Criticism of “Colonial Modernity” through Kurdish Decolonial Approaches

Western modernity with its colonial application has created an identity trauma and patriarchal domination of the memory of colonized and oppressed peoples. Critiques from colonized territories encourage us to reread the colonial epistemes of modernity, whether or not centered on the West. The Kurdish political movement thus defines a new interpretation of modernity based on the critique of colonialism and global capitalism: “democratic modernity.” This chapter problematizes the relations between modernity, the nation state, the destruction of ecology, social confinement, the relationship of the forces of these relations, but above all the modalities by which it becomes possible to act on them to break the “stalemate” of the modernity of thought in the twenty-first century.

Overcoming the Other America: José Martí's Immanent Critique of the Unionist Paradigm

This article offers a new interpretation of the Cuban intellectual José Martí's international political thought. It argues that Martí's analysis of early US imperialism and call for Spanish American unity are best understood as an immanent critique of the “unionist paradigm,” a tradition of international political thought that originated in the American independence movements. Martí recognized the impediments that racism had placed in the way of both US and Spanish American efforts to stabilize the hemisphere's republics by uniting them under regional institutions. He argued that, in his own time, Anglo-Saxon supremacism had deprived US-led Pan-Americanism of all legitimacy, causing a crisis of international political order in the Americas. In the context of this crisis, he developed a revised, antiracist unionism that, he argued, would free Spanish America's republics from imperial aggression and interstate conflicts, making the region a global model of stable and inclusive self-rule.

The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800

The production, acquisition, and use of consumer goods defines our daily lives, and yet consumerism is seen as increasingly controversial. Movements for sustainable and ethical consumerism are gaining momentum alongside an awareness of how our choices in the marketplace can affect public issues. How did we get here? This volume advances a bold new interpretation of the 'consumer revolution' of the eighteenth century, when European elites, middling classes, and even certain labourers purchased unprecedented quantities of clothing, household goods, and colonial products. Michael Kwass adopts a global perspective that incorporates the expansion of European empires, the development of world trade, and the rise of plantation slavery in the Americas. Kwass analyses the emergence of Enlightenment material cultures, contentious philosophical debates on the morality of consumption, and new forms of consumer activism to offer a fresh interpretation of the politics of consumption in the age of abolitionism and the Atlantic Revolutions.

Higher-Dimensional Regular Reissner–Nordström Black Holes Associated with Linear Electrodynamics

Following the interpretation of matter source that the energy-momentum tensor of anisotropic fluid can be dealt with effectively as the energy-momentum tensor of perfect fluid plus linear (Maxwell) electromagnetic field, we obtain the regular higher-dimensional Reissner–Nordström (Tangherlini–RN) solution by starting with the noncommutative geometry-inspired Schwarzschild solution. Using the boundary conditions that connect the noncommutative Schwarzschild solution in the interior of the charged perfect fluid sphere to the Tangherlini–RN solution in the exterior of the sphere, we find that the interior structure can be reflected by an exterior parameter, the charge-to-mass ratio. Moreover, we investigate the stability of the boundary under mass perturbation and indicate that the new interpretation imposes a rigid restriction upon the charge-to-mass ratio. This restriction, in turn, permits a stable noncommutative black hole only in the 4-dimensional spacetime.

Affine-invariant contracting-point methods for Convex Optimization

In this paper, we develop new affine-invariant algorithms for solving composite convex minimization problems with bounded domain. We present a general framework of Contracting-Point methods, which solve at each iteration an auxiliary subproblem restricting the smooth part of the objective function onto contraction of the initial domain. This framework provides us with a systematic way for developing optimization methods of different order, endowed with the global complexity bounds. We show that using an appropriate affine-invariant smoothness condition, it is possible to implement one iteration of the Contracting-Point method by one step of the pure tensor method of degree $$p \ge 1$$ p ≥ 1 . The resulting global rate of convergence in functional residual is then $${\mathcal {O}}(1 / k^p)$$ O ( 1 / k p ) , where k is the iteration counter. It is important that all constants in our bounds are affine-invariant. For $$p = 1$$ p = 1 , our scheme recovers well-known Frank–Wolfe algorithm, providing it with a new interpretation by a general perspective of tensor methods. Finally, within our framework, we present efficient implementation and total complexity analysis of the inexact second-order scheme $$(p = 2)$$ ( p = 2 ) , called Contracting Newton method. It can be seen as a proper implementation of the trust-region idea. Preliminary numerical results confirm its good practical performance both in the number of iterations, and in computational time.

