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The article investigates the social making of counter-terrorism in international organizations (IOs). Discussing the literatures that emphasize the (in)coherence of multilateral counter-terrorism and the diversity of interests that interact and converge in these policies, the article highlights the determinants by which an object as vague and dissensual as post-9/11 counter-terrorism is ordered and stabilized within IOs. Therefore, the article provides an alternative sociological exploration of counter-terrorism in IOs by delving into the dynamics of frictions and power. Multilateral counter-terrorism is conceptualized as a socially grounded 'constructive ambiguity'; the catch-all category of counter-terrorism is both a patent source of conflict among IOs' players, who fight over its meaning, and a catalyser of minimal consensus. The article isolates two types of power structures in IOs that the ambiguity of counter-terrorism supports: domination and fragmentation. Additionally, the article demonstrates how ambiguities condition the conduct and evolution of IOs' risk management security agenda. To do so, the article takes NATO's post-9/11 trajectory as a case study and explores two different counter-terrorism policies related to counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan and maritime surveillance in the Mediterranean Sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National and state/territory dialogues in Australia have increasingly turned towards implementing mechanisms that will oversee truth-telling processes to facilitate reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. While truth lies central to decolonising, it is vital to reflect on whose truth(s) are being represented, and in what ways it should be disseminated. In this article I discuss how the cultivation of a 'decolonising consciousness' may assist in confronting national and personal truths while also helping citizens of settler-colonial nations acquire the proficiency needed to put decolonial understandings into praxis. I argue that decolonising truths entails a responsive consciousness that is informed by frameworks such as border thinking, agonistic pluralism and kincentric orientations. Decolonising truth enables non-Indigenous settlers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples alike to live alongside the complexities of mutually informing, competing, and at times incommensurable worldviews; this is the point of departure in the ongoing path towards reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public sector unions are increasingly becoming the hegemonic contemporary labor actor in terms of membership and militancy in both advanced and emerging economies. However, political economy lacks a unified theoretical approach to study mobilization by state unions. The analysis of public sector union politics has been largely separated by regional (United States vs. Europe vs. Global South) and disciplinary (American politics vs. comparative politics/political sociology) divides. We contend that though both public and private workers belong to the subaltern classes, public sector union politics and mobilization have different foundations than in the private sector. Unlike private unions, state labor mobilization is essentially driven by what we call the "reverse economic cycle" (militancy increases in bad—rather than good—economic times), by the legal enforcement of bargaining rights (which in contrast to the private sector substantially varies across and within democracies), and by the likelihood of a political exchange between labor and the government. Argentine teachers between 2006 and 2019 provide an ideal laboratory to test this argument through a multilevel (i.e., national and subnational), mixed-methods strategy, which includes comparative and statistical assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical methodologies in International Political Sociology (IPS) and its intersecting fields and research traditions have increasingly coalesced around the idea that research should be done in dialogue, and possibly cooperation, with people rather than only about them. Drawing together research under this theme and wider debates on participatory, activist, and action research, alongside our own research experience, this article proposes the notion of cooperative research to capture and further develop this research agenda. In the context of neoliberal academia and its narrow insurance-based conception of research ethics and safety, we argue that cooperative and ethical research can be done and developed further both in the cracks and margins of the system, and in a gradual reform process within it. Starting with a survey of existing traditions and recent advances towards cooperative research, we proceed to unpack what cooperative research looks like in practice and how it benefits the involved parties. The article then explores structural and epistemic obstacles that cooperative research faces within the current institutional, body, and geo-politics of knowledge production. It also reflects on future avenues to productively deal with the inherent contradictions of cooperative research, not only by embracing the "ethos of critique", but also by trying to make (even small) changes within the Western knowledge production system by promoting, and rendering more legitimate, alternative forms of knowledge and storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Collective Discussion aims to open up space for an international political sociology of the production of historical knowledge that interrogates the politics around benchmark dates and what becomes knowable and unknowable through them. Specifically, it examines 1492 as a historiographical device through which to unpack how the discipline of IR knows history. 