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Higher education seems to be in a perpetual state of 'crisis'. The many hundreds of books and papers containing this specific, or other relevantly similar expressions, convey a sense of fear and angst. Yet, what are these various crises about, and which values and beliefs are seen as threatened or 'under attack'? This paper will provide an analysis of the 'crisis' literature and identify four major crisis themes – massification, marketisation, restitution and geopolitics, linked to their ideological basis and influences—including meritocracy, liberalism, restorative justice, and justice globalism. The second part of the paper analyses the massification crisis in Britain between the 1940s and the 1970s as a case example identifying how the principles of a meritocratic society played an influential role in the debate. It will be argued that the notion of 'universities in crisis' needs to be understood critically in terms of ideology and historically via the shifting and reshaping of such beliefs over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite international efforts to address human-caused climate change, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. However, existing literature often overlooks the role of the state and social actors in exacerbating or mitigating emissions. This study adopts the political-economic embeddedness perspective to argue that the role of the state and social actors cannot be separated in the greenhouse gas economy. Specifically, we explore how the embeddedness within the Taiwanese state and private corporations enables resistance to greenhouse gas reduction policies. Through an analysis of greenhouse gas emissions data and examination of corporate characteristics among major emitters in Taiwan, we find that two key legacies of Taiwan's developmental state period, family-controlled firms and private corporations with more governmental directors, tend to have higher emissions levels. Importantly, these legacies persist even after neo-liberal reforms. This study's findings have implications for developing countries, particularly in Asia, that employ developmental state strategies. It underscores the need for countries to consider the potential negative impacts of state intervention and market dynamics on greenhouse gas emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Frankfurt School Critical Theory, we examine the political outcomes of how Asian populist authoritarian regimes seized the COVID-19 pandemic context for regime maintenance and power consolidation. The pandemic revealed interesting India-Philippines parallels highlighting three inter-connected political-economic development patterns contextualising analogous state responses to COVID-19. First, how neo-liberal economic policies pursued through old and new technologies of domination accompanied phenomenal economic growth rates without addressing structural socio-economic inequalities. Second, how parallel predisposing conditions of failed political promises, increased rent-seeking opportunities, and corruption under constricted neo-liberal democracies, gave rise to populist authoritarian leaders. Third, how combined neo-liberalism and populist authoritarianism conditioned conflictual and contested government responses to the pandemic, bolstering power consolidation and regime maintenance, on the one hand, and ensuing political contestations on the other. Populist authoritarianism persists during pandemics through three significant connected elements of ideological domination propagated through mass media, the hetero-patriarchal family, and educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining sociological, legal and political science approaches, our article investigates some pandemic-related national policy measures and analyses survey studies on the reactions of the labour market and its actors to the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary, a neoliberal national-populist country. Our surveys conducted with employers and employees show that job losses and working time reductions especially hit vulnerable groups of employees, among them young people and low wage earners, increasing existing social inequalities. The legislative changes seriously damaged the employees' individual and collective rights and did not prove to be overly helpful for the employers either. The pandemic did not initiate any substantial policy changes, as the Hungarian autocratic regime was not very interested in effectively tempering its shocking effects on public health and the labour market. Instead, the government took the situation as a pretext in order to further reduce pluralism in the country's policymaking processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about research’s environmental impacts have been articulated in the research arena, but questions remain about what types of role responsibilities are appropriate to place on researchers, if any. The research question of this paper is: what are the views of UK health researchers who use data-intensive methods on their responsibilities to consider the environmental impacts of their research? Twenty-six interviews were conducted with UK health researchers using data-intensive methods. Participants expressed a desire to take responsibility for the environmental impacts of their research, however, they were unable to consolidate this because there were often obstacles that prevented them from taking such role responsibilities. They suggested strategies to address this, predominantly related to the need for regulation to monitor their own behaviour. This paper discusses the implications of adopting such a regulatory approach as a mechanism to promote