Search Results (45)

Colombia is a megadiverse, multiethnic, and multicultural country with a tremendous socio-ecological systems (SESs) diversity, which faces essential challenges arising from human activities, low levels of sustainable economic development, poverty, and social inequality rates, and the persistence of multiple forms of military, political, and social violence. Understanding the resilience of this complex system is both fundamental and challenging due to the contradictory effects of economic development and regional ecosystem degradation. This research proposes the Socio-Ecological Resilience Integrated Index (SERII) to assess historical changes in socio-ecological resilience in Colombia’s departments (political-administrative units) between 1985–2022. The SERII considers the trade-offs between ecosystems, social systems, and production systems, providing a complete perspective of integrated management with a geographic resolution at the level of general political-administrative units. The results reveal a spatial variation in the SERII, with worse conditions in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Colombian Amazon (on the country periphery) and better conditions in departments of the country center. From 1985 to 2022, the SERII experienced a decrease (51.5%), driven by ecosystem degradation, increased extractive activities (illegal and illegal), and the persistence of military, political, and social violence. While the limitations of the proposed indicator are described, the SERII effectively replicates the overall resilience of Colombia’s departments to external shocks and allows for suggesting regional management priorities for the targeted promotion of sustainable development. Full article

The Pacific Alliance (PA), established in 2011, aims to foster economic integration among its member states—Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico—by promoting trade liberalization and economic cooperation. However, recent political shifts within these countries have influenced trade policies, affecting intra-bloc commerce and relations with external markets, particularly China and the United States. This study explores how the political environment within the PA has shaped sustainable trade, considering economic policies, trade agreements, and shifts in regional priorities. Using a qualitative and descriptive approach, this research is based on a documentary review of academic literature, official reports, and international trade data. Content analysis was applied to assess the impact of political decisions on PA trade sustainability, including the examination of tariff structures, trade flows, and capital movements. The findings indicate that intra-regional trade within the PA remains limited, with an intraregional trade index below 4%. Mexico continues to prioritize exports to the U.S., while Peru and Chile strengthen ties with China. Although PA member states have maintained liberal economic policies, disparities in trade liberalization levels hinder integration. Furthermore, despite the reduction of tariffs and the implementation of digital trade facilitation measures, political instability and differences in economic strategies among member states challenge the PA’s long-term sustainability. Strengthening institutional frameworks and increasing investments in research and development are crucial for enhancing economic integration and ensuring trade resilience within the bloc. Full article

Wild oyster reefs have been harvested for centuries and continue to face anthropogenic pressures, including climate change, pollution, and habitat reduction. Oyster aquaculture has grown to supplement depleted wild stocks and strengthen local economies, but development has not occurred at the same rate across all regions. Across the United States, states have a variety of political and cultural influences that impact oyster aquaculture policy, constraining the ability to make direct comparisons among locations that could enhance aquaculture expansion in slower-to-develop states and regions. This research developed a four-part index to compare regulatory, production, and economic attributes of oyster aquaculture among 23 coastal states. The final index score—a summation of the four individual index components—provides a broad integrated view of oyster aquaculture across the U.S. The results indicate that coastal states in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and New England regions have the greatest number of resource and policy attributes in place to support oyster aquaculture, whereas coastal states in the Gulf of Mexico and Western Pacific region have relatively less in the way of aquaculture-supporting structures. As the oyster aquaculture industry continues to grow in the U.S., results from this study can help organizations involved in oyster aquaculture to make informed decisions to expand permitting, leasing, and production systems, following the model from states who have been active in oyster aquaculture for decades. Mindful and cautious improvements can facilitate sustainable sources of seafood and stable income generation for coastal communities while reducing pressures on wild stocks. Full article

The notion of resilience has been widely invoked as that essential resource by which sex workers may endure, cope, or thrive despite encountering adversities and stressors. A useful definition within the resilience discourse around sex work is the ability to connect, reconnect, and resist disconnection in response to hardships, adversities, and trauma. In this article, we will examine the history of ‘resilience’ and show how it has been ubiquitously applied to sex workers in some Pacific Island settings. The resounding message of resilience discourse is that sex workers must learn to cope, accommodate, and adapt themselves to conditions that oppress them, and in fact, presuppose a continued acceptance of a degraded place in the world. Rather than resistance as a political action aimed at changing the social, institutional, and economic structures that have placed sex workers there, resilience shifts the onus onto the individual sex worker or her community support to learn to adapt to those conditions. Resilience strategies may be pragmatic but, in the end, to present these as any kind of solution to sex worker struggles becomes little more than victim blaming. Full article

