Academic literature on the topic 'Equality – Georgia (Republic)'

This article examines the factors influencing age at death in the multiethnic villages, comprised mostly of Georgians and Ossets, in the Kistauri commune in the eastern Republic of Georgia between 1897 and 1997. The data are analyzed with Cox proportional hazards models using age at death as the dependent variable, and ethnicity, gender, marital status, residency status, and year of birth as the independent variables. The results show that Georgians lived longer than Ossets. Individuals who had ever been married lived longer than those who had not. The results perhaps reflect harsher living conditions for Ossets, the ethnic minority, despite Soviet ideologies about equality.

ABSTRACT This article maps the circulation of Georgian books abroad, through translation, from 1991 to 2019 (since Georgia’s independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR] to Georgian culture’s internationalization after the guest-of-honorship at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair). The analysis demonstrates that interperipheral relations do not necessarily depend on mediation from the centers, as the world system of translations has tended to assume. Although the main locus of translation of Georgian books after 1991 was Western Europe, a “translation zone” distinct from the global centers of consecration situated in the Caucasus-Black Sea region has also emerged, while the shared history of twentieth-century socialism and its translational network may have left some traces in the post-Soviet space in terms of cultural transfers. Equally, the role of cultural mediators has proved crucial in the process of circulation. The article also argues for the use of alternative sources in order to analyze translation flows with the goal of adding nuance to the core-periphery model in light of the limitations of the Index Translationum.

Background: While pictorial health warning labels (HWLs) are evidence-based, the different messaging strategies are understudied. Methods: We analyzed 2014 national survey data from 1163 Georgian adults to examine: (1) perceived effectiveness of pictorial vs. text-only HWLs; (2) pictorial HWL themes; and (3) correlates of perceived effectiveness of different pictorial themes. Participants were randomized to evaluate the effectiveness of either Set A or Set B of HWLs (each contained half pictorial, half text-only). Results: All but 2 pictorial HWLs were perceived as more effective than text-only. Factor analyses identified one factor among Set A (“benign”) and two in Set B pictorial HWLs (“benign”, “gruesome”). Among Set A pictorial HWLs, correlates of greater perceived effectiveness included being female, rural residence, not having children, and nonsmoker status. Among smokers, correlates included being female and unmarried, fewer smoking friends, and higher quitting importance. Among Set B, 43.8% rated gruesome pictorial HWLs more effective, 12.9% benign more effective, and 43.4% equally effective. Correlates of perceiving benign more effective included fewer smoking friends and higher income. Among smokers, lower income predicted gruesome being perceived as more effective; fewer smoking friends and higher quitting importance predicted perceiving benign as more effective. Conclusion: A variety of pictorial HWL strategies should be used.

US presidential elections are peculiar contests based on mediation by an Electoral College in which votes are aggregated on a state-by-state basis. In 2020, as in 2016, the outcome was decided by a set of states where the two candidates were equally competitive: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two geographical stories tend to dominate accounts of what happened in 2020. The first story is based on red (Republican) versus blue (Democratic) states, and the second story relies upon rural versus urban biases in support for the two parties. After showing how and where Donald Trump outperformed the expectations of pre-election polls, we consider these two geographical stories both generally, and more specifically, in relation to the crucial swing states. Through an examination of the successes of Joe Biden in Arizona and Georgia, two states long thought of as “red”, and the role of the suburbs and local particularities in producing this result, we conclude that the polarization of the United States into two hostile electorates is exaggerated.

Based on the original documentary material collected by the author in the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova, an attempt has been made to investigate some unknown aspects of the struggle of Bessarabian Bulgarians against the tsarist policy of assimilation during the First World War. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Bulgarians ranked fifth in terms of population in Bessarabia – a province annexed to the Russian Empire in 1812. In all these years, they preserved their language, culture, and national traditions, transforming the Alexander III Boys’ Gymnasium in Bolgrad into a true centre of national culture. Many Bessarabian Bulgarians played an important role in the history of Bulgaria, holding positions of responsibility in the Bulgarian state. Some of them were the Prime Minister of Bulgaria Aleksandar Malinov, the Minister of War Danail Nikolaev, the Mayor of Sofia Martin Todorov and his brother General Georgi Todorov, and General Ivan Kolev. Despite this fact, and in contradiction with Russian historical mythology about special relations privileged with Bulgarians, the Russian authorities treated them equally with other national minorities, exposing them to forced assimilation, deportations, expulsions, repressions, and arrests of representatives of the Bulgarian national movement in the Russian Empire.