researchers’ role responsibilities using a neo-liberal critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of international mindedness (IM) underscores international baccalaureate (IB) programmes and acts as a universal principle for teaching and learning. Despite its prioritisation, it is unclear how practitioners, parents, and students enact IM in schools individually and collectively. In this article, I present research highlighting the development of IM in an IB school. The research findings prioritise an international approach to education reliant on the distillation of values, the rationalisation of transparency and overcoming self-determinism. These findings are further analysed through Jürgen Habermas' (1991) theory of communicative action illustrating the breadth and depth of IM application, including its emancipatory potential. My analysis shows that while the international school community members agree with the fundamentals of the IB's frameworks, they note the challenges of IM practice influenced by the steering powers of IB corporatism. This article will interest educators, leaders and policymakers seeking penetrative interpretations of international education and critical praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractRenewables in India are presented as modern technologies ensuring a pathway towards sustainable development and unlimited growth. But this story entails problematic land politics and the reconfiguration of space for resource frontiers’ expansion, local state formation, and ethno-religious authoritarian agendas: for the past 20 years, Kutch district of Gujarat state in Western India has experienced several waves of land liberalisation and industrialisation programmes, including wind power projects, but its proximity with Pakistan and the presence of Muslim pastoral populations on both sides of the border have also fostered Hindu nationalist movements since 1947. The development of wind energy projects in Western India follows traditional patterns of a regime of dispossession: a set of “inscription devices” assemble and disassemble land in a discursive, bureaucratic, and violent way and affix an official stamp of legality on damaging mechanisms of dispossession within a state-specific regime. But as wind projects move to borderland territories, their associated regime of dispossession aligns with long-term exclusive ethno-religious conceptions of space as Hindu. The unfolding land politics endorses the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral strategy to capture the remaining constituencies and co-opt minority leaders, while agents enforcing wind’s regime of dispossession see an opportunity to assert upper-caste Hindu supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short piece is a Gramscian inspired response to Emmanual Botlhale and Thekiso Molokwane's article entitled "The viability of the welfare state in Botswana". Contrary to Botlhale and Molokwane's uncritical approach, I argue that as with other welfare states in capitalist societies, Botswana's welfare state is an instrument used by the ruling bourgeois classes to construct hegemony or renew it (hegemony) when it has been weakened. Furthermore, I argue that Botswana's welfare state, as with other welfare states in contemporary capitalist societies, is threatened by neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary scholarship on populism, albeit involving divergent approaches and polarised diagnoses of populism's political impacts, commonly attributes the recent populist surge to the peril of neo-liberal encroachment. However, such a neo-liberal–populist proposition encounters discrepant experiences when applied in non-Western contexts, including in East Asia. To recalibrate the conceptual framework, this article employs Gramsci-inspired scholarship on hegemony and populism – the notion of "the integral state" and non-reductionist class politics in particular – and utilises Taiwan as a case to expound upon the entanglement of democratisation, neo-liberalisation, and various forms of populist politics. Situating the post-2000 surge of multiple popular movements in Taiwan's hegemonic restructuring since the 1980s, this article identifies a course of bifurcated development between "liberal populism of the bourgeois hegemony" and the "neo-liberal populism of the multitude" that embodies various ways in which neo-liberalism intersects with populist politics. Highlighting the constant boundary-redrawing of the integral state and its associated class politics along the hegemonic restructuring processes, Taiwan's case exemplifies a critical approach to rethinking the over-determined relations between populism and neo-liberalism for other East Asian states and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Seldon (1916–2005) was a significant British neo-liberal economist in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1957 to 1988, as the "engine room" of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Seldon had been advocating the reform of "free" state education. He vigorously argued for education vouchers, by which each parent could be provided with purchasing power and school choice. From the mid-1960s, his ideas gradually attracted the attention of the Conservatives and contributed to the rise of the New Right and Thatcherism in the 1980s. Despite this, previous literature seldom explores Seldon's work in relation to education in greater depth. To fill the lacuna, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of Seldon's neo-liberal ideas about education and his approaches in promoting reform agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silence in the context of work has different meanings across different settings. Turbulence