key: General Discussion -- Penguin Species' Central-Place Foraging Range Patterns -- Sex Differences in Foraging -- Interspecific Competition Involving Penguins -- Penguins Eat A lot! -- Competition between Penguin Species -- Competition between penguins and other seabirds -- Competition between penguins and marine mammals -- Competition between penguins and industrial fisheries -- SECTION III – THE HARDWARE OF A FISH-BIRD -- CHAPTER 6. THE SLIPPERY SHAPE, HOT AIR AND THE POWERHOUSE – HOW FISH-BIRDS SWIM -- Water – Hard Taskmaster -- The Four Forces Relevant to Penguins -- Vertical Forces – Weight and Upthrust -- Buoyancy: How Much Air Do Penguins Hold? -- Buoyancy and Bergmann's Rule revisited -- Horizontal Forces: Drag -- The Interplay of Drag and Upthrust in Gliding Penguins -- The Drag Devil is in the Detail -- The Penguin Powerhouse -- How Penguins Swim -- The Effect of Upthrust and Body Angle on Penguin Thrust and Lift Forces -- Top Speeds; Power and Upthrust -- The Energy Costs of Swimming -- General considerations -- Specific considerations -- 'Sensible' Swim Strategies and Costs of Transport -- Cruising speed and integrating speed with the cost of transport, -- and beyond -- CHAPTER 7. HOT PENGUINS ̶ COLD WATER -- Resting and Floating Penguins -- The Metabolic Rate of Floating Penguins -- Patterns of Heat Loss to the Sea -- Overall Body Insulation/Conductance -- The Nature of Penguin Insulation -- Active Penguins -- Activity Produces Heat -- Greater Depths Impose a Higher Heat Tax -- Consuming Prey Imposes a Heat Tax -- Embracing The Fish in the Fish-bird -- CHAPTER 8. FISH-BIRDS – THE INSIDE STORY -- Diving Physiology -- Surface issues – Uptake of oxygen -- Oxygen Management Underwater -- Role of the Air Spaces -- Gas Exchange to Body Tissues -- The Aerobic Dive Limit and Beyond -- The Importance of Size in Dive Performance -- Duration -- Depth -- Penguins Under Pressure – Beating the Squeeze and the Bends -- Barotrauma -- Beating the Bends -- A Gut Reaction in Fish-Birds -- Gastric Emptying -- Rotting Food -- The Eyes Have It -- SECTION IV – THE SOFTWARE OF FISH-BIRDS -- CHAPTER 9. EMBRACING THE DEPTHS - THE PENGUIN DIVE -- Submergence -- The time underwater – basic dive descriptors -- Dive profiles -- Dive distance-depth profiles -- Dive aspect ratios -- Horizontal dive directionality/tortuosity -- The Multifunctionality of Dives -- Basic dive types -- T-dives for travelling -- V-dives (water column assessment) -- P-dives (parabolic – prospecting with no prey capture) -- Po-dives (parabolic dives with circular trajectory) -- U-dives (depth-directed prospecting) -- W-dives/Up-dives (U-dives with prey pursuit) -- Depth Duration Effects Over Multiple Dives -- CHAPTER 10. FISH-BIRD STRATEGIES ̶ THE SEARCH FOR FICKLE PREY -- Decisions, Decisions, Decisions – How Fish-Birds Search for Prey -- Heading in the Right Direction -- Dealing with Prey Patchiness -- In-depth Considerations: -- Time-based efficiency -- Energy-based efficiency -- Superficial Considerations: Surface Pauses and Inspired Tactics -- Being Picky about Food -- Fish-Birds and Smart Strategies -- CHAPTER 11. THE FINAL SECONDS – HOW FISH-BIRDS CAPTURE PREY -- Prey Acquisition, a Departure from the Dive 'Norm' -- Performance Metrics for Prey Capture -- Catching Solitary Prey -- Changing buoyancy with depth affects prey capture strategies -- Prey pursuit against interfaces -- Exploiting Aggregated Prey -- Crustaceans -- Fish -- Non-corralling feeding behavior -- Clarity on Limitations of Penguin Vision -- SECTION V – PENGUINS IN A FICKLE ENVIRONMENT -- CHAPTER 12. TURNING THE TABLES – FISH-BIRDS ON THE MENU -- Basic Law of the Sea: Big Fish Eat Little Fish -- Seals as Predators -- Seals' hunting behavior -- Penguins avoiding seals -- Fur Seals as Predators -- Sea Lions as Predators -- Killer Whales as Predators -- Sharks as Predators -- CHAPTER 13. PENGUINS ADJUSTING TO A CHANGING OCEAN -- Penguins Have Always Been Challenged by a Changing Ocean -- Prehistoric response to a changing ocean -- Possible prehistoric changes to penguins' food web -- The Anthropocene: How will Penguins Cope, Now Also Dealing with Humans? -- Response