Books on the topic 'Hard Sphere Systems'

How do women claim rights against violence in India and with what consequences? By observing how women navigate the Indian criminal justice system, Roychowdhury provides a unique lens on rights negotiations in the world’s largest democracy. She finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. They do so because law enforcement personnel are incapacitated and unwilling to enforce the law. As a result, rights negotiations do not necessarily lead to more woman-friendly outcomes or better legal enforcement. Instead, they allow some women to make gains outside the law: repossess property and children, negotiate cash settlements, join women’s groups, access paid employment, develop a sense of self-assurance, and become members of the public sphere. Capable Women, Incapable States shows how the Indian criminal justice system governs violence against women not by protecting them from harm but by forcing them to become “capable”: to take the law into their own hands and complete the hard work that incapable and unwilling state officials refuse to complete. Roychowdhury’s book houses implications for how we understand gender inequality and governance not just in India but in large parts of the world where political mobilization for rights confronts negligent and incapacitated criminal justice systems.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

This chapter assesses Khrushchev's reforms in the penal sphere. The reforms of the Khrushchev period had an important lasting effect on the Soviet penal system. This certainly holds true in terms of the Gulag's permanent reduction in size, but it also applies to the reorientation of Gulag aims and the resultant improved conditions experienced by its inmates. Although certain inmate privileges were reduced or eliminated in the early 1960s at the culmination of the “camp is not a resort” campaign, many of the most important prisoner-friendly reforms of the 1950s, such as parole and the eight-hour workday, remained. Despite certain continuities, therefore, the Gulag did not return to a state of unchecked (and even abetted) violence, grueling labor, and oppressive living conditions—the defining features of the Stalinist penal system. De-Stalinization in the penal sphere was a real and enduring legacy of the Khrushchev era.

The climate of our planet is changing at a rate unprecedented in recent human history. The energy absorbed from the sun exceeds what is returned to space. The planet as a whole is gaining energy. The heat content of the ocean is increasing; the surface and atmosphere are warming; mid-latitude glaciers are melting; sea level is rising. The Arctic Ocean is losing its ice cover. None of these assertions are based on theory but on hard scientific fact. Given the science-heavy nature of climate change, debates and discussions have not played as big a role in the public sphere as they should, and instead are relegated to often misinformed political discussions and inaccessible scientific conferences. Michael B. McElroy, an eminent Harvard scholar of environmental studies, combines both his research chops and pedagogical expertise to present a book that will appeal to the lay reader but still be grounded in scientific fact. In Energy and Climate: Vision for the Future, McElroy provides a broad and comprehensive introduction to the issue of energy and climate change intended to be accessible for the general reader. The book includes chapters on energy basics, a discussion of the contemporary energy systems of the US and China, and two chapters that engage the debate regarding climate change. The perspective is global but with a specific focus on the US and China recognizing the critical role these countries must play in addressing the challenge of global climate change. The book concludes with a discussion of initiatives now underway to at least reduce the rate of increase of greenhouse gas emissions, together with a vision for a low carbon energy future that could in principle minimize the long-term impact of energy systems on global climate.

The goal of this chapter is to understand how Switzerland has managed to turn a linguistic make-up that is centrifugally explosive in theory into one that is relatively benign in practice. On the one hand, it is argued that numerous historical particularities and political decisions have served to curtail the centrifugal forces that are presumed to be typical of political systems constituted by linguistically demarcated public spheres. On the other hand, Switzerland serves to corroborate a core hypothesis of this project, namely that the institutionalization of democratic legitimacy will produce powerful centripetal effects on the political community. In sum, a host of factors help to explain why Switzerland does not fall apart, but it is its quality of democracy that is largely responsible for keeping it together.

Law lay at the heart of the colonial encounter. This chapter examines the ‘deep effects’ that the colonial encounter had on law in Africa and how the very ‘litigiousness’ of Africans reflects both social change and African agency. Colonial officials used law to promote both legibility and stability of African societies. In practice, however, colonial legal systems promoted conflict by imposing rules and expectations that were not widely shared or deeply embedded in African discourses of political and social authority. The chapter explores how colonial legal pluralism led to the establishment of new formal legal institutions and how litigants used the multiple arenas created by overlapping systems of dispute settlement. Even though it was designed to respect ‘custom’, the colonial legal sphere involved the seepage of metropolitan concepts and procedures into native law and practice and often led to changes in the legal character and capacity of individuals. This enabled women, younger adults, and low-status individuals to confront men and higher status individuals even in courts designed to uphold custom.

