Scholarly Works, Political Science
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
- Targeting the Weak: Exploring Transnational Digital RepressionBrantly, Aaron F. (NASK National Research Institute, 2025-05-02)Much of the cyber conflict literature is heavily focused on state-on-state cyber conflict. Yet, data is available indicating that the most vulnerable are the non-state actors who comprise civil-society organisations, religious, cultural, or political minorities who seek refuge in diaspora communities. The communities and individuals who seek refuge in third-party nations with more permissive legal environments are increasingly being targeted by the regimes in their origin states via cyber means. These attacks meant to safeguard the ‘sovereignty’ or will of the attacking (home) nation, undermine the sovereignty and security of the harbouring nation, and the rights of the people residing within it. This analysis examines how cyber conflict extending across borders, but not targeting foreign governments, is an increasingly common and pernicious phenomenon. These attacks are clandestine in nature and meant to undermine domestic adversaries residing abroad. This paper examines why and how states target these populations and the implications of these attacks on host nation sovereignty. The analysis seeks to expand the cyber conflict literature by presenting data and cases on cyber conflicts targeting the weakest members of the global community, those seeking refuge from oppressive regimes.
- Feminist approaches to environmental politicsLawrence, Jennifer L.; Altamirano-Jimenez, Isabel; Daggett, Cara; MacGregor, Sherilyn; Ray, Emily; Wiebe, Sarah Marie; Battersby, Hannah; Rodekirchen, Magdalena; Urquhart, Heather (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025-03-01)
- Citizenship in the shadow of law: identifying the origins, effects, and operation of legal ambiguity in JordanFrost, Lillian; Schaaf, Steven D. (Cambridge University Press, 2024-12-01)What are the origins and effects of legal ambiguity in authoritarian regimes? Using a detailed case study of nationality rights in Jordan - which draws from interviews with 210 Jordanian political officials, judges, lawyers, activists, and citizens/residents - we develop a framework for understanding how legal ambiguity emerges, and how it matters, under authoritarianism. We first conceptualize four discrete forms in which legal ambiguity manifests: lexical ambiguity (in legal texts); substantive ambiguity (in status as law); conflictual ambiguity (between contradictory legal rules); and operational ambiguity (in enforcement processes). We then scrutinize the emergence and effects of legal ambiguity in Jordanian nationality policy by integrating historical process tracing, detailed interview evidence, and a content analysis of archival documents, laws, and court verdicts pertaining to nationality rights. Our findings contribute to scholarship on legal ambiguity, authoritarian legality, and discretionary state authority by showing that (1) crisis junctures make the emergence of legal ambiguity more likely; (2) legal ambiguity takes a variety of different forms that warrant conceptual disaggregation; and (3) different forms of legal ambiguity often have disparate effects on how authoritarian state power is organized and experienced in public life.
- Path Dependence, Institutional (Non-)Change and Politicisation: The EU-Turkey Customs Union and the Evolution of German-Turkish Trade TiesTsarouhas, Dimitris (Routledge, 2025-05)How can one account for flourishing trade relations between Turkey and Germany despite multiple political crises? Adopting a historical institutionalist approach, combined with the politicisation literature, I make a twofold argument. First, the 1995 EU-Turkey Customs Union (CU) constitutes a critical juncture with important long-term consequences for bilateral trade and the integration of Turkish industry to European and global value chains. The CU has enforced the modernisation of administrative and regulatory structures of the Turkish industrial sector, which serve as a default stabiliser in maintaining relations between Germany and Turkey through turbulent political times. Second, the politicisation of Germany-Turkey relations, due to the dense EU-Turkey regime complex and the prominent role that the ‘Turkey question’ now plays in EU politics, has prevented the modernisation of the CU. The fact that this non-change has occurred despite strong support by German and Turkish business circles demonstrates the salience of politicisation, and the subordinate role economic ties play in boosting Turkey’s EU vocation.
- Negotiating the recovery and resilience facility: the emergence of coordinative conditionalityLadi, Stella; Tsarouhas, Dimitris; Copeland, Paul (Springer Nature, 2025-02)This paper analyses the design and negotiations of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) which the EU member states were required to formulate so as to access the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). By focusing on three Eurozone members (Austria, Greece, and Slovakia) which represent distinct voices and experiences within the EU integration project, we argue that a new form of conditionality, coordinative conditionality, can be identified. While this conditionality shares many features with previous conditionality forms, it is also unique as it results from what has been described as coordinative Europeanisation, namely early coordination between the EU and member states; informal channels of communication alongside formal negotiations; and a heightened salience of ownership by national governments. We argue that although evidence of coordinative Europeanisation can be found during the design and negotiation of the NRRPs in all three countries, the intensity of conditionality’s different aspects is mediated by the credibility of a given member state’s government.