Understanding how ocean currents influence larval dispersal and measuring its magnitude is critical for conservation and sustainable exploitation, especially in the Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP), where the larval transport of rocky reef fish remains untested. For this reason, a lagrangian simulation model was implemented to estimate larval transport pathways in Northwestern Mexico and TEP. Particle trajectories were simulated with data from the Hybrid Ocean Coordinate Model, focusing on three simulation scenarios: (1) using the occurrence records of Lutjanus peru and L. argentiventris as release sites; (2) considering a continuous distribution along the study area, and (3) taking the reproduction seasonality into account in both species. It was found that the continuous distribution scenario largely explained the genetic structure previously found in both species (genetic brakes between central and southern Mexico and Central America), confirming that the ocean currents play a significant role as predictors of genetic differentiation and gene flow in Northwestern Mexico and the TEP. Due to the oceanography of the area, the southern localities supply larvae from the northern localities; therefore, disturbances in any southern localities could affect the surrounding areas and have impacts that spread beyond their political boundaries. Full article

In the aftermath of the 2003 Casablanca bombings, the Moroccan state emphasized, through official public discourse, the components that constitute “official Moroccan Islam” to combat extremist ideologies. These religious elements include Mālikism in jurisprudence, Ashʿarism in theology, and the Sufism of Imam Al-Junayd (d. 298/910), all balanced by the pledge of allegiance to King Mohammed VI (a descendant of the Sharifian lineage), the constitutionally designated Commander of the Faithful and sole religious leader. Since the reform policy initiated in 2004, the Moroccan state has constructed a narrative on the distinctiveness of Moroccan Islam—moderate and tolerant—and promoted it among its own citizens and beyond its borders. However, while the Moroccan state claims to have a unique form of Islam, controversial arguments have been raised questioning the nature of the state’s purported Islam. Other criticisms include investigating the state’s endorsement of Sufism and its broader policy of institutionalization. Yet, this article argues that the state supports any form of Islam, not necessarily Sufism, that aligns with its religious and political leadership. Like other Arab and Muslim states, Morocco’s religious policy is impacted by the global context, where Salafism is now perceived as a threat to established worldviews. In addition, this article argues that Morocco’s support for Sufi Islam is based not merely on its perceived political passivity, but because it complements the state’s policies and gains advantages from this support. It concludes that the official narrative of Moroccan Islam, which emphasizes a Sufi-oriented approach to counter extremism, is open to question, particularly given that Salafism was the state’s preferred form of Islam in post-colonial Morocco. This highlights the complex and often conflicting relationship between political actors and religious leaders in shaping Morocco’s religious discourse. Full article

This paper explores the combined impacts of certain geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts on the global energy transition, focusing on developments related to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreements. The New Globalization Scenario Matrix (NGSM) and a correlative SWOT analysis in transnational terms are utilized to understand and conceptualize potential future global trends in the emerging new globalization. Findings suggest that the examined contemporary global events may enhance the overall performance of the global system, thereby accelerating energy transitions. Consequently, a re-envisioned approach to the International Political Economy (IPE) of energy is proposed, blending repositioned realism and liberalism to foster a realistic and innovative new global liberalism. Full article

In the mid-twentieth century, growing North American textile and ready-to-wear industries vigorously appropriated Native American aesthetics to cultivate a commercial and design identity apart from Europe. Most studies of the circulation of Indigenous idioms in these industries focus on Southwestern or South Pacific regionalisms, and scholarship on studio and commercial fabric and fashion design from the Northwest Coast in the twentieth century is limited. This paper contributes by raising Indigenous and non-Indigenous use of Northwest Coast design forms during the politically turbulent 1940s–1960s and analyzing the impact of this aesthetic vocabulary within broader North American textiles and fashion. Throughout, I engage with the approaches of critical fashion theory and multiple modernisms, considering the frictions of property and power relations within settler-colonial states, then and now. Drawing from study of objects, periodicals, and archival materials as well as first-person perspectives, I contextualize these representations within entangled art, museum, and design worlds in the Northwest Coast, New York City, and the Southwest. My examination illustrates that Northwest Coast artists and art ideas asserted a peripheral but locatable role in mid-century textiles and fashion, facilitating the development of today’s robust Indigenous fashion network on the Northwest Coast and its cultural politics. Full article