The article provides an empirical test of the hypothesis of the influence of the level of economic development of the country on the level of development of its social capital based on panel data analysis. In this study, the Indices of Social Development elaborated by the International Institute of Social Studies under World Bank support are used as an indicators of social capital development as they best meet the requirements for complexity (include six integrated indicators of Civic Activism, Clubs and Associations, Intergroup Cohesion, Interpersonal Safety and Trust, Gender Equality, Inclusion of Minorities), comprehensiveness of measurement, sustainability. In order to provide an empirical analysis, we built a panel that includes data for 20 countries divided into four groups according to the level of economic development. The first G7 countries (France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom); the second group is the economically developed countries, EU members and Turkey, the third group is the new EU member states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania); to the fourth group – post-Soviet republics (Armenia, Georgia, Russian Federation, Ukraine). The analysis shows that the parameters of economic development of countries cannot be completely excluded from the determinants of social capital. Indicators show that the slowdown in economic growth leads to greater cohesion among people in communities, social control over the efficiency of distribution and use of funds, and enforcement of property rights. The level of tolerance to racial diversity and the likelihood of negative externalities will depend on the change in the rate of economic growth. Also, increasing the well-being of people will have a positive impact on the level of citizens’ personal safety, reducing the level of crime, increasing trust. Key words: social capital, economic growth, determinant, indice of social development.

The subject of research in 1918-1921 is the parameters of the functioning of the media during the period of the Independent republic of Georgia and processes that contributed to the creation of a pluralistic media climate in the country and the establishment of liberal-democratic values. One of the manisfestations of this is the issue of human rights and social equality, which we will discuss in a specific direction – in terms of gender.Based on the plurastic media envionment, based on the contextual analysis of relevant sources, archival and newspaper publications, we gave selected and studied the main print media of the leqding, ideologically different political parties of 1918-1921: Socia;-Democratic Worker’s Party newapaper “Unity” (1917-1921). The Federalist Party “People’s Affairs” (1917-1921) and the National Democrats – “Georgia” (1915-1921). We analyzed how adequately, with what visions and journalistic means these media outlets covered the feminist narrative.We focused on publications on the problems of women’s emancipation, as well as women authors, the number of which, althouigh small, they are quite professionally able to properly focus on gender issues and in-depth understanding of women’s social or political issues (N.Nakashidze, M.Toroshelidze, F.Josh and others).The resuklts of the research showed that the party press of 1918-1921, on the one hand, clearly reflected the positive steps taken by the government of the Independent Republic of Georgia at the legislative level to protect human rights and, in particular, the feminist direction. On the other hand, the government’s lack of interest in the problems of woman’s social or legal equality appeared in a negative light.

AbstractTuberculosis (TB), a preventable and treatable disease, yearly affects millions of people and takes more than a million lives. Recognizing the symptoms and obtaining the correct diagnosis are vital steps towards treatment and cure. How timely a person with TB gets diagnosed may be influenced by biological differences between the sexes, and factors that are linked to the person’s gender, in the context of the prevailing gender norms. According to our hypothesis, gender-related factors contribute to delays in the diagnosis of TB. We investigated four countries (Georgia, Kazakhstan, Republic of Moldova, and Tajikistan) of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) - a region with a high burden of drug-resistant TB, scarcity of gender-related TB information, and varying gender equality. Retrospective information was collected directly from the people with a history of TB - through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. We did not find differences between genders in the way participants recognized TB symptoms. In three countries women de-prioritized seeking diagnosis because of their lack of access to finances, and household-related obligations. In all four countries, men, traditionally carrying the weight of economically supporting the family, tended to postpone TB diagnosis. In two countries women experienced stigma more often than men, and it was a deterrent factor to seeking healthcare. The role of gender in obtaining the correct diagnosis came forth only among the respondents from Georgia and to some extent from Kazakhstan. We conclude that there are barriers to health care seeking and TB diagnosis that affect differently women, men and gender-diverse persons in EECA Region.

