November 2021 Monthly Digest

The Monthly Digest is a resource provided by Security in Context that provides a list of recent publications, calls, conferences and other items relevant to the critical global, security, and international political economy studies audience. In addition to new items, our digest may contain relatively recent entries, so please double check dates on any calls or conferences. All descriptions taken from their original sources unless otherwise indicated. If we’ve missed something, or you have items you’d like to contribute for future digests, please email us at submissions@securityincontext.org

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Books

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Feminist Solutions for Ending War

Edited by Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner

'War is a man's game,' or so goes the saying. Whether this is true or not, patriarchal capitalism is certainly one of the driving forces behind war in the modern era. So can we end war with feminism? This book argues that this is possible, and is in fact already happening.

Each chapter provides a solution to war using innovative examples of how feminist and queer theory and practice inform pacifist treaties, movements and methods, from the international to the domestic spheres. The contributors propose a range of solutions that include arms abolition, centering Indigenous knowledge, economic restructuring, and transforming how we 'count' civilian deaths.

Ending war requires challenging complex structures, but the solutions found in this edition have risen to this challenge. By thinking beyond the violence of the capitalist patriarchy, this book makes the powerful case that the possibility of life without war is real.

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

By David Graeber and David Wengrow

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

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The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism

Decades of neoliberal authoritarianism have propelled Turkey into crisis. Regime change, economic disaster and Erdogan’s ambition to impose ‘one-man rule’ have shaken the foundations of Turkish political life, but what does this mean for workers?

Moving beyond the headlines and personalities, this book uncovers the real condition of the working class in modern Turkey. Combining field research and in-depth interviews, it offers cutting-edge analyses of workplace struggles, trade unionism, the AKP’s relationship with neoliberalism, migration, gender, agrarian change and precarity, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on workers.

Bringing together Turkish activists and scholars, this book is an inside look at the dynamics and contradictions of working-class resistance against Turkey’s neoliberal authoritarian regime; from worker self-management to organized labour and rural struggles.

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Scholarships/Fellowships‍

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Ohio State University,  Mershon Center for International Security Studies Post-Doctoral Scholar

The Mershon Center for International Security Studies (https://mershoncenter.osu.edu), within the College of Arts and Sciences, seeks up to three two-year Postdoctoral Scholars to join our team starting the 2022 academic year.

The Mershon postdoctoral scholars support research on international, national, and human security in a global context. We understand international security from a wide range of perspectives, approaches, and substantive foci. Consequently, successful applicants may come from a variety of disciplines that engage international, national, and human security broadly conceived, including anthropology, communications, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, public affairs/administration, public policy, sociology, and other disciplines that engage international security.  We especially welcome applications from scholars whose work explicitly integrates knowledge across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Special consideration will be given to applicants whose work will advance the center’s research related to international, national, and human security.

Successful applicants will be expected to devote approximately 10 hours per week to center related activities. Postdoctoral scholars will be mentored and supported in pursuing their individual research agendas during their remaining time.  Responsibilities to the Center may include coordinating and supporting Center research and programming activities as well as opportunities to collaborate on Mershon Scholar projects.  The two-year term begins August 15, 2022.

The Mershon Center provides an institutional home for campus-wide collaboration among departments, programs, institutes, faculty and students at The Ohio State University engaged in work pertaining to international security broadly construed. Activities include conferences, roundtables, and speaker series

Postdoctoral Scholars at the Mershon Center will pursue their own research and participate in the activities of the Center. Because scholars are expected to be fully integrated with the intellectual life of the Center, they must plan to physically reside in the vicinity of The Ohio State University.

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Lithuania Scholarships for International Students 2021

Lithuania Scholarships 2021. The primary higher instructive establishment in Eastern Europe is arranged in Lithuania. It is perhaps the most sought after nations in Europe for higher educations. English language programs, inventive showing techniques, cheap colleges, astounding design, and high caliber of life are only a portion of the things that are drawing in global study to concentrate in Lithuania with the speed of light. The Universities in Lithuania offer a wide scope of scholarships to their students every year and the section prerequisites are practically simple. State funded schools in Lithuania fundamentally utilize Lithuanian as the language of guidance, yet exemptions can be made if the need emerges and explicit courses can be offered in English also.