to long-term climate change -- Response to short-term ocean climate variation -- Response to marine pollution -- CHAPTER 14. NOT FORGETTING ̶ -- The Social Side - Behavior and Communication at Sea -- Penguin flock fusion/cohesion -- Penguin flock fission/fragmentation -- Navigation -- Long range -- Medium to short-range -- Understanding the Daily 'Wash' -- Air flux in diving penguins, an aspect of 'washing' -- Are Auks Really 'Northern Penguins'? -- Research Tags – the Flip Side for Evolutionarily-Honed Fish-Birds -- SECTION VI -- CHAPTER 15. PENGUINS ̶ WHY THE HYPE? -- Sources of Hype -- Us -- Many people -- Researchers -- The Transition -- The fascination of species -- Beyond the transition -- Role in Ecosystems -- Biomimicry -- Our Last Word.

Relevance of the research problem. Sport is a value of every nation, which includes the system of physical, spiritual and cultural education, sports achievements, scientific knowledge, international communication (Karoblis, 2005). High level sport is inseparable from competitive activities, the pursuit of sports results (Hargreaves & MacDonald, 2000; Karoblis, 2005). The special training of athletes in the chosen sports is a part of general education of personality, which has a close connection with social, educational, political, economic issues of humanity development (Johnson et al., 2007). The athlete training process is a multi-year educational process of a specific structure and organizational form, which develops physical characteristics of an athlete, determines his activity, behavior, independence and responsibility, promotes to achieve excellent results. However, optimization of athlete training technology, construction of training system and its filling with full content still have the greatest impact on the improvement of sports results (Bompa & Buzzichelli, 2018; Karoblis, 2005; Платонов, 2004). Management of high-performance athlete training is related to prognostication, individual model characteristics of sport fitness, general and special load ratio, search for new effective directions of workout methodology, modeling of competition activity indicators, workout process planning, competition program conclusion, sport training adjustment (Karoblis, Raslanas, Steponavičius, 2002). Track-and-field athletics is integral sports that combine cyclic and acyclic exercise competitions: running, throws, vertical and horizontal jumps (Armonavičius, 1995). Short distance running is one of the most prestigious track-and-field athletics competitions. An exceptional short distance motor feature is the maximum intense activity of the whole body, especially the nervous and muscular systems, lasting from 0.1 to 40–50 s (Stanislovaitis et al., 2008). The ever-improving sports results reveal new human mental and physical abilities, vast resources of the body that could not even be dreamed of before. The organization of exercise, methodology, their scope and intensity, their combination with the means of recovery according to the main laws of phenotypic adaptation form the basis for the training of high-performance athletes (Платонов, 2004; Stonkus, 2000; Issurin, 2008; Krylovas, Kosareva, Dadelienė, & Dadelo, 2020). The particularity of the sport is based on competition. The results recorded in sport receive global recognition and become a true human achievement standard. In the world, they are constantly progressing, promoting the development of the sport community, therefore the greatest human intellectual and material resources are directed to the training of high-performance athletes (Skernevičius, 2015; Krylovas, Kosareva, Dadelienė, & Dadelo, 2020). However, the results of a research conducted by scientists showed that over the past nearly 20 years, elite athletes, including Olympic, world champions and prizewinners, have achieved personal best results in key competitions of the season by only in 50 percent cases (Yakimovich & Ovchinnikov, 2016). This shows that the opinion that contemporary coaches are high-performance and knowledgeable in the training of elite athletes and immaculately control and manage the process of sport training of athletes