Abstract Background The Republic of Georgia is part of the Caucasus biodiversity hotspot, and human agricultural plant use dates back at least 6000 years. Over the last years, lots of ethnobotanical research on the area has been published. In this paper, we analyze the use of food plants in the 80% of Georgia not occupied by Russian forces. We hypothesized that (1) given the long tradition of plant use, and the isolation under Soviet rule, plant use both based on home gardens and wild harvesting would be more pronounced in Georgia than in the wider region, (2) food plant use knowledge would be widely and equally spread in most of Georgia, (3) there would still be incidence of knowledge loss despite wide plant use, especially in climatically favored agricultural regions in Western and Eastern Georgia. Methods From 2013 to 2019, we interviewed over 380 participants in all regions of Georgia not occupied by Russian forces and recorded over 19,800 mentions of food plants. All interviews were carried out in the participants’ homes and gardens by native speakers of Georgian and its dialects (Imeretian, Rachian, Lechkhumian, Tush, Khevsurian, Psavian, Kakhetian), other Kartvelian languages (Megrelian, Svan) and minority languages (Ossetian, Ude, Azeri, Armenian, Greek). Results The regional division was based primarily on historic provinces of Georgia, which often coincides with the current administrative borders. The total number of taxa, mostly identified to species, including their varieties, was 527. Taxonomically, the difference between two food plant groups—garden versus wild—was strongly pronounced even at family level. The richness of plant families was 65 versus 97 families in garden versus wild plants, respectively, and the difference was highly significant. Other diversity indices also unequivocally pointed to considerably more diverse family composition of wild collected versus garden plants as the differences between all the tested diversity indices appeared to be highly significant. The wide use of leaves for herb pies and lactofermented is of particular interest. Some of the ingredients are toxic in larger quantities, and the participants pointed out that careful preparation was needed. The authors explicitly decided to not give any recipes, given that many of the species are widespread, and compound composition—and with it possible toxic effects—might vary across the distribution range, so that a preparation method that sufficiently reduces toxicity in the Caucasus might not necessary be applicable in other areas. Conclusions Relationships among the regions in the case of wild food plants show a different and clearer pattern. Adjacent regions cluster together (Kvemo Zemo Racha, and Zemo Imereti; Samegrelo, Guria, Adjara, Lechkhumi and Kvemo and Zemo Svaneti; Meskheti, Javakheti, Kvemo Kartli; Mtianeti, Kakheti, Khevsureti, Tusheti. Like in the case of the garden food plants, species diversity of wild food plants mentioned varied strongly. Climate severity and traditions of the use of wild food plants might play role in this variation. Overall food plant knowledge is widely spread all-across Georgia, and broadly maintained.

Defence date: 21 June 2018
Examining Board: Prof. Gabrielle Ballarino, University of Milan ; Prof. Fabrizio Bernardi, European University Institute, Supervisor ; Prof. Klarita Gërxhani, European University Institute ; Prof. Irena Kogan, University of Mannheim
Whether formal education can equalize life chances of people with different backgrounds, or further exacerbate inequalities that inevitably exist in any society, depends largely on how equally the chances to attain education are distributed among different socio-economic groups. Large-scale political, socio-economic, institutional and structural transformations that newly independent republics underwent in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union 25 years ago was bound to substantially change the distribution of those chances. Bridging the post-communist area studies with the social science scholarship on educational inequalities, with this thesis I study how inequalities in educational attainment changed in post-Soviet Russia and Georgia and what were broader implications of any such change. Using Gender and Generations Survey data from Russia and Georgia I have examined how chances of attaining various levels of education changed for people born to parents with different social status. I have used a merged dataset of repeated cross-sectional national survey from Russia to examine if returns to educational attainment changed during 1990s and 2000s. I find that while educational inequality has increased in both countries, particularly in attaining secondary education, returns to educational attainment, understandably small in the Soviet Union, did not increase much. This leads me to conclude that increasing educational inequalities did not contribute to the well-documented surge of income inequality. Finally, I used quasi-experimental approach to estimate the effect of the introduction of standardized university admissions examinations on the chances of access to highly selective universities. I find moderate support for the hypothesis that the standardized exams have equalized chances of students from various backgrounds to be admitted to selective universities.

This book covers major issues of constitutionalism in the American Revolution. It begins with the imperial debate over taxation and representation between the colonists and the British government. That debated climaxed with the Declaration of Independence. Each of the former colonies became republics and drew up written constitutions with several of them including bills of rights. These constitutions established patterns that later influenced the federal Constitution created in 1787, including bicameral legislatures, independent executives, and independent judiciaries. But because the Confederation of the states lacked the power to tax and regulate trade and the state legislatures were abusing their considerable power, the revolutionaries sought to solve both problems with a new federal Constitution in 1787. In addition to having to recognize the equality of each state in the Senate, the Convention faced the problem with slavery. Although most Americans thought that slavery was gradually dying, South Carolina and Georgia wanted to import more slaves and forced the Convention to guarantee twenty more years of slave importations and some protections for slavery in the Constitution. The institution that benefited most from the Revolution was the judiciary. It became very important in monitoring the demarcation between the public and the private realms that emerged from the Revolution.

This chapter looks at the first eight-hour-day campaign of 1866–67 in Chicago, which resulted in the first eight-hour law in the United States. The first eight-hour movement began shortly before the end of the Civil War, spearheaded by Boston mechanic Ira Steward and George McNeill and was soon taken up by native-born and British craft workers joined by German and Irish workers in Chicago. In 1865, Scottish printer Andrew C. Cameron formed Chicago's Grand Eight Hour League as a political organization independent of both the Republican and the Democratic Parties, with fourteen branches operating across the city hosting mass meetings, further pushing state and local politicians to support eight-hour reform. Initial eight-hour agitation quickly produced new arguments for shorter hours that capitalized on the themes of freedom and equality that had been crafted by the abolitionist movement to end slavery but also on themes familiar to those steeped in a heavily Protestant religious culture.

What is known about women’s participation as decision-makers in international affairs? Is it fair to assume, as many observers do, that female elites will mirror the relatively pacifist preferences of women in the general public as well as the claims of progressive feminist movements? By focusing on women’s presence in senior national security positions in the American political executive, Women as Foreign Policy Leaders offers among the first systematic responses to these questions. It examines four high-profile appointees in the United States since 1980: Jeane Kirkpatrick during the Reagan years, Madeleine Albright in the Clinton era, Condoleezza Rice during the George W. Bush presidencies, and Hillary Rodham Clinton in the first Obama mandate. Women as Foreign Policy Leaders documents the difference these four women made in a domain long dominated by men. In probing the actions taken by four appointees on matters of political conflict and gender equality, the book demonstrates that female decision-makers made diverse and transformative contributions during a series of Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. The track records of these four women reveal not just a consistent willingness to pursue muscular, aggressive approaches to international relations, but also widely divergent views about feminism. Women as Foreign Policy Leaders shows how Kirkpatrick, Albright, Rice, and Clinton staked out their presence on the international scene and provided a crucial antidote to the silencing of women’s voices in global politics.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

Melinda Lawson explores the meaning of national loyalty through the writings of abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips, anti-slavery Congressman George Julian, and President Abraham Lincoln. The author stresses that elite men were moved by notionsof “duty,” compelling them to uphold moral principles in their civic roles. Lawson’s work suggests the challenges men of antislavery conviction faced in a slaveholding republic where the Constitution nurtured the “peculiar institution.” Theirs was not a national loyalty of blind allegiance to the Constitution and the laws. Instead, each of the three held as sacred the ideals of liberty and equality written in the Declaration of Independence. This chapter traces how each man navigated the complicated duties of a true patriot through disunion and war.

The Epilogue charts the career of Georges Rémon, artistic grandchild of Pierre-Luc Cicéri. Rémon was an inventor of interior designs that took the historicist, themed aesthetic to a new level. Equally well-versed in revivalist and Art Nouveau interiors, Rémon also invented interior decorating schemes that paid lip service to the more recent political regimes of the nineteenth century (Second Republic style, Louis-Philippe style, Napoléon III style) as well as decorative settings in what would later become the Art Deco style. His workshop designed not only period rooms for the 1900 universal exhibition but also interiors of several ocean liners that brought the French aesthetic to America. His career is thus a perfect example of how the artistic output of upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, illustrators, collectors and department store managers, directed towards the private interior, invented a “system,” which saw that unity and harmony, as expressed through one main theme and coordinated by the same person, would guide the design of each interior. Without the invention of this “system,” the twentieth-century profession of the interior designer might never have been born.