- The Dark Enlightenment and the Anthropocene: Readings from the Book of Third Nature as Political TheologyLuke, Timothy W. (Telos Press, 2021-03-19)
- Author's Response: Writing from the RuinsCaraccioli, Mauro J. (Sage, 2024-12-10)
- Learning how to count: Pedagogies of accountability in the pandemic universityCaraccioli, Mauro J. (Sage, 2024-09-28)This article examines the pedagogical politics at play in the quantification of faculty labor in contemporary U.S. academia. It focuses on the author’s experiences at a large, land-grant, R1 university, going through the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) review process and reflecting on the various kinds of responsibilities that emerged from structural and personal transformations during the COVID-19 pandemic. By developing a pedagogy of accountability against quantitative compartmentalization, the essay outlines how to posit care, empowerment, and reflexivity as central to all learning, especially for teachers and particularly in times of crisis. In this context, ‘learning how to count’ means going against faceless metrics of one-to-one correspondence with other faculty or peer institutions and instead embracing what Paulo Freire called the ‘civic courage’ to teach as a commitment to others and the self.
- Climate Change Deniers versus Climate Change Decriers: The Pragmatics of Climate Defense in the Age of DisinformationLuke, Timothy W. (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, 2024-10-29)Thirty-five years ago, Bill McKibben published his best-selling popular depiction of climate change, The End of Nature. Nearly a decade ago, Naomi Klein's global best-seller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate presented her detailed brief: “thought leaders” must resist and reverse the degradation of Earth's climate in the face of denials that this policy change was impossible. As popular activists, McKibben and Klein both believe “more information leads to good and great change.” This gambit presumes when presented disturbing facts on how and why rising fossil fuel use is degrading the climate, like-minded readers will wisely rise, readily organize and rationally stop such destruction. Both authors have thriving careers as “thought leaders,” but the gamble that informative writing would inspire game-changing decisive actions has backfired. In fact, the intensity of their climate decrying for millions of “action laggards” is twisted into disinformation to justify climate denying. Nature has not ended, and climate change has not changed everything. Costly climate disasters are increasing; but habits of embedded symbolic action tied to moralistic decrying suggest McKibben and Klein now play new roles as artful traders in the networks of disinformation. In today’s ESG-guided climate politics, major energy companies nod appreciatively to climate decriers, pledging future perfection at carbon reduction in contrite denialist exchange for sustaining the continued present degradation of their carbon emissions. This is a puzzle. Are answers to the puzzle to be found in Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which explores to what degree everyday life now is not engaged with the natural world? Instead, denial and disinformation seem to ensnare it in “trips into the Mirror World” where sustainable degradation produces “digital doubles” of fulfilled future pledges of true sustainability in the 24x7 attention economy underpinned by the falsehoods of current concentrated carbon intensity.
- The Anthropocene and Freedom: Terrestrial time as political mystificationLuke, Timothy W. (2013-10)
- Black Representation and District Compactness in Southern Congressional DistrictsGoedert, Nicholas; Hildebrand, Robert; Pierson, Matthew; Travis, Laurel; Fravel, Jamie (2024-04-01)This paper explores the assumed trade-off between district compactness and Black representation in legislative districts in the American South. We perform analysis both on heuristically generated districts using current US demographics, and on historical congressional maps since the 1970s. Computations are performed using an iterative heuristic to find feasible solutions guided by multiple objectives. We find that while the trade-off has been strongly observed historically, it is possible to effectively address both goals simultaneously in most cases. We are able to demonstrate maps substantially superior to the present enacted maps on both dimensions in at least seven of nine states analyzed. Nevertheless, the trade-off appears more necessary in states with larger and/or more heavily rural Black populations than in more urbanized states, where the drawing of compact Blackinfluence districts is easier.
- Sustainabilization: A Critique of Green Economy(s)Luke, Timothy W. (2016-09-22)
- Postmodern Geopolitics in the 21st Century: Lessons from the 9.11.01 Terrorist AttacksLuke, Timothy W. (2003-11-30)
- AI and the ambiguity of the pharmakonZanotti, Laura (2024-07-05)This conference paper explores how relational approaches based on quantum social science may offer conceptual frameworks to conceptualize and evaluate AI and how the United Nations and Academia may offer avenues for engaging ethically with this borderless phenomenon.