is not sufficiently substantiated. It has been established that the development of high-performance sprinters depends on many factors, the most important of which is the directionality of the training process, its management, taking into account the individual characteristics of the athlete's body adaptation to workout and competition loads (Stanislovaitis, 2008; Бондаренко, 1999; Нбанекова, Филин, 1995). The training of sprinters and their competitive activities have been extensively studied not only by foreign (Smith, 2005; Doscher, 2009; Kale & Bayrak, 2009; Prins, Murata, Derenne, Morgan, & Solomon, 2010; Dickin, Reyes, & Dolny, 2009; Nelson, Landin, Young, & Schexnayder, 2008; Eikenberry, Mcauliffe, Welsh, Zerpa, Mcpherson, & Newhouse, 2008; Oзoлин, 1986), but also by Lithuanian sport scientists (Stanislovaitis, 2008, 2006, 2005; Grūnovas, 2006; Butkus, 2006, 1995; Skurvydas, 1999, 2003; Bradauskienė, 2006). Although the world record of female sprinters in a 100 m distance is quite high (10.49 s), the search for new training methods and their application in the process of female sprinter workouts continues. Scientists are not only analyzing and evaluating existing workout methodological tools, but also looking for new methods for an advanced sprinter training process. Thus, in search of new methods to increase running speed, through more research and the application of the latest training technologies, methods can be discovered to help athletes to become faster and to develop a running speed, which has never been achieved before. Recently, in a 100 m running, as in many track-and-field athletics competitions, the results of athletes are progressing rapidly. That progress depends heavily on the selection of talented athletes, scientifically and practically sound and effective workout methodologies, the selection and application of remedial measures, the material compensation of athletes, which greatly increases motivation of athletes, and etc. Therefore, in order to achieve good results and prizes in high rank competition in contemporary sport, it is necessary to know the peculiarities of the application of training methodology, to properly select the most important starts of the annual training cycle, taking into account all conditions at the place and time of competition. An athlete and a coach must not only follow the innovations of training methodology, science and medicine, but also look back, be able to analyze his own results and the results of athletes, who have shown significant results theretofore, the peculiarities of workout tools and methods applied by them, the reasons for successful and unsuccessful starts, and then all this to apply to the management of his own training process. Discovering, revealing and learning about new technologies through the theory and didactics of sport workout is the most important function of sport science (Mester, 2003), and it is important for a coach to be able to use scientific results and recommendations, be insightful and be able to successfully model the training of elite athletes (Karoblis, Raslanas, Poteliūnienė, Steponavičius, Petkus, & Žilinskienė, 2011). The purposeful training of female sprinters and the search for effective technologies in order to increase the maximum running speed become a scientific problem. The presented scientific problem is relevant for the following reasons: ● It is important to analyze the change in results in terms of age and to determine the age, at which the highest results are achieved; ● It is important to research and theoretically substantiate, which components determine the sports result in short distance running; ● To research the effectiveness of training measures in order to increase maximum running speed; ● The contribution of running at maximum speed to the sports result in a 100 m run has not been sufficiently researched; ● It is important to establish criteria that affect the progress of athletes' mastery and the change of sport performance. Hypothesis. It is likely that sports results of female sprinters are not improving due to the integrated and concentrated training models applied separately. A universal speed training model is more effective. Object of the research is the process of female sprinter training. Aim is to identify the peculiarities of optimizing the training of high-performance female sprinters. Objectives of the research: 1. On the basis of the data of the theoretical analysis of scientific sources, to reveal the change of the results of high-performance female sprinters in terms of age. 2. To perform a comparative analysis of the preparation of high-performance female spriners for the Athens, Beijing, London and Rio Olympic Games. 