Generating Political Commitment for Regulatory Interventions Targeting Dietary Harms and Poor Nutrition: A Case Study on Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Taxation in Australia

Background: Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxes are an effective public health policy intervention for improving nutrition and public health. Although implemented in over 50 jurisdictions worldwide, this intervention remains vastly underutilised, and in Australia political commitment for such a tax is low. The aim of this study is to understand the politics of SSB taxation in Australia, what factors have constrained political commitment for a tax, and what might enable such commitment in future. Methods: We adopted a case study design, guided by a theoretical framework developed from the political economy of nutrition literature. Data were collected from 16 interviews with informants from multiple sectors, supported by media articles, journal articles, and grey literature. Data were coded and organized by thematic analysis, and synthesised into the final results. Results: Nutrition actors have made significant progress in generating commitment for a SSB tax by producing relevant evidence, raising awareness, advocating for action, employing resonating frames, collaborating with civil society organisations, and forming coalitions increasing their overall cohesion. Nevertheless, political commitment for a SSB tax is low and was found to be impeded by the powerful influence of the food, beverage, and sugar industries, opposition from both major Australian political parties, ideological resistance to regulation, a low quality monitoring and surveillance system for food and nutrition, and limited public advocacy. The influence of nutrition actors was also impeded by weak connections to key policymakers and missed collaborative opportunities with pro-SSB tax organisations. Conclusion: The identification of several impediments provides an explanation for why political commitment for a SSB tax is low in Australia and reveals several opportunities for how it might be generated in the future. Political commitment may come about through, for example, actions to limit the influence of industry in policy decision-making, and by strengthening the existing pro-SSB tax coalition.

The Personality Nexus

This chapter explores the changing legal landscape of moral rights in the context of music creation. It traces moral rights’ roots to the Kantian theory of authors’ personality rights in continental Europe and it also explains common law jurisdictions’ ideological resistance to a freestanding moral right doctrine in favor of a patchwork approach to the issue. It shows that international agreements including the Berne Convention, the WPPT, and the Beijing Treaty, have played different roles in promoting the minimal moral right standard for either music creators or performers at the international level. Furthermore, it should not be ignored that there has always been an unresolved tension between moral rights and the time-honored practice of music parody, because the former might exert a chilling effect on the latter. It is suggested that a reimagination of moral rights through the Kantian communicative authorship is crucial for accommodating parodic expressions in an increasingly reconfigurable music ecosystem.

Not merely the absence of disease: A genealogy of the WHO’s positive health definition

The 1948 constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. It was a bold and revolutionary health idea to gain international consensus in a period characterized by fervent anti-communism. This article explores the genealogy of the health definition and demonstrates how it was possible to expand the scope of health, redefine it as ‘well-being’, and overcome ideological resistance to progressive and international health approaches. The first part of the article demonstrates how the health definition was composed through a trajectory of draft ideas from scholars in the history of medicine, as well as political actors working to promote national health insurance. The definition was authored by League of Nations veteran Raymond Gautier, but secretly drew heavily on medical historian Henry E. Sigerist’s controversial book Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union (1937). The second part analyses how it was possible to resist the ideological pushback against the WHO and secure US ratification. The WHO’s progressive constitution was not simply a deviation from dominant health ideas, but a direct outcome of the entrenched health conflict. The genealogy is based on original archival material from international organizations and US government archives. The article contributes to understandings of the political controversies surrounding the WHO and to scholarship on understandings of health. It also illustrates how influential health ideas cross the boundaries between politics and health sciences, as well as the boundaries between domestic health policy and global health.

Visiones utópicas y distópicas en las películas. La voz de la luna y Tiempo después

In the mid-1980s, the program of economic, political, and social restructuring —perestroika— and the new era of transparency and openness —glasnost— became the unintended catalyst for dismantling what had taken nearly three-quarters of a century to erect Communist states. While the reforms of perestroika and glasnost instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev, were not the sole causes of the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the forces they unleashed destabilized an already weakening system and hastened its end. The political protests and the exodus of thousands of East Germans —Peaceful Revolution— fleeing to West Germany and Austria through the Hungarian border, contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989, and it also triggered the German reunification in 1990. But since the end of the Cold War (1947-1991), many disappointments such as the worsening of socio-economic inequality and global instability, have followed the initial euphoria associated with the victory of the Western Bloc over the Eastern Bloc. The resurgence of the dichotomous relationship capitalism vs communism, and the political polarization driven by a sharp generational divide, are portrayed by the Italian-French co-production “The Voice of the Moon” (Dir. Federico Fellini, 1990), and the Spanish-Portuguese co-production “Some Time Later” (Dir. José Luis Cuerda, 2018). Both cinematic approximations embrace the ideological resistance towards the ongoing process of dehumanization and its pernicious effects on society. The achievement of social justice is deliberately postponed by the technocratic power elite, and by youth generations that are disengaged with its historical past, and enslaved by digital technologies.