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Articles & Journals

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Institutional similarity, firm heterogeneity and export sophistication

By Firat Demir & Chenghao Hu

What explains changes in export sophistication across firms and destinations? This paper studies the effects of institutional similarity and firm heterogeneity on export sophistication using revealed product mix and firm-level data from China and establishes eight stylised facts. First, firms export more sophisticated products to destinations with more similar institutions. Second, the positive effect of institutional similarity is weaker for higher productivity firms. Third, whilst exports of private, foreign, and joint-venture firms are more sophisticated, they are less sensitive to institutional similarity than public firms. Fourth, export-oriented firms export more sophisticated products and are more sensitive to institutional similarity. Fifth, whilst remoteness to export markets does not affect export sophistication, firms that export to further destinations are less sensitive to institutional similarity. Sixth, although multiproduct firms and firms with lower export skewness export more sophisticated products, they are more sensitive to institutional similarity. Seventh, the effect of institutional similarity is asymmetric and is less important when exporting to countries with better institutions. Eight, firms that are more dependent on contract enforcement export more sophisticated products, and more so to markets with similar institutions.

Speaking of hybrid warfare: Multiple narratives and differing expertise in the ‘hybrid warfare’ debate in Czechia

Jan Daniel & Jakub Eberle

What do we speak of when we speak of ‘hybrid warfare’, a notion that has become prominent in discussions of European security? The article shows that this question is difficult to answer, as the hybrid warfare discourse is not only vague, but also consists of multiple, and at times contradictory, narratives. While talking and writing about supposedly the same thing, participants in the hybrid warfare debate often suggest markedly different ideas about the precise nature and target of the threat, offer different responses and draw upon different expertise. Grounding our argument in critical scholarship on narratives, security knowledge and hybrid warfare, we build a framework for studying security narratives around the four elements of threat, threatened value, response and underlying knowledge. This framework is utilised in a case study of Czechia, a country that has played a pioneering and outsized role in European hybrid warfare debates. We identify three narratives of hybrid warfare – defence, counterinfluence and education – which present markedly different understandings of ‘hybrid warfare’, and ways to defend against it. Our intervention hopes to contribute to disentangling the contradictions of the hybrid warfare discourse, itself a necessary precondition for both sound state policy and an informed public debate.

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The Real Exchange Rate And Development Theory, Evidence, Issues And Challenges

The Journal of Economic Surveys

Firat Demir & Arslan Razmi

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of the real exchange rate (RER) on international trade, economic development and growth. We summarize the main conceptual issues, briefly discuss the relevance of the RER as an instrument of development policy, provide an overview of the macroeconomic and microeconomic mechanisms that link the RER to trade and long-run growth and development, analyse the challenges – especially the disconnect between theory and data – that often arise in empirical applications, and discuss new avenues for future research. In the process, we present some updated estimates and illustrative figures. The mechanisms through which the RER influences long-run growth and structural change remains a promising area of research and the relevance of individual channels in different contexts deserves much more careful investigation. Greater data availability should help fill some of these gaps in our understanding.

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Antipode Online

Volume 53, Issue 6 November 2021

From time to time, it is not only worthwhile to think about how the themes of radical geography evolve and shift, but also to reflect upon what keywords radical geographers mobilize to think through (and disrupt) the socio-spatialites, materialities, and temporalities of capitalism, its “others”, and its alternatives. Not too long ago, Antipode dedicated an open access book to what we thought were Keywords in Radical Geography. This November editorial has been written in that spirit: turbulent circulations of rent; control and abandonment; bordering/debordering; social recomposition; hope; military urbanism; hostile environments; justice as subject; privatized labour rights; surplus life; modulating eventfulness; jugarse la vida (wagering life); common space; slow financialization; and differential diversification are the keywords deployed by our authors in this issue, building on and extending a rich archive that has been nurtured within and beyond the spaces of Antipode. We hope our readers pick up some of these keywords, and the larger texts held together by these.