The Explanatory Effect of a Label: Its Influence on a Category Persists Even If We Forget the Label

In this study we replicated the explanatory effect of a label which had been found by Giffin et al. (2017). In their experiments, they used vignettes describing an odd behavior of a person based on culturally specific disorders that were unfamiliar to respondents. It turned out that explanations which explain an odd behavior through a person’s tendency to behave that way (circulus vitiosus) seemed more persuasive if the disorder was given a label that was used in the explanation. We replicated these results in Experiment 1, and in a follow-up Experiment 2 we examined the familiarity with category information and the evaluation of that category over time (the delay lasted one week). We realized that the label effect persists even when people make judgments based on their recollections about a category. Furthermore, according to a content analysis of the recollections, participants in the label condition remembered more information from the vignettes but tended to forget an artificial label; however, they used other words from the disorder domain instead (like “disease” or “kleptomania”). This allowed us to suggest a new interpretation of this effect: we suppose that in the Giffin et al. (2017) experiments the label did not bring any new features to a category itself, but pointed to a relevant domain instead, so the effect appeared from the activation of areas of knowledge in semantic memory and the application of relevant schema for learning a new phenomenon.

The Structure of Municipal Voting in Vancouver

We offer a new interpretation of the structure of municipal electoral competition in Vancouver, focusing on the city’s high-profile municipal election in 2018. Using novel “cast vote records” – a dataset containing each of the 176,450 ballots cast in the city’s municipal election – we use a Bayesian multidimensional scaling procedure to estimate the location of every 2018 candidate and voter in Vancouver in a shared two-dimensional political space. We then match observed votes from the cast vote records to survey responses in the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES), a large election survey undertaken in Vancouver in 2018, using 96 CMES variables to interpret our two measured dimensions of electoral competition. We find evidence of a single primary dimension of competition, structured by left-right ideology, along with a secondary dimension dividing establishment from upstart parties of the right. Our paper supplies a new interpretation of Vancouver’s electoral landscape, clarifies our understanding of the role of left-right ideology in municipal electoral competition, and demonstrates the promise of cast vote records for research on municipal elections and voting.

Green May Be Nice, but Infrastructure Is Necessary

Green infrastructure is presented as a novel and innovative approach in the current environmental planning discourse, but how new is it really? An historical overview of planning ideas in both the urban and the rural contexts indicates that the concept, if not the term, “green infrastructure” has a very long and distinguished pedigree in the field of landscape and open space planning. To determine how far the concept is indeed new, definitions of green infrastructure from the literature are examined. While “green” has long been loosely used as a synonym for natural features and vegetation in the planning context, “infrastructure” is the part of the term which is really novel. Infrastructure is otherwise understood as being either “technical” or “social”, and the common features of these otherwise very different forms are considered in order to gain a better understanding of how they might also relate to a new interpretation of green infrastructure. A number of international case studies of different “green infrastructure” projects are then presented, again to better understand their common features and potential relationship to other infrastructure types. Finally, the necessity to consider green and blue areas together and to take them as seriously as other forms of infrastructure is emphasized. The developing climate and biodiversity crises underline the urgency of implementing a flexible and multifunctional green-blue infrastructure system. This must be carefully integrated into the existing fabric of both urban and rural landscapes and will require an appropriately resourced administration and management system, reflecting its beneficial impacts.

Experimental legal regimes of mobilization type as a method of legal regulation in the context of COVID-19 spread

Experimental legal regime; COVID19; legal regime; legal experiment; “regulatory sandboxes”; legal technique; classification of legal experiments; legality; experimental legal regimes of mobilization type on legal forecasting and legal interpretation methods. The theoretical basis of the research includes well-known legal science categories, i.e. legal regime and legal experiment that get a new interpretation with the appearance of experimental legal regime institute. The main results of the research, scope of application. Experimental legal regime is a broader legal phenomenon than regulatory sandboxes, which includes not only regulation of the digital innovation sphere, but also other rules that are limited in time and space. There are legal regimes with signs of experimentation that are not officially identified by the state as experimental legal regimes. The work studied the experience which arose due to modern changes in state and legal regulation caused by the global epidemic of COVID-19. It is suggested to divide the legal experiments according to the purpose of experimental legislation into the following groups: optimizing, progressive and mobilization ones. The aim of the first group named “Optimizing legal experiments” is to test using of new regulation applied to a large and complex object. The second group named “Progressive legal experiments” is intended to check whether the abandonment of old laws is beneficial in the innovation field. The result is creation of a smart regulation for economic and technological development. The third group named “Mobilization legal experiments” is aimed at maintaining of the existing level of resources, security, and infrastructure in the event of critical situations. It is being proved that the legal restrictions aimed at preventing of COVID-19 viral infection spreading can be classified as experimental legal regimes of mobilization type. The criterion for distinguishing of mobilization experimental legal regimes from others is the voluntary participation in the legal experiment and the goal of the experimental legal regime.Conclusions. The development of mobilization experimental legal regimes implies raising of their legality. It can be achieved by the provision of legal guarantees such as the goals of the legal experiment and the evaluation of their consequences. This will allow identify whether the consequences of the experiment correspond to the goals of the new legal regulation. There must be grounds for limitations to legal certainty caused by legal experimentation. Their manifestation is the goal and evaluation criteria, with the help of which it is possible to determine whether the consequences of the establishment of the experiment correspond to the goals of the new legal regulation. Otherwise, there is a risk of unjustified infringement of the rights and legitimate interests of citizens.