3. To review the technologies of sports training of female sprinters and to examine the factors influencing their results. 4. To determine the effectiveness of a universal method for training the speed of high-performance female sprinters. 5. To reveal/identify the opinion of high-performance female sprinters about the factors determining their training system. Theoretical and practical significance Researching the structure and content of sports training for female sprinters of different ages and sports mastery, analyzing the change of sports results in terms of age, evaluating workout methods, running speed components, the provisions for effective running speed increase were identified: ● Running speed is determined by the speed of muscle contraction, the length of leg support, the frequency of steps, and the sports result in a 100-meter run depends mainly on the maximum running speed. ● In order to improve the results of the maximum running speed of female sprinters, it is important to apply a universal, combined method in the workout process, running with weight and stretching with an elastic band. These provisions are relevant to the theory and practice of female sprinter training. The results of the study can be used in the development of training programs for sports schools and high-performance female sprinters. CONCLUSIONS 1. The age for achieving the best personal result in the women's 100 m running competition is 24.69 ± 3.27 year. The best Lithuanian sprinter L. Grinčikaitė-Samuolė achieved her best result in this running competition at the age of 25 – 11.19 s. At the beginning of their athletic career, American sprinters had the highest running scores and dominated until the age of 17, however later is observed leadership of the Caribbean Region female sprinters up to the age of 35. The results of European sprinters were average in almost all age groups. 2. Analysis of the four Olympic Games revealed a significant improvement in the results of the 100 m running and starting reaction speed (p < 0.05). In order to get to in the 100 m running final, athletes should run an average of 10.96 ± 0.03 s, and to become the prizewinners of the competition – 10.86 ± 0.08 s. Sprinters become the prizewinners of the 100 m run at the age of 25.42 ± 3.18 year. 3. Lithuanian female sprinters lose to the best sprinters of Europe and the world in the competition requiring the maximum running speed – 40 m in acceleration (11.99 %). The best Lithuanian sprinter L. Grinčikaitė-Samuolė reduces this difference to 4.05 % in the 100 m running distance, the gap between Europe's and the world's best female sprinters is gradually declining due to improved European sprinters' maximum running speed results. 4. The resisted/assisted running method is the most effective way to increase the running speed and starting acceleration, as this speed training method significantly improves the values of step length and support duration than running normally. 5. High-performance female sprinters lack attention to an important component of training – psychological training – in the process of their sports training. It was found out that their sports training and improvement of results are more influenced by external (monetary prizes, premiums) than internal motives (desire to improve results, honor to represent their country). A coach's personality also has impact. The coach is valued not only as a specialist, but distinguishing his personal qualities, such as sincerity, friendliness, motivation, promotion is considered an integral part of the training process.