The record-setting winter of 2022–2023 came as an answer to both figurative and literal prayers for political leaders, policy makers, and water managers reliant on snowpacks in the Upper Colorado River Basin, a vital source of water for tens of millions of people across the Western United States. But this “drought-busting” winter was not well-predicted, in part because while interannual patterns of tropical ocean temperatures have a well-known relationship to precipitation patterns across much of the American West, the Upper Colorado is part of a liminal region where these connections tend to be comparatively weak. Using historical sea surface temperature and snowpack records, and leveraging a long-term cross-basin relationship to extend the timeline for evaluation, this analysis demonstrates that the 2022–2023 winter did not present in accordance with other high-snowpack winters in this region, and that the associative pattern of surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, and snow water equivalent in the regions that stored and supplied most of the water to the Colorado River during the 2022–2023 winter, was not substantially different from a historically incoherent arrangement of long-term correlation. These findings suggest that stochastic variability plays an outsized role in influencing water availability in this region, even in extreme years, reinforcing the importance of other trends to inform water policy and management. Full article

British proposals to forcibly deport asylum seekers to Rwanda have raised fierce opposition from across the political spectrum in the UK and internationally. These proposals differ from official practices of deportation as they have developed in liberal democracies since the 1970s. There are certainly some international parallels, such as Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’ of ‘offshoring’ asylum, which is often cited as an inspiration. Yet a much clearer precedent involving the forcible movement of people to countries where they have no personal or legal connection existed for many years in the British Empire. Colonial policies of forcible removal, relocation, displacement, and dispersal around the Empire are well established. We draw attention to these longer histories before investigating more recent cases of the dispersal of refugees within the British Empire in the twentieth century. In many cases, such forced dispersal concerned those who had been recognised as refugees who were interned and subsequently moved elsewhere in the Empire. Such policies were designed to prevent the arrival of refugees in the UK. These policies have provided inspiration for asylum practices in some postcolonial states—Israel is reported to have reached an agreement with Uganda and Rwanda to deport asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea, although these are not public. In this paper, we highlight how these colonial practices of forcible displacement of individuals inform the current agreement between the UK and Rwanda. Full article

Genebanks are crucial for safeguarding global crop diversity but are themselves exposed to several risks. However, a scientific basis for identifying, assessing, and managing risks is still lacking. Addressing these research gaps, this study provides risk analysis for three key risk groups: natural hazards, political risks, and financial risks, carried out on a sample of 80 important national and international genebanks, comprising at least 4.78 million accessions or roughly 65% of the reported total of ex situ conserved accessions worldwide. The assessment tool of Munich Re “Natural Hazards Edition” allowed a location-specific comparison of the natural hazard exposure. Results showed that genebanks in the Asia-Pacific region are most exposed to natural hazards, while institutions in African and some Asian countries are rather vulnerable to political risks. Financing is a major problem for national genebanks in developing countries, whereas the Global Crop Diversity Trust achieved considerable financial security for international genebanks. Large differences in the risk exposure of genebanks exist, making a location- and institution-specific risk assessment indispensable. Moreover, there is significant room for improvement with respect to quality and risk management at genebanks. Transferring risks of genebanks to third parties is underdeveloped and should be used more widely. Full article