1492 presents a relevant case for this interrogation, for it is central for the historical narratives of a variety of approaches. In this sense, the different contributions do not seek to recover an alternative, 'better' history of 1492, but rather to explore its politics of knowledge production: what types of histories it makes visible, what types it precludes, and in what way it partakes in the reproduction of specific hierarchies of knowledge and the power structures that operate through them. In doing so, the Collective Discussion makes visible – and thus opens up for discussion – the historiographical operations performed by periodization and benchmark dating in IR, pointing to a way forward for an international political sociology of knowledge production in the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erich Fromm has long been a forgotten intellectual despite his status as a major critical theorist and sociologist in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s but his work is being returned to with new enthusiasm because of events in the world, developments within sociology and new interest in psychosocial analysis dealing with emotions. This paper theorizes Fromm's return to scholarly influence now, offering analysis of both his reputational fate in light of the rise of global Trumpism and right wing‐populism and the value of the tools his unique merger of Freud, Marx and sociology offers in the contemporary moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, a number of methods have been proposed to forecast the unknown inner-cell values of a set of related RxC contingency tables when only their margins are known. This is a classical problem that emerges in many areas, from economics to quantitative history, being particularly ubiquitous when dealing with electoral data in sociology and political science. However, the two current major algorithms to solve this problem, based on Bayesian statistics and iterative linear programming depend on adjustable (hyper-)parameters and do not yield a unique solution: their estimates tend to fluctuate (when convergence is reached) around a stationary distribution. Within the linear programming framework, this paper proposes a new algorithm (lclphom) that always converges to a unique solution, having no adjustable parameters. This characteristic makes it easy to use and robust to claims of hacking. Furthermore, after assessing lclphom with real and simulated data, lclphom is found to yield estimates of (almost) similar accuracy to the current major solutions, being more preferable to the other lphom-family algorithms the more heterogeneous the row-fraction distributions of the tables are. Interested practitioners can easily use this new algorithm as it has been programmed in the R-package lphom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the dialogue and circulation of scientific knowledge in the South-South context between Brazil and the African Portuguese Speaking Countries (PALOP), focusing on the Political Science and Political Sociology fields. The main questions are: What strategies have been implemented to foster educational cooperation between Brazil and African countries? How much and for whom do these policies provide educational opportunities? Methodologically, the analysis covers historical, political, and diplomatic aspects that have driven collaboration between Brazil and PALOP in education. We based our analysis on a qualitative literature review, triangulated with quantitative data from Brazilian educational policies. The main conclusion is that Brazil has played a relevant role in training PALOP professionals in recent decades through its foreign policy in the educational field, enabling an epistemic dialogue between Africa and Latin America. Therefore, educational cooperation establishes bridges connecting the Brazilian way of thinking and building Social Sciences and the scientific approaches developed in the PALOP, which can serve as an example for other countries that want to strengthen South-South knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alfred Schütz, who joined the Austrian army at 17 years old as a lieutenant in 1917, faced traumatic experiences during the First World War that deeply influenced his later intellectual pursuits. This article examines how Schütz's wartime and postwar experiences shaped his intellectual and political contribution to sociology. The trauma Schütz faced during and after the war profoundly influenced his views on the ethical competence and integrative capacities of common sense, particularly in his applied theory essays of the 1940s. Highlighting the modern crisis of alienation, Schütz's works such as "The Stranger" and "The Homecomer" reflect his commitment to understanding and overcoming the estrangement and confusion that arise from social and spatial displacement and the ideology of irreconcilable alienness. Rather than treat what is missing from the biographical archive as an irretrievable loss or absence, the article reads parts of Schütz's later writings for traces they bear of his unrepresented wartime and postwar experiences, and argues that his applied theory essays partly serve as a delayed response to his youthful traumas. Ultimately, Schütz's insights into foreignness offer profound reflections on the interplay between historical events, personal experiences, and social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent populist wave has raised questions about the implications of populism for democracy. Some scholars express optimism that populism may be a source of democratic revitalization, bringing about sweeping changes in accordance with the majority will. More often, populism is viewed as a threat to liberal democracy, combining calls for radical change with disdain for core democratic institutions and norms. We consider the possibility that these outcomes may not be mutually exclusive and develop a conceptual typology for understanding the consequences of populist rule. We then use cross-national panel fixed-effects models to analyze the effects of populist leadership between 1990 and 2017. We first examine whether populists have economic and social effects in line with their core aspirations. Left-wing populists are quite