Relevance of the research problem. Sport is a value of every nation, which includes the system of physical, spiritual and cultural education, sports achievements, scientific knowledge, international communication (Karoblis, 2005). High level sport is inseparable from competitive activities, the pursuit of sports results (Hargreaves & MacDonald, 2000; Karoblis, 2005). The special training of athletes in the chosen sports is a part of general education of personality, which has a close connection with social, educational, political, economic issues of humanity development (Johnson et al., 2007). The athlete training process is a multi-year educational process of a specific structure and organizational form, which develops physical characteristics of an athlete, determines his activity, behavior, independence and responsibility, promotes to achieve excellent results. However, optimization of athlete training technology, construction of training system and its filling with full content still have the greatest impact on the improvement of sports results (Bompa & Buzzichelli, 2018; Karoblis, 2005; Платонов, 2004). Management of high-performance athlete training is related to prognostication, individual model characteristics of sport fitness, general and special load ratio, search for new effective directions of workout methodology, modeling of competition activity indicators, workout process planning, competition program conclusion, sport training adjustment (Karoblis, Raslanas, Steponavičius, 2002). Track-and-field athletics is integral sports that combine cyclic and acyclic exercise competitions: running, throws, vertical and horizontal jumps (Armonavičius, 1995). Short distance running is one of the most prestigious track-and-field athletics competitions. An exceptional short distance motor feature is the maximum intense activity of the whole body, especially the nervous and muscular systems, lasting from 0.1 to 40–50 s (Stanislovaitis et al., 2008). The ever-improving sports results reveal new human mental and physical abilities, vast resources of the body that could not even be dreamed of before. The organization of exercise, methodology, their scope and intensity, their combination with the means of recovery according to the main laws of phenotypic adaptation form the basis for the training of high-performance athletes (Платонов, 2004; Stonkus, 2000; Issurin, 2008; Krylovas, Kosareva, Dadelienė, & Dadelo, 2020). The particularity of the sport is based on competition. The results recorded in sport receive global recognition and become a true human achievement standard. In the world, they are constantly progressing, promoting the development of the sport community, therefore the greatest human intellectual and material resources are directed to the training of high-performance athletes (Skernevičius, 2015; Krylovas, Kosareva, Dadelienė, & Dadelo, 2020). However, the results of a research conducted by scientists showed that over the past nearly 20 years, elite athletes, including Olympic, world champions and prizewinners, have achieved personal best results in key competitions of the season by only in 50 percent cases (Yakimovich & Ovchinnikov, 2016). This shows that the opinion that contemporary coaches are high-performance and knowledgeable in the training of elite athletes and immaculately control and manage the process of sport training of athletes is not sufficiently substantiated. It has been established that the development of high-performance sprinters depends on many factors, the most important of which is the directionality of the training process, its management, taking into account the individual characteristics of the athlete's body adaptation to workout and competition loads (Stanislovaitis, 2008; Бондаренко, 1999; Нбанекова, Филин, 1995). The training of sprinters and their competitive activities have been extensively studied not only by foreign (Smith, 2005; Doscher, 2009; Kale & Bayrak, 2009; Prins, Murata, Derenne, Morgan, & Solomon, 2010; Dickin, Reyes, & Dolny, 2009; Nelson, Landin, Young, & Schexnayder, 2008; Eikenberry, Mcauliffe, Welsh, Zerpa, Mcpherson, & Newhouse, 2008; Oзoлин, 1986), but also by Lithuanian sport scientists (Stanislovaitis, 2008, 2006, 2005; Grūnovas, 2006; Butkus, 2006, 1995; Skurvydas, 1999, 2003; Bradauskienė, 2006). Although the world record of female sprinters in a 100 m distance is quite high (10.49 s), the search for new training methods and their application in the process of female sprinter workouts continues. Scientists are not only analyzing and evaluating existing workout methodological tools, but also looking for new methods for an advanced sprinter training process. Thus, in search of new methods to increase running speed, through more research and the application of the latest training technologies, methods can be discovered to help athletes to become faster and to develop a running speed, which has never been achieved before. Recently, in a 100 m running, as in many track-and-field athletics competitions, the results of athletes are progressing rapidly. That progress depends heavily on the selection of talented athletes, scientifically and practically sound and effective workout methodologies, the selection and application of remedial measures, the material compensation of athletes, which greatly increases motivation of athletes, and etc. Therefore, in order to achieve good results and prizes in high rank competition in contemporary sport, it is necessary to know the peculiarities of the application of training methodology, to properly select the most important starts of the annual training cycle, taking into account all conditions at the place and time of competition. An athlete and a coach must not only follow the innovations of training methodology, science and medicine, but also look back, be able to analyze his own results and the results of athletes, who have