This research paper investigates the evolving defense cooperation between India and Japan in the context of the strategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly considering China’s rise. The existing literature recognizes China’s increasing influence as a significant factor in India-Japanese security cooperation, but tends to overlook the dynamics behind India’s shifting stance. The study reveals that India initially hesitated to actively engage in anti-China security cooperation with Japan until the mid-2010s, but later adopted a more proactive partnership. An analysis of policy documents, political speeches, and government records attributes India’s initial reluctance to its commitment to non-alignment and strategic autonomy, its desire to balance relations with both China and Japan, and its domestic political priorities favoring economic development over military expansion or strategic alliances. However, growing concerns over China’s assertiveness, military modernization, a change in political leadership, and the Quad’s development as a regional security platform have prompted India’s attitude shift. The research’s recommendations not only offer a roadmap for India, Japan, and other Indo-Pacific countries with deep economic ties to China, but also help combat China’s military threats to contribute to regional stability and security, address common challenges, and foster a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region. Full article

This paper argues that the neoliberal consensus about education finance has broken down due to growing economic inequality. First, I use a comparative historical analysis of political alliances to examine patterns of world trade and nations’ policies for economic and educational development since World War II. The United States emphasized STEM-collegiate preparation for all students, while most countries continued the dual emphasis on technical-tertiary and higher education. Educational policy in the US and Pacific region also shifted towards a reliance on markets and student loans resulting in worsening economic inequality in access. Nations with dual technical and academic pathways in secondary and postsecondary education systems expand college enrollment rates more rapidly than the US. They also experience class conflict between the working–middle class and the new technological elite. Next, I examine how education policy shifted from national planning aligned with public funding to market-based incentives for institutional development, further exposing gaps in opportunity within nations. Finally, recognizing the variations in systemic causes of inequality, I argue that governments, education agencies, and civic activists can best promote equity by organizing to address barriers to opportunity for groups left behind in the wake of withering neoliberal education policy. Full article

In the past decade, the Philippines has gained notoriety as the country with the fastest-growing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic in the Western Pacific region. While the overall trends of HIV incidence and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)-related deaths are declining globally, an increase in new cases was reported to the HIV/AIDS and ART Registry of the Philippines. From 2012 to 2023, there was a 411% increase in daily incidence. Late presentation in care remains a concern, with 29% of new confirmed HIV cases in January 2023 having clinical manifestations of advanced HIV disease at the time of diagnosis. Men having sex with men (MSM) are disproportionately affected. Various steps have been taken to address the HIV epidemic in the country. The Philippine HIV and AIDS Policy Act of 2018 (Republic Act 11166) expanded access to HIV testing and treatment. HIV testing now allows for the screening of minors 15–17 years old without parental consent. Community-based organizations have been instrumental in expanding HIV screening to include self-testing and community-based screening. The Philippines moved from centralized HIV diagnosis confirmation by Western blot to a decentralized rapid HIV diagnostic algorithm (rHIVda). Dolutegravir-based antiretroviral therapy is now the first line. Pre-exposure prophylaxis in the form of emtricitabine–tenofovir disoproxil fumarate has been rolled out. The number of treatment hubs and primary HIV care facilities continues to increase. Despite these efforts, barriers to ending the HIV epidemic remain, including continued stigma, limited harm reduction services for people who inject drugs, sociocultural factors, and political deterrents. HIV RNA quantification and drug resistance testing are not routinely performed due to associated costs. The high burden of tuberculosis and hepatitis B virus co-infection complicate HIV management. CRF_01AE is now the predominant subtype, which has been associated with poorer clinical outcomes and faster CD4 T-cell decline. The HIV epidemic in the Philippines requires a multisectoral approach and calls for sustained political commitment, community involvement, and continued collaboration among various stakeholders. In this article, we outline the current progress and challenges in curbing the HIV epidemic in the Philippines. Full article

A Catholic pope and a Rawlsian statesman respectively represent religious and political leaders who confront the reality of war and face the challenge of responding to it. A political decision during conflict based exclusively on religious or secular justifications will be unconvincing in a contemporary plural public space. John Rawls’s solution to this dilemma was to offer justifications based on public reason grounded on political values and not on religious or secular values that support non-public reason. However, restraining religious arguments can ignite passionate religious objections when the decisions of government contradict the demands of their religious values. Hence, this paper argues against an exclusive position and highlights the importance of a nuanced approach that engages religious and political perspectives. The arguments are presented by engaging both Catholic and Rawlsian responses to war by focusing on just war theory and the role of a statesman. Full article