On the basis of systems theory, Gunther Teubner has developed a sociologically informed theory of law and constitutionalism that does not rest on the sovereign state, but on the functionally differentiated society. From this point of view, law and constitutionalism can also emerge without a state: in transnational political processes on the one hand and in the ‘private’ spheres of world society on the other. The search for unity and hierarchy in the law may be futile under these circumstances. As Teubner suggests, however, collisions between the various constitutional fragments may be addressed by a new kind of conflicts law that follows the model of private international law. With contributions by Ino Augsberg, Anna Beckers, Gralf-Peter Calliess, Pasquale Femia, Karl-Heinz Ladeur, Andreas Maurer, Riccardo Prandini, Ralf Seinecke, Thomas Vesting, Lars Viellechner

The challenges posed by the intents to end the armed conflict have mobilized various reflections, from the academic sphere -as researchers- to the composition of family life. This research has combined these two ranges; the one that, on the one hand, inquires for the construction of knowledge and, on the other, establishes territories and transmits culture through motherhood. Thus, given the evident difficulty of the political scenario, and as part of the academic commitment of the universities that are members of the State University System of the Capital District (sue-Capital District), academic cooperation efforts were joined with the purpose of developing this research project called “Post-agreement and Cultural Transmission of Peace in Mothers in Bogotá” (sue-2019). This book is the result of the study from an exploration of discursive, anthropological, sociological, territorial, and psychological aspects. We hope it would have effect on the road to peace.

The concept of Christianization dominates scholarship on the early Middle Ages. Yet, “Christianization” is a vague, anachronistic term, applied haphazardly to group an assortment of diverse changes as if all had the same cause. Moreover, the concept treats Christianity as a “religion”: a transhistorical system of fixed doctrines and institutions separate from other spheres of life. Early medieval Christianity, however, was an evolving conglomeration of rituals, ideas, practices, and institutions. Medieval people thought that someone became a Christian not by accepting a religion, but rather by joining the Christian commonwealth (res publica christiana) through certain universal rituals—Rogationtide among them. By studying the development of Rogationtide, this book formulates a paradigm for Christianization without the need for “religion.”

Between 1820 and 1870, European musical culture changed. Previously, a certain type of program had dominated the musical sphere: contemporary works spanning various genres including opera. In the 1870s new actors emerged. A learned world of classical music came into being, focusing on orchestral and chamber pieces, with less of a connection to opera. New kinds of songs, increasingly termed “popular,” began to make their mark in roughly similar European venues. In these contexts, listening practices reflected radically different social values and expectations. But did mixed programming remain in some concert performances? Did listeners demonstrate eclectic musical tastes? Taking examples from Paris, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Berlin, this chapter shows how links were made between contrasting repertoires by the importation or adaptation of works. A process that seems at first to have been an exception turns out to have been a conventional system of exchange.

The English School, or society of states approach, is a threefold method for understanding how the world operates. According to English School logic, there are three distinct spheres at play in international politics, and two of these are international society and world society—the third being international system. On the one hand, international society (Hugo Grotius) is about the institutionalization of shared interest and identity amongst states, and rationalism puts the creation and maintenance of shared norms, rules, and institutions at the centre of international relations (IR) theory. This position has some parallels to regime theory, but is much deeper, having constitutive rather than merely instrumental implications. On the other hand, world society (Immanuel Kant) takes individuals, non-state organizations, and the global population as a whole as the focus of global societal identities and arrangements, and revolutionism puts transcendence of the state system at the centre of IR theory. Revolutionism is mostly about forms of universalist cosmopolitanism. This position has some parallels to transnationalism but carries a much more foundational link to normative political theory. International society has been the main focus of English School thinking, and the concept is quite well developed and relatively clear, whereas world society is the least well developed of the English School concepts and has not yet been clearly or systematically articulated.

This chapter maintains that as both municipal and international law use legal norms to regulate social relationships, a space for inter-systemic interaction between both legal spheres emerges. Municipal legal practice can have an ‘upstream’ impact on the formation of the content of the sources of international law, where these require proof of State practice and/or opinio juris for valid norms to be generated. Particularly, domestic court decisions can have a jurisgenerative effect on customary international law, where they become part of a transnational dialogue between domestic and international courts on questions of international law determination. Admittedly, this dialogical process is hamstrung by the particularities of domestic law and the hard-to-eradicate selection bias of international law-appliers. However, a more objective comparative international law process can be grounded, geared to effective problem-solving guided by the persuasiveness and quality of reasoning of municipal court decisions relevant to international law.

Hegel, who pioneers presuppositionless, foundation-free autonomous reason in his Science of Logic and the ethics of self-determination in his Philosophy of Right, might be expected to follow parallel itineraries in both works. Hegel develops logical determinacy into the three successive domains of the contrastive determinacy of the Logic of Being, the determined determinacy of the Logic of Essence, and the self-determined determinacy of the Logic of the Concept. On the other hand, he develops self-determined conduct as a self-ordered system of intersubjective structures of rights, falling into three domains: Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Community, dividing Ethical Community itself into the three spheres of family, social, and political ethical community. This chapter examines whether the division of the Philosophy of Right has an intrinsic necessity and completeness and whether that necessity and completeness can be confirmed through any correlation with the categorial division of the Science of Logic.