shown significant results theretofore, the peculiarities of workout tools and methods applied by them, the reasons for successful and unsuccessful starts, and then all this to apply to the management of his own training process. Discovering, revealing and learning about new technologies through the theory and didactics of sport workout is the most important function of sport science (Mester, 2003), and it is important for a coach to be able to use scientific results and recommendations, be insightful and be able to successfully model the training of elite athletes (Karoblis, Raslanas, Poteliūnienė, Steponavičius, Petkus, & Žilinskienė, 2011). The purposeful training of female sprinters and the search for effective technologies in order to increase the maximum running speed become a scientific problem. The presented scientific problem is relevant for the following reasons: ● It is important to analyze the change in results in terms of age and to determine the age, at which the highest results are achieved; ● It is important to research and theoretically substantiate, which components determine the sports result in short distance running; ● To research the effectiveness of training measures in order to increase maximum running speed; ● The contribution of running at maximum speed to the sports result in a 100 m run has not been sufficiently researched; ● It is important to establish criteria that affect the progress of athletes' mastery and the change of sport performance. Hypothesis. It is likely that sports results of female sprinters are not improving due to the integrated and concentrated training models applied separately. A universal speed training model is more effective. Object of the research is the process of female sprinter training. Aim is to identify the peculiarities of optimizing the training of high-performance female sprinters. Objectives of the research: 1. On the basis of the data of the theoretical analysis of scientific sources, to reveal the change of the results of high-performance female sprinters in terms of age. 2. To perform a comparative analysis of the preparation of high-performance female spriners for the Athens, Beijing, London and Rio Olympic Games. 3. To review the technologies of sports training of female sprinters and to examine the factors influencing their results. 4. To determine the effectiveness of a universal method for training the speed of high-performance female sprinters. 5. To reveal/identify the opinion of high-performance female sprinters about the factors determining their training system. Theoretical and practical significance Researching the structure and content of sports training for female sprinters of different ages and sports mastery, analyzing the change of sports results in terms of age, evaluating workout methods, running speed components, the provisions for effective running speed increase were identified: ● Running speed is determined by the speed of muscle contraction, the length of leg support, the frequency of steps, and the sports result in a 100-meter run depends mainly on the maximum running speed. ● In order to improve the results of the maximum running speed of female sprinters, it is important to apply a universal, combined method in the workout process, running with weight and stretching with an elastic band. These provisions are relevant to the theory and practice of female sprinter training. The results of the study can be used in the development of training programs for sports schools and high-performance female sprinters. CONCLUSIONS 1. The age for achieving the best personal result in the women's 100 m running competition is 24.69 ± 3.27 year. The best Lithuanian sprinter L. Grinčikaitė-Samuolė achieved her best result in this running competition at the age of 25 – 11.19 s. At the beginning of their athletic career, American sprinters had the highest running scores and dominated until the age of 17, however later is observed leadership of the Caribbean Region female sprinters up to the age of 35. The results of European sprinters were average in almost all age groups. 2. Analysis of the four Olympic Games revealed a significant improvement in the results of the 100 m running and starting reaction speed (p < 0.05). In order to get to in the 100 m running final, athletes should run an average of 10.96 ± 0.03 s, and to become the prizewinners of the competition – 10.86 ± 0.08 s. Sprinters become the prizewinners of the 100 m run at the age of 25.42 ± 3.18 year. 3. Lithuanian female sprinters lose to the best sprinters of Europe and the world in the competition requiring the maximum running speed – 40 m in acceleration (11.99 %). The best Lithuanian sprinter L. Grinčikaitė-Samuolė reduces this difference to 4.05 % in the 100 m running distance, the gap between Europe's and the world's best female sprinters is gradually declining due to improved European sprinters' maximum running speed results. 4. The resisted/assisted running method is the most effective way to increase the running speed and starting acceleration, as this speed training method significantly improves the values of step length and support duration than running normally. 5. High-performance female sprinters lack attention to an important component of training – psychological training – in the process of their sports training. It was found out that their sports training and improvement of results are more influenced by external (monetary prizes, premiums) than internal motives (desire to improve results, honor to represent their country). A coach's personality also has impact. The coach is valued not only as a specialist, but distinguishing his personal qualities, such as sincerity, friendliness, motivation, promotion is considered an integral part of the training process.

Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape?  The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk