The success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends on alignment between global aims and local decision-making. Presently missing are analyses that explain how local decision-making determines efforts to prompt transformational change. Specific to SDG2 (i.e., Zero Hunger), disregard for local decision-making manifests an endemic misrepresentation of agricultural extension as a means for achieving increased ‘production and/or productivity’. Engagements were undertaken with 390 cassava farming households in Northwest Cambodia, enabling analysis of how smallholders determine the success of global efforts to (...) intensify production. The findings uncover the adoption of ‘ngeay sruol’ farming (translation: convenience), defined as low-input and low-cost decision-making guided by risk-aversion. Both individually and collectively, smallholders lower their risk-taking and thereby refuse extension seeking to increase production and productivity. The smallholders remain open to production and productivity, but not when required to assume significant risk to their lives and livelihoods. Going beyond generic calls for improved global-local alignment or value chain access, ngeay sruol demonstrates the deterministic, past-future prefiguration of smallholder agency, which is likely to be encountered by top-down efforts to feed the world by 2030. (shrink)

In the forty‐year history of U.S. bioethics commissions, these government‐sanctioned forums have often demonstrated their power to address pressing problems and to enable policy change. For example, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established in 1974, left a legacy of reports that were translated into regulations and had an enormous practical impact. And the 1982 report Splicing Life, by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and (...) Behavioral Research, became the basis for the National Institutes of Health's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee as well as for the Food and Drug Administration's developing “Points to Consider” when contemplating the introduction of recombinant DNA into human beings. Some efforts of bioethics commissions, however, are not tightly connected to policy change or to outcomes directly linked to a specific report. While direct policy impact is indeed a useful metric for government bioethics commissions, it is not their only legitimate utility. For instance, bioethics commissions can also be incubators for deliberation on a hot topic, giving policy‐makers time to think through options while the political heat has some time to dissipate. Or a bioethics commission may stake out a position that enables a politician to take action while not necessarily following its recommendations. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

War and Border Crossings brings together renowned scholars to address some of the most pressing problems in public policy, international affairs, and the intercultural issues of our day. Contributors from widely varying disciplines discuss cross-cultural ethical issues and international topics ranging from American international policy and the invasion and occupation of Iraq to domestic topics such as immigration, the war on drugs, cross-cultural bioethics and ethical issues involving American Indian tribes. The culture clashes discussed in these essays raise serious questions (...) about what principles ought to inform the negotiating of conflicts in order to achieve, or at least approach, outcomes that are fundamentally just, fair, responsible, and ethical. (shrink)

"Brian Orend's The Morality of War promises to become the single most comprehensive and important book on just war for this generation. It moves far beyond the review of the standard just war categories to deal comprehensively with the new challenges of the conflict with terrorism. It thoughtfully reviews every major military conflict of the past few decades, mining them for implications of the evolving tradition of just war thinking. It concludes with a critical engagement with the major alternatives (...) to just war thinking: pacifism and 'realism.' It is, in short, the most comprehensive and thoughtful assessment of all aspects of just war since Michael Walzer's classic Just and Unjust Wars." - Martin L. Cook, United States Air Force Academy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Graffiti and Colonial Unknowing:A Comment on Mishuana Goeman's "Caring for Landscapes of Justice in Perilous Settler Environments"Anna Cookin "caring for landscapes of justice in Perilous Settler Environments," Dr. Goeman shows how the NDN Collective's initiatives, Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero's Tongvaland project, and the works of Gabrieliño Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame "exemplify communities of care" that work toward "the unmapping of settler terrains" ("Caring for Landscapes" 51). Her address highlights (...) how these cartographic art productions are processes of (re)mapping that challenge colonial spatialities. Drawing on Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's poem "i am graffiti," Goeman frames these art works as Indigenous graffiti, insofar as they are everyday acts of resurgence1 that resist erasure and enact rematriation.My comments aim to articulate how Romero's and Dorame's works both reveal and disrupt a colonial unknowing by showing the cracks of settler colonial spatiality. I take Goeman's address to illustrate that the changing of minds and unsettling of settler identity will not occur through argumentation, facts, and figures alone, but rather through aesthetic and cartographic practices that "provide a way of seeing Indigenous futurities and relationalities" ("Caring for Landscapes" 52).Maps as Tools of Settler ColonialismIn order to highlight how these art practices enact a kind of (re)mapping that breaks through the veneer of colonial permanence, we first need to consider the way mapping transforms land into property in the service of Indigenous erasure and land dispossession. In her address, Goeman offers a short history of what is now called Los Angeles through the lens of dispossession that occurs through "international claiming of property and burgeoning US property law" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). Tovaangar was divided into Spanish (and [End Page 64] then Mexican) land grants that, after 1846, were "registered under the US as property" (Goeman, "Caring for Landscapes" 53; emphasis added). The Land Act of 1851 "established the domestication of the California landscape under US governance" by legitimating existing Mexican land rights and mapping out territory yet "unclaimed" ("Caring for Landscapes" 54). The mapping of this so-called "unclaimed" territory propelled a violent erasure of California Indians by "establishing new and ongoing commerce centers" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). Land was transferred into property—as a thing owned—without "the consent of those who … lived on the land since time immemorial, following the settler structure of passing land between Christian nations" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). By showing how property rights legitimate conquest and violence, Goeman illustrates how mapping has been (and continues to be) an "essential settler-colonial tool to domesticate land in Southern California and propel development" ("Caring for Landscapes" 54). While she demonstrates how the mapping of Tovaangar using 493 hand-drawn Diseños maps served to sever Indigenous communities (and their relationships with land, such as the Gabrieliño Tongva with the San Gabriel Mountains), she emphasizes that this is an ongoing process that has not been left in a distant past. Newer maps that may seem more objective and scientific with "better models of scale or a more realist representation" remain, at their core, maps of dispossession ("Caring for Landscapes" 54).The very desire to objectively determine location by assigning latitude and longitude reveals a colonial spatiality, which "territorialize[s] the physical landscape by manufacturing categories and separating land from people" and conceives of space in terms of property logics (Goeman, "[Re]Mapping Indigenous Presence" 296). In addition to Indigenous land dispossession, this colonial spatiality rejects relationality by creating dualist boundaries between human and non-human, in which land is the raw material for human development and the creation of culture. Cherokee philosopher Brian Burkhart speaks of relationality in terms of locality, which he defines as "being-fromthe-land, knowing-from-the-land, and meaning-from-the-land" (Indigenizing Philosophy xvii). The severing of locality can be understood in terms of the transformation of land as relative to inert matter to be acted upon. Mapping serves as a tool of settler colonial erasure insofar as it delocalizes "land as the relational ground of kinship" into "land as a mere object that only has meaning or value in relation to people" ("Indigenizing Philosophy... (shrink)

R. M. Cook has recently pointed out that the transport of warships across the Isthmus of Corinth was not the normal use of the diolkos since there was no regular need for such transport. Rather, the diolkos from its inception served a commercial function and its use provided the Corinthian state with a source of revenue.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Tragic Evolutionary Logic of The IliadBrian BoydThe Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, by Jonathan Gottschall; xii & 223 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, $32.00 paperback.Jonathan Gottschall has conquered the oldest and craggiest peak of Western literature, The Iliad, by a new face. He stakes out the Darwin route to Homer so directly and clearly that he makes the climb inviting and inspiring (...) even to curious newcomers without high-altitude evolutionary training. And the vista he opens up offers us a chance to look in multiple directions: at Homer, at literary evolutionism and its possibilities, and at Gottschall's role in exploring this new route to discovery.One previous monograph has investigated a single literary work from a Darwinian viewpoint: Brett Cooke's analysis of Evgeny Zamyatin's 1921 science-fiction classic, We.1 Cooke's Human Nature in Utopia, by showing how Zamyatin appeals to the evolved nature of readers, in the face of the denial of human nature in his imagined One State and in early Soviet Communism, deepens our natural response to a modern classic. But where Cooke merely succeeds, Gottschall triumphs. The Rape of Troy not only deepens our response to a classic discussed for almost three millennia but also explains the world of Homer in a way no one could have seen without the multi-million-year perspective evolution allows—and does so with conceptual clarity, tight argument, effortless imagery, and copious verbal energy. [End Page 234]Gottschall emphasizes that his "evolutionary anthropology of conflict in Homeric society" does not attempt a Homeric "theory of everything" (pp. 3, 9). There is much of interest in The Iliad he does not touch on, and much even in possible evolutionary approaches to Homer that he does not consider. He focuses intently on a single two-part question: Why is there so much violence in the Iliad, and what effect does it have on how those in Homeric society see their world?After a brilliant introductory overview, he shows in his first two chapters how over the last century Homerists have increasingly turned to comparative anthropology to augment the meagre direct data. They have clarified that the Iliad was long obscured by later Western assumptions about states and kings, and that the poem probably reflects something like Homer's own world, within (at about 800 BCE) the late Greek Dark Age, a pre-state society in many ways closer to Highland New Guinea than to the worlds of Caesar or Charlemagne.Everyone who knows about the Trojan War knows that the Greeks fight Troy because the Trojan prince Paris took Helen from her husband, the Greek lord Menelaus. But readers of the Iliad want to know why thousands of soldiers on both sides persisted through ten years of brutal battle. Surely war on this scale cannot have been over just a woman? Scholars have proposed many explanations of what was really at stake. Immortal honor for men all too aware, day after bloody day, of their own physical mortality? Power? Status? Material goods? Prestige goods? A chance to neutralize enemies?By drawing on evolutionary biology and anthropology, Gottschall can show that this war, like most human violence against other humans, and even like most intraspecies animal violence, stems ultimately from male competition over females. He introduces the powerful and far-reaching principle of differential parental investment developed by Robert Trivers.2 As Gottschall lucidly elaborates: "males will attempt to mate more promiscuously both because sex is cheaper for them, and because they have the potential to produce many offspring with multiple females. I emphasize the words 'attempt' and 'potential' because if every male adopts a relatively promiscuous strategy, and if some males succeed, then other males will not reproduce at all" (p. 44). The far more divergent rates of reproductive success among males than among females prove to be the key determinant. Gottschall sums up: "males typically face higher risks of total reproductive failure and higher hopes of extraordinary reproductive success. This creates strong incentives to compete for mates. Males who are better able to compete for access to [End Page 235] scarce female reproductive capacity, in whatever form... (shrink)

‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who (...) are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles. (shrink)

The semantic paradoxes are often associated with self-reference or referential circularity. Yablo (Analysis 53(4):251–252, 1993), however, has shown that there are infinitary versions of the paradoxes that do not involve this form of circularity. It remains an open question what relations of reference between collections of sentences afford the structure necessary for paradoxicality. In this essay, we lay the groundwork for a general investigation into the nature of reference structures that support the semantic paradoxes and the semantic hypodoxes. We develop (...) a functionally complete infinitary propositional language endowed with a denotation assignment and extract the reference structural information in terms of graph-theoretic properties. We introduce the new concepts of dangerous and precarious reference graphs, which allows us to rigorously define the task: classify the dangerous and precarious directed graphs purely in terms of their graph-theoretic properties. Ungroundedness will be shown to fully characterize the precarious reference graphs and fully characterize the dangerous finite graphs. We prove that an undirected graph has a dangerous orientation if and only if it contains a cycle, providing some support for the traditional idea that cyclic structure is required for paradoxicality. This leaves the task of classifying danger for infinite acyclic reference graphs. We provide some compactness results, which give further necessary conditions on danger in infinite graphs, which in conjunction with a notion of self-containment allows us to prove that dangerous acyclic graphs must have infinitely many vertices with infinite out-degree. But a full characterization of danger remains an open question. In the appendices we relate our results to the results given in Cook (J Symb Log 69(3):767–774, 2004) and Yablo (2006) with respect to more restricted sentences systems, which we call $\mathcal{F}$ -systems. (shrink)

List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction Robert S. Westman and David C. Lindberg; 1. Conceptions of the scientific revolution from Bacon to Butterfield: a preliminary sketch David C. Lindberg; 2. Conceptions of science in the scientific revolution Ernan McMullin; 3. Metaphysics and the new science Gary Hatfield; 4. Proof, portics, and patronage: Copernicus’s preface to De revolutionibus Robert S. Westman; 5. A reappraisal of the role of the universities in the scientific revolution John Gascoigne; 6. Natural magic, hermetism, and occultism in (...) early modern science Brian P. Copenhaver; 7. Natural history and the emblematic world view William B. Ashworth, Jr.; 8. From the secrets of nature to public knowledge William Eamon; 9. Chemistry in the scientific revolution: problems of language and communication Jan V. Golinski; 10. The new philosophy and medicine in seventeenth-century England Harold J. Cook; 11. Science and heterodoxy: an early modern problem reconsidered Michael Hunter; 12. Infinitesimals and transcendent relations: the mathematics of motion in the late seventeenth century Michael S. Mahoney; 13. The case of mechanics: one revolution or many? Alan Gabbey; Index. (shrink)

Discussions of the object as a key to understanding central aspects of modern and contemporary art. Artists increasingly refer to "post-object-based" work while theorists engage with material artifacts in culture. A focus on "object-based" learning treats objects as vectors for dialogue across disciplines. Virtual imaging enables the object to be abstracted or circumvented, while immaterial forms of labor challenge materialist theories. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the "objectness" of production, with art as its focus. Among the topics (...) it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and things; the significance of the object's transition from inert mass to tool or artifact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past. Artists surveyed include Georges Adéagbo, Art in Ruins, Iain Baxter, Louise Bourgeois, Pavel Büchler, Lygia Clark, Claude Closky, Brian Collier, Jimmie Durham, Fischli & Weiss, Luca Frei, Meschac Gaba, Isa Genzken, Gruppe Geflecht, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, John Latham, Antje Majewski, Gustav Metzger, Cady Noland, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Piper, Falke Pisano, Eva Rothschild, Aura Satz, Kenneth Snelson, Hito Steyerl, Josef Strau, Alina Szapocznikow, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Erwin Wurm Writers include Homi K. Bhabha, Jack Burnham, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Lynne Cooke, Gillo Dorfles, Jean Fisher, Ferreira Gullar, Charles Harrison, Paulo Herkenhoff, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Jean-François Lyotard, Lev Manovich, Ursula Meyer, Bruno Munari, Georges Perec, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Dieter Roelstraete, Howard Singerman, Nancy Spector, Marcus Steinweg, Anne Wagner, Gérard Wajcman, Slavoj Zizek. (shrink)