This book re-examines the alterations in Western European life that followed widespread conversion to Christianity—the phenomena traditionally termed “Christianization”; it re-centers scholarly paradigms for Christianization around the development of mandatory rituals. One prominent ritual—Rogationtide, a three-day penitential procession before Ascension Thursday—supplies an ideal case study demonstrating a new paradigm of “Christianization without religion.” Christianization in the Middle Ages was not a slow process through which a Christian system of religious beliefs and practices replaced an earlier pagan system. “Religion,” in the sense of a fixed system of belief bounded off from other spheres of life, did not exist in the Middle Ages. Rather, Christianization was primarily ritual performance. Being a Christian meant joining a local church community. After the fall of Rome, mandatory rituals such as Rogationtide arose to separate a Christian commonwealth from the pagans, heretics, and Jews outside it. A Latin West between the polis and the parish had its own institution—the Rogation procession—for organizing local communities. For medieval people, sectarian borders were flexible, except when they did not want those borders to be so. Rituals served to demarcate these borders. Rogationtide is an ideal case study of this demarcation, because it was an emotionally powerful feast that combined pageantry with doctrinal instruction, community formation, social ranking, devotional exercises, and bodily mortification. As a result, rival groups quarrelled over the holiday’s meaning and procedure, sometimes violently, in order to reshape the local order and ban people and practices as non-Christian.

Former chief CNN India correspondent and award-wining journalist Ravi Agrawal takes readers on a journey across the Subcontinent, through its remote rural villages and its massive metropolises, seeking out the nexuses of change created by smartphones, and with them connection to the internet. As always with India, the numbers are staggering: in 2000, 20 million Indians had access to the internet; by 2017, 465 million were online, with three Indians discovering the internet every second. By 2020, India's online community is projected to exceed 700 million, and more than a billion Indians are expected to be online by 2025. In the course of a single generation, access to the internet has progressed from dial-up connections on PCs, to broadband access, wireless, and now 4G data on phones. The rise of low-cost smartphones and cheap data plans has meant the country leapfrogged the baby steps their Western counterparts took toward digital fluency. The results can be felt in every sphere of life, upending traditions and customs and challenging conventions. Nothing is untouched, from arranged marriages to social status to business start-ups, as smartphones move the entire economy from cash-based to credit-based. Access to the internet is affecting the progress of progress itself. As Agrawal shows, while they offer immediate and sometimes mind-altering access to so much for so many, smartphones create no immediate utopia in a culture still driven by poverty, a caste system, gender inequality, illiteracy, and income disparity. Internet access has provided greater opportunities to women and changed the way in which India's many illiterate poor can interact with the world, but it has also meant that pornography has become more readily available. Under a government keen to control content, it has created tensions. And in a climate of hypernationalism, it has fomented violence and even terrorism. The influence of smartphones on "the world's largest democracy" is nonetheless pervasive and irreversible, and India Connected reveals both its dimensions and its implications.

John Wesley founded Methodism as an evangelical renewal movement within the Church of England. That structure encouraged both establishment impulses and Dissenting movements within Methodism in the North American context. In Canada, British missionaries planted a moderate, respectable form of Methodism, comfortable with the establishment. In Ontario, however, Methodism drew from a more democratized, enthusiastic revivalism that set itself apart from the establishment. After a couple of generations, however, these poorer outsiders had moved into the middle class, and Canadian Methodism grew into the largest denomination, with a sense of duty to nurture the social order. Methodism in the United States, however, embodied a paradox representative of a nation founded in a self-conscious act of Dissent against an existing British system. Methodism came to embrace the American cultural centre while simultaneously generating Dissenting movements. After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans challenged deference, hierarchy, patronage, patriarchy, and religious establishments. Methodism adopted this stance in the religious sphere, growing as an enthusiastic, anti-elitist evangelistic campaign that validated the spiritual experiences of ordinary people. Eventually, Methodists began moving towards middle-class respectability and the cultural establishment, particularly in the largest Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). However, democratized impulses of Dissent kept re-emerging to animate new movements and denominations. Republican Methodists and the Methodist Protestant Church formed in the early republic to protest the hierarchical structures of the MEC. African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in response to racism in the MEC. The Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Free Methodists emerged in protest against both slavery and hierarchy. The issue of slavery divided the MEC into northern and southern denominations. The split reflected a battle over which religious vision of slavery would be adopted by the cultural establishment. The denominations remained divided after the Civil War, but neither could gain support among newly freed blacks in the South. Freed from a racialized religious establishment embedded in slavery, former slaves flocked to independent black Methodist and Baptist churches. In the late nineteenth century, Methodism spawned another major evangelical Dissenting movement, the Holiness movement. Although they began with an effort to strengthen Wesleyan practices of sanctification within Methodism, Holiness advocates soon became convinced that most Methodists would not abandon what they viewed as complacency, ostentation, and worldliness. Eventually, Holiness critiques led to conflicts with Methodist officials, and ‘come-outer’ groups forged a score of new Holiness denominations, including the Church of God (Anderson), the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene. Holiness zeal for evangelism and sanctification also spread through the missionary movement, forming networks that would give birth to another powerful, fragmented, democratized movement of world Christianity, Pentecostalism.