induced by the privatisation of previously state‐owned enterprises presents a curious setting to explore worker silence. Turning to worker silence in the process of mass privatisation of sugar factories in Turkey, we examine why workers remained silent while resenting privatisation. We reflect on the experiences and perceptions of workers in the privatisation of sugar factories in an unregulated neoliberal country, where macro‐national and meso‐institutional mechanisms enforce worker silence Drawing on 48 interviews with workers from sugar factories, we demonstrate that worker silence deepened in the process of privatisation. The study provides evidence that an unregulated form of neoliberalism worsens worker silence through three distinct mechanisms: dismissal of democratic demands, marketisation of everything and decline of solidarity. We extend these mechanisms with 13 different corresponding forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, there has been a growing anti-vaccination movement in English-speaking Canada created by a small number of people with alternative understandings of health and medicine, and by parents who believe their children were harmed by vaccination. The anti-vaccination movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was fuelled by growing concerns about environmental toxicity, skepticism about the motivations of the pharmaceutical industry, neo-liberal ideas about health that encouraged patients to take health and health care in their own hands, and the intensive parenting styles characteristic of late twentieth century Canada. To combat vaccine hesitancy, it is vital to understand the arguments of those opposed to vaccination, which are often far more complex and nuanced than the pro-side would like to admit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Trump's presidency as metamodern, embodying contradictions within the established order and resonating with contemporary cultural trends. Oscillating between modernism and postmodernism, metamodernism is defined by coexistence of seemingly contrasting affective states and dispositions: enthusiasm and irony, hope and melancholy, attachment and alienation, generating a multifaceted subjecthood. Trump's nostalgic slogan 'Make America Great Again' (MAGA) emphasizes this vacillation, a new inflection of an old phrase, received as both facetious and sincere, promising return to a prelapsarian state, while also taking neo-liberal ideals to extreme conclusions. This juxtaposition, the nostalgic impulse for something new, is traced as an increasingly dominant aesthetic form within digital games. As we explore, certain genres and aesthetics epitomize this, providing anachronistic audio-visuals, rhizomatic exploration, punishing gameplay, revolving around intertextuality and demands for community participation. We finally locate both Trump's presidency and this nostalgic turn in contemporary digital games as symptomatic of a metamodern impulse, a search for stability and order amongst an increasingly fragmented, imbalanced and chaotic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Dominant theoretical conversations on experiences of racial discrimination are focused on how Black and other non-White people perceive and experience racial discrimination in White majority racial systems; however, research is scant on experiences of racial discrimination of racial minorities in Black majority social systems. This paper addresses this lacuna by exploring perceived experiences of racial discrimination of Coloured people in Johannesburg, South Africa, a racial minority in a Black majority country. Fourteen in-depth individual interviews were conducted with participants. Analysis of the interviews resulted in many interviewees claiming race-based discrimination in housing, employment, service delivery, political representation and education. A few participants, however, claimed that Black South Africans are also experiencing socioeconomic problems like Coloured South Africans. Racial discrimination theory and social exclusion theory are used as perspectives for the study. Based on the findings, I argue that the perceived experiences of racial discrimination of most of the participants of the study can be explained by three interrelated structural forces, namely legacies of historical racial exclusions, the neoliberal macro-economic order and government neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores political economic developments in India's post-reform period that began in 1991 through the interactions of the non-elite, ordinary middle-class Indians and state institutions and market processes. The article introduces "twin movement" as a concept and revises the Polanyian notion of a double movement of differentiated domains of welfare and neo-liberal state which restricts exploring the tacit relationships that form between the state and the market; how the state subtly forces people to resort to market institutions and processes; and forces/encourages capital accumulation to mitigate challenges of the neo-liberal market. This ethnographic article draws attention to the re-modelling of state institutions that is attuned to neo-liberal market logics; and how this re-modelling modifies state–citizen relationships, and shapes subjectivity and "middleclassness." In doing so, the article maps how non-elite middleclassness is located in demands, desires, and aspirations; and how intricately these are weaved into the everyday insecurities, risks, and vulnerabilities that constitute the social, economic, and political life of the urban non-elite middle class in neo-liberal India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional curiosity has recently become a 'buzzword' in