Decolonizing Diplomacy: Senghor, Kennedy, and the Practice of Ideological Resistance

At the turn of the 1960s, Léopold Sédar Senghor and John F. Kennedy vowed to radically transform African foreign policy. Through a close reading of a recently declassified correspondence and a historical analysis of two behind-the-scenes negotiations, Senghor’s first state visit to the U.S. and Kennedy’s support for the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Ripert examines the private and public concatenations that lead both statesmen to transform policymaking not by implementing new policies but by challenging inherited ideologies. Though their efforts did not always bring successful change in policymaking, the diplomatic correspondence between the two newly elected leaders reveals a more subtle and sustainable transformation: a decolonization of diplomacy.

24. EU criminal law

This chapter examines what EU criminal law consists of; the reasons for its existence; and the mechanism by which it is created. It then describes the more important of its practical manifestations. It shows that Member States are torn between the practical necessity for certain problems in the area of criminal law to be dealt with at an EU level, and a deep-seated ideological resistance to this happening. A consequence of this is that the bulk of the EU instruments of which EU criminal law is composed are designed to help and encourage the criminal justice systems of the various Member States to work together, rather than to impose upon them uniform rules of criminal law or criminal procedure devised by EU law-making institutions.

Memory in Sacred Places: The Revitalization Process of the Muisca Community

The Muisca community of Suba, located in Bogota, Colombia, is a place-based community whose epistemology is rooted in what is now an urban environment. After enduring over five centuries of segregation, marginalization, displacement, and near cultural obliteration, the Muisca community has thrived to the present day and is currently undertaking the task of re-indigenization through the revitalization of their traditional knowledge and the process of ethnogenesis. The effects of urbanization on the Muisca have not only changed the physical spaces which they inhabit, but it has also disrupted the relational patterns between the community and their sacred places. This severing of the community from their sacred places has had the effect of further invisibilizing the Muisca’s ethnic identity in the national social imaginary. As a form of resistance to their marginality, the Muisca are engaging in symbolic practices, in both public and private spaces, as a means of cultivating ideological resistance, memory revitalization, and generating new meanings of their collective identity. This article, based on an ethnographic case study, seeks to examine how the Muisca community is symbolically re-appropriating their sacred places in this urban context to mend the social fabric of the Muisca community. As such, this revitalization project represents an attempt to reconstruct a forgotten indigenous identity by rewriting the historical memory of a community that disappeared from the national discourse.

Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing, and Resistance

The chapter engages with another popular approach to visual international politics: visuals as a site of resistance to power, both through producing critical artwork and by ethically witnessing international crises. To trace these issues, the chapter analyzes the work of Ai Weiwei, a world-famous artist-activist whose ethical witnessing creatively resists China’s authoritarian party-state. It shows how Ai’s art presents ideological resistance to state power, in both the traditional sense of liberal resistance to authoritarian state oppression and the hermeneutical sense, in which it is necessary to decode his work for its “meaning” as the social construction of the visual. The chapter then considers how Ai’s documentary film Human Flow (2017) provokes transnational resistance through its “visual construction of the social”—and of the global. It thus examines how visual art can serve as an ethical witness to resist reigning political regimes, and how it also can excite affective communities of sense to creatively resist reigning political aesthetics. Chapter 6 thus highlights the need to appreciate the dynamic tension that entangles cultural governance and resistance.

The interplay between ideological resistance and management control: an Egyptian case study

Purpose This study explores the relationship between institutional logics and workers’ agency in business organisations. The purpose of this paper is to explain management control in a complex setting of workers’ resistance and institutional multiplicity and complexity. Exploring the inherent political volatility at the macro level, the work also investigates the political aspects of economic organisations and the intermediary role of individuals who deal with these institutions. Design/methodology/approach Theoretically, the study triangulates institutional logics and labour process theories, linking higher-order institutions with mundane labour practices observed in the case study. Methodologically, the study adopts a post-positivistic case study approach. Empirical data were solicited in a village community, where sugar beet farming and processing constitutes the main economic activity underlying its livelihood. Data were collected through a triangulation of interviews, documents and observations. Findings The study concludes that, especially in LDCs agro-manufacturing settings, economic and societal institutions play a central role in the mobilisation of labour resistance. Control can be effectively practiced, and be resisted, through such economic and social systems. This study affirms the influence of institutional logics on individuals’ agency and subjectivity. Originality/value The study contributes to literature by investigating the relationship between subalterns’ agency and institutional logics in a traditional political and communal context, in contrast to the highly investigated western contexts; and providing a definition of management control based on the prevalent institutional logics in the field.