effective at implementing their agenda: they reduce income inequality, regulate markets, and incorporate marginalized groups. Right-wing populists are also fairly impactful: for instance, they raise tariffs, cut taxes, and restrict the rights of women and gay people. However, populists of all stripes are associated with the rapid and severe erosion of liberal democratic institutions. Populists, we conclude, often destroy democracy in the name of the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market represents an intriguing departure from the anticipated path of liberalisation in public policy. While it includes provisions seemingly aligned with the liberalisation of the Digital Single Market by relaxing digital copyright enforcement, it also introduces mechanisms that bolster digital copyright protection, signalling a shift towards market regulation. This paper explores why and how Jean-Claude Juncker's European Commission proposed a directive featuring robust regulatory elements despite initial promises of copyright deregulation within the Digital Single Market. Combining insights from political economy and political sociology, I examine the concept of 'political work' as the practice of promoting, defending, and implementing a choice of public action. Within this framework, I identify a managerial dimension of political work involving political practices that influence the institutional structure and management of public action. Utilising a qualitative methodology involving twelve in-depth interviews with Commission officials conducted between 2018 and 2021, alongside document analysis, I demonstrate how Jean-Claude Juncker and his cabinet's managerial political work, encompassing organisational reforms within the Commission, played a pivotal role in steering the proposed policy towards regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key aim of studying development is to understand the factors that shape socioeconomic progress and explain inequalities. In empirical work, the predominant focus has been on posing these questions in the language of causal inference: how one or more variables effect an outcome of interest, with the estimation of Average Treatment Effects (ATE) becoming prioritised as the key objective. The 'credibility revolution' and the emphasis on randomised controlled trials in research on development has cemented this dominance, because randomisation is well‐suited to estimating the ATE. This paper argues that this dual dominance—ATE as main question of interest, and experiment as preferred method—is narrow and restrictive. We propose causal mediation frameworks as an alternative, which are routinely used in disciplines including epidemiology, psychology, sociology and political science where causal mechanisms are an equally important focus. We introduce key concepts and definitions of path‐specific effects, and discuss identification and estimation approaches. We illustrate applications for development and demonstrate how causal mediation brings the focus back to contextual knowledge, combining this with empirical rigour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological inference methods are devised to estimate unknown inner-cells of 2-way contingency tables by inferring conditional distribution probabilities. This outlines one of the more long-standing social science problems, chiefly frequent in political science and sociology. To solve the problem, ecological inference algorithms consider an asymmetric relationship, with a main characteristic (e.g. race or social class) mapped to rows impacting on a dependent variable, usually the vote, mapped to columns. The problem arises because different solutions are reached depending on how variables are assigned to rows and columns. The models are asymmetric. In this paper, we propose 2 new sets of ecological inference algorithms and explore if accuracy could be improved by handling the problem in a symmetric way. We assess the accuracy of the proposed methods using real data from more than 550 concurrent elections where the true district-level cross-classifications of votes (straight- and split-tickets) are known. Our empirical assessment clearly identifies the symmetric solutions as more accurate. They outperform asymmetric methods 90% of the time and reduce error, on average, by 11%. Our results are based on data from simultaneous elections, so further research is required to see whether our conclusions can be maintained in other ecological inference contexts. Interested readers can easily use the proposed methods as they are implemented in the R package lphom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initial studies of the COVID-19 pandemic's emotional toll indicated different outcomes based on partisanship and media consumption. This study builds on prior research by utilizing a broad set of measures to test how (1) political party affiliation, (2) trust in President Trump, (3) news media sources, and (4) distrust in the media's portrayal of the pandemic impacted self-ascribed increases in negative emotions during the later stages of the pandemic. Using original data from a national survey conducted in the early months of 2021, we confirm that news media and partisanship played a key role in Americans' perceived increases in psychological distress. Specifically, we find that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to report increased worry and loneliness due to the pandemic. Viewers of CNN were also more likely to disclose increased worry, loneliness, and sadness than Fox News viewers. But both of these findings were related to and mitigated by issues of trust and distrust. In particular, trust that the Trump administration effectively responded to the pandemic was strongly associated with emotional stability above and beyond partisan differences. In addition, distrust of "mainstream media" coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic was linked with lower odds of increased negative emotions due to the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]