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Turkey: Erdogan’s Battle Over Bogazici University

Reflections on the fragility of academic freedoms and human rights.

The Globalist

Turkey is going through a major economic crisis, with inflation and unemployment rates in double digits. The Turkish currency has lost over 25% of its value in the last 12 months. The COVID 19 pandemic hit the country like a hurricane — causing untold misery and economic damage.

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Lectures & Webinars

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Study and Struggle Critical Conversation #3: Abolition Must Be Red

A conversation about centering anti-capitalism in the fight for abolition with Stevie Wilson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Tuesday November 9 at 7 pm EST.

Study and Struggle organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. We provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi. These groups correspond with groups from across the country through our pen pal program. We regularly come together for online conversations hosted by Haymarket Books. The curriculum, built by a combination of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people, scholars, and community organizers, centers around the interrelationship between prison abolition and immigrant justice, with a particular attention to freedom struggles in Mississippi and the U.S. South.

For our Fall 2021 four month curriculum, we have borrowed and augmented Ruth Wilson Gilmore's argument that “abolition is about presence, not absence. It has to be green, and in order to be green, it has to be red (anti-capitalist), and in order to be red, it has to be international," having added “intersectional” as a fourth analytical category that we hope moves us beyond “single-issue” organizing. Study and Struggle provides a bilingual curriculum to all our imprisoned comrades in Mississippi with the support of our friends at 1977 Books and makes it fully available online for other study groups to use as they see fit.

Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher.

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"Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s" by Romy Golan

Register Here.

Join us for a discussion featuring Claire Bishop and M. Antonella Pelizzari with Romy Golanto discuss her latest publication, Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s. 

Flashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and politics of the first part of the twentieth century and the aftermath of World War II. Most analyses have treated the 1960s in Italy as the decade of “presentism” par excellence, a political decade but one liberated from history. Romy Golan, however, makes the counterargument that 1960s Italian artists did not forget Italian and European history but rather reimagined it in oblique form. Her book identifies and explores this imaginary through two forms of nonlinear and decidedly nonpresentist forms of temporality—the flashback and the eclipse. In view of the photographic and filmic nature of these two concepts, the book’s analysis is largely mediated by black-and-white images culled from art, design, and architecture magazines, photo books, film stills, and exhibition documentation.

The book begins in Turin with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings; moves on to Campo urbano, a one-day event in the city of Como; and ends with the Vitalità del Negativo exhibition in Rome. What is being recalled and at other moments occluded are not only episodes of Italian nationalism and Fascism but also various liberatory moments of political and cultural resistance. The book’s main protagonists are, in order of appearance, artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giosetta Fioroni, photographer Ugo Mulas, Ettore Sottsass (as critic rather than designer), graphic designer Bruno Munari, curators Luciano Caramel and Achille Bonito Oliva, architect Piero Sartogo, Carla Lonzi (as artist as much as critic), filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, and, in flashback among the departed, painter Felice Casorati, writer Massimo Bontempelli, art historian Aby Warburg, architect Giuseppe Terragni, and Renaissance friar-philosopher-mathematician Giordano Bruno (as patron saint of the sixty-eighters).

Organized by The James Gallery/Center for the Humanities with Princeton University Press. and co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

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Job Openings

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University of California - Los Angeles

Data Scientist for Policy & Politics

The UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative (LPPI) seeks a data scientist to help manage and grow the organization's big data projects. 

LPPI champions nonpartisan, evidence-based domestic policy solutions that improve the economic, political, and social landscape for Latinos and other communities of color in states and localities across the U.S. LPPI leverages UCLA's cross-disciplinary strengths to create an enterprise-wide home for Latino social policy with expertise in over a dozen issue areas including civil rights, criminal justice, educational equity, health access, housing, and voting and civic participation. 