- Towards anarchist abolitionist futures for violence prevention: Beyond 'counterterrorism'Dixit, Priya (Cambridge University Press, 2024-11-25)Recent critical scholarship on terrorism has centred on matters of race, class, and gender regarding how counterterrorism policies are connected to multiple systems of hierarchical power relations. This article builds upon this scholarship and looks towards the future. It engages with understandings of emancipatory futures in critical scholarship on terrorism while drawing upon abolitionist and anarchist political thought to expand understandings of such futures. Anarchist and abolitionist thinking are useful for considering futures beyond the 'global war on terror' (GWOT) because of their anti-state and anti-domination orientations and focus on building alternatives to prevent and manage violence apart from contemporary 'counterterrorism'. After providing an outline of anarchist and abolitionist thought, the article connects these to contemporary examples drawn from the United States and Nepal. In doing so, it theorises and imagines futures for preventing violence and building public security that are linked to anarchist and abolitionist understandings of violence and the state. In contrast to 'power politics' which centres on the state, an anarchist abolitionist approach explores how safety and security can be reimagined and remade in the absence of a state.
- More Than a Journal: Politics & Gender and the Study of Women as National LeadersJalalzai, Farida (Cambridge University Press, 2024-09-30)
- Global Cities vs. “global cities:” Rethinking Contemporary Urbanism as Public EcologyLuke, Timothy W. (Routledge, 2003-03)
- The Spyware Industrial ComplexSpens, Brooke (Tech4Humanity Lab, 2024-11-01)Over the last decade, commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs) have capitalized off the demand for full service cyber espionage tools from government customers. The demand has created an incentive model for firms to develop intrusion technologies, further proliferating the spyware industry at the risk of human rights and the security of users. Missteps of spyware companies resulting in the erroneous surveillance of civil society has been well documented by watchdog groups like University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Amnesty International. Rather than the misapplication of surveillance tools as is often covered in the media, this report will examine the ecosystem that supports the development, selling, and sustainment of commercial spying. Reports by Steven Feldstein and Brian Kot, Google’s Threat Analysis Group, and other works will be drawn on throughout this analysis. This paper aims to define the features and patterns of cyber espionage firms that produce the spyware utilized in the “pay-to-play” model.
- An Exploratory Mixed-methods Study on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance in Open-Source SoftwareFranke, Lucas; Liang, Huayu; Farzanehpour, Sahar; Brantly, Aaron F.; Davis, James C.; Brown, Chris (ACM, 2024-10-24)Background: Governments worldwide are considering data privacy regulations. These laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), require software developers to meet privacy-related requirements when interacting with users’ data. Prior research describes the impact of such laws on software development, but only for commercial software. Although opensource software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do not know how such laws impact open-source software development. Aims: To understand how data privacy laws affect open-source software (OSS) development, we focus on the European Union’s GDPR, as it is the most prominent such law. We investigated how GDPR compliance activities influence OSS developer activity (RQ1), how OSS developers perceive fulfilling GDPR requirements (RQ2), the most challenging GDPR requirements to implement (RQ3), and how OSS developers assess GDPR compliance (RQ4). Method:We distributed an online survey to explore perceptions of GDPR implementations from open-source developers (N=56). To augment this analysis, we further conducted a repository mining study to analyze development metrics on pull requests (N=31,462) submitted to open-source GitHub repositories. Results: Our results suggest GDPR policies complicate OSS development and introduce challenges, primarily regarding the management of users’ data, implementation costs and time, and assessments of compliance. Moreover, we observed negative perceptions of the GDPR from OSS developers and significant increases in development activity, in particular metrics related to coding and reviewing, on GitHub pull requests related to GDPR compliance. Conclusions: Our findings provide future research directions and implications for improving data privacy policies, motivating the need for relevant resources and automated tools to support data privacy regulation implementation and compliance efforts in OSS.
- A First Look at the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Open-Source SoftwareFranke, Lucas; Liang, Huayu; Brantly, Aaron F.; Davis, James C.; Brown, Chris (ACM, 2024-04-14)This poster describes work on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in open-source software. Although open-source software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do not know how such laws impact open-source software development. We surveyed open-source developers (N=47) to understand their experiences and perceptions of GDPR. We learned many engineering challenges, primarily regarding the management of users’ data and assessments of compliance. We call for improved policy-related resources, especially tools to support data privacy regulation implementation and compliance in open-source software.