LPPI fosters innovative research, leverages policy-relevant expertise, drives civic engagement, and nurtures a leadership pipeline to propel viable policy reforms that expand opportunity for all Americans. 

Under the direction of the Director(s) of Research and the Faculty Director, the data scientist will serve as an integral part of the research team. 

Binghamton University - State University of New York, 

Environmental Studies Program

Assistant Professor - Environmental Policy / Environmental Justice

The Environmental Studies Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York invites applications for a tenure-track position at the level of assistant professor beginning in Fall 2022. 

We seek an environmental justice scholar who conducts innovative research within a specific policy area. Our new colleague will examine the economic, legal, societal, or race-related drivers of environmental injustice within topics, such as, but not limited to, energy, air, food systems, urbanization, or water / land resource policy. Our new colleague will study the social and/or political science of their area of policy concentration, be well-versed in the physical or systems science underpinning the topic, and able to convey an interdisciplinary understanding to students. Such a melding of human and natural systems is at the crux of the Environmental Studies Program and a recruitment focus for faculty members. We seek applicants who prioritize engaged, collaborative, or community-based research with Indigenous, African-American, Latinx or other minoritized populations. 

Teaching will include lower-level and upper-level environmental policy courses emphasizing local, state, and federal policy in the United States and incorporating environmental justice concepts. In addition, the faculty member will teach an upper-level specialty course that would contribute to our new sustainability systems undergraduate concentration and the Sustainable Communities master’s degree. Other courses might include one of our capstone classes or a research methods course. This person would serve as a mentor to master’s degree students working on a variety of projects. 

Binghamton University emphasizes research across departments through its trans-disciplinary areas of expertise (TAEs) on campus. These TAEs bring together and support university researchers interested in conducting interdisciplinary projects in sustainable communities, smart energy, data science, health sciences, material and the visual world, and citizen, rights and belonging.

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University of Oklahoma

Assistant Professor - Economics

The Department of Economics at the University of Oklahoma invites applications for a tenure track assistant professor position focusing on research topics in the areas of Environmental Economics, Energy Economics, or Natural Resources/Sustainability. A successful candidate must be an outstanding researcher and teacher. The regular teaching load is 2/2, with course reductions in the first and third years. Contributions to graduate and undergraduate programming are envisioned. Research/grant collaboration with existing faculty and OU’s nationally ranked interdisciplinary Energy/Environment research cluster is encouraged.

University of Oklahoma

Tenure or Tenure- Track, Health and Inequality

The University of Oklahoma is excited to initiate a projected multi-year cluster hire to expand expertise in cancer research on the Norman campus. Complementing recent growth at the Health Promotion Research Center at the University of Oklahoma’s Health Science Center, this year we will be adding tenured or tenure-track faculty in Anthropology, Economics, and Social Work.  Faculty will join the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Stephenson Cancer Center and will be expected to work with faculty at both the Norman and Health Sciences Center campuses to develop funded research to improve cancer outcomes. We specifically seek researchers whose work centers on the social determinants of health (broadly defined) as well as the organization, delivery, and experience of cancer care.

The normal teaching load is 2/2.  Course reductions are given in the first two years (so 1/2 or 2/1) and are envisioned as being additionally obtained by the successful hire based on their grants/funding.  Contributions to undergraduate and graduate programs (PhD, Master’s in Data Analytics) are envisioned.  Initial screening will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled.  First round Zoom interviews will follow the stated AEA/ASSA recommendations.  Campus fly outs for second round interviews are envisioned.  Applicants should upload a cover letter, curriculum vitae, writing sample, teaching evaluations, and (arrange for) three letters of reference to Interfolio.  Salary and benefits are competitive.  Grant driven summer support beyond the base salary is expected.

OKC/Norman is a lovely place to live.  OU is a traditional ‘college town’ set within an affordable community that provides many social and recreational amenities, along with strong public schools.  Most faculty live within 10-15 minutes of campus and within 20-30 minutes of the OKC airport and downtown amenities.