the field of probation and social work. However, little research has sought to understand what professional curiosity means definitionally, conceptually or operationally. In this article, we analyse interview data from 49 probation practitioners in England and Wales to explore what professional curiosity means in the context of probation and what the main barriers are to enacting professional curiosity. We argue that professional curiosity is primarily used to assess risk and that practitioners face multiple barriers to its enactment which are rarely acknowledged or dealt with in policy and practice guides. These barriers fall into three groups: structural, relational and emotional. We conclude the article by examining the findings through the lens of neo-liberalism and probation values. The article therefore extends knowledge of professional curiosity operationally while also seeking to explain its position in a neo-liberal policy context. This research has important implications for policy and practice. Rather than simply asking practitioners to ask questions and be on the lookout for disguised compliance, probation providers should recognise and acknowledge these barriers to practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unbridled individualism and the neoliberalism that has been its biggest booster in the last four decades has propagated the conviction, only recently challenged, that hypertechnology is the pinnacle of humankind's aspirations and represents its future. This brief talk is a philosophical reflection about what it means to be human today, in an attempt to question the supposed infallibility of the technological project. The reflection draws on the cultural matrices of the original or autochthonous peoples of Mesoamerica, within the framework of the 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's thinking, which prefigured existentialism, and the technological scenario envisioned by the European philosopher Günther Anders (1902-1992). With these pieces we attempt to cobble together a modest body of ideas to contribute to the debate among thinkers and researchers from a wide range of disciplines (including ethnologists, historians, sociologists and psychologists) about the hypertechnological future of humanity. Our reflection aims to shed light on modern society's blind, headlong rush into the technological project and the pressing need to recalibrate human existence at more natural scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the fall of the communist regime, Romania launched the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector in 1995. The reform was largely financed through a World Bank loan and closely followed the neo-liberal ideology promoted by Bank officials. It aimed to privatize and to implement private sector management principles in the public education sector. This paper argues that in order to introduce neo-liberal policy models, the Bank first created a structure of knowledge around the Romanian system of education, which diagnosed it as inefficient and underperforming. Specific representations of domestic institutions, bureaucratic processes, and actors were used to legitimate the forms of intervention proposed and the role of the Bank in internal governance. I argue further that the main stake of the project was reforming governance in education as new mechanisms for power distribution and money allocation were set in place. By manufacturing their role as impartial, apolitical "experts," and by ignoring the political nature of government, they created a niche in governance and imposed neo-liberal understandings in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges of contemporary child welfare practice are well documented in many countries worldwide. The current study enhances this work by reporting the lived experiences of child welfare workers in Chile, who negotiate their practice in a strained political and organisational context. A qualitative methodology was used to understand the complexities of the survival strategies of these workers. Data were collected via multiple individual interviews and group workshop sessions with six workers of different Chilean National Service for Minors' collaborating organisations. Through a constructivist grounded theory analysis, we identify three major complexities that shape and construct the strategies of survival that the Chilean child welfare workers deploy in a neo-liberalised labour context: (1) Surviving a violent labour context (precariousness and dehumanisation); (2) surviving labour ambiguities (fractures and resistance) and (3) surviving oneself (pain-filled and violence executors' bodies). We discuss these findings in the context of the scholarly literature and offer implications for policy and macro practice to alter the work conditions of this professional field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that two classic films made in 1973, William Friedkin's The Exorcist and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, both anticipate and give nightmarish form to an underlying political shift that historians often originate at exactly the same moment: the advent of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative order that would come to define American life for at least the next 40 years. Rather than seeing these films as centred on ancient demons or obsolete workers, this essay reverses the standard 'Gothic temporality' of the past's persistence and positions the horror film as, instead, a form of speculative fiction; not a registration of history's traumatic aftermath but a barometer of the emerging political future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the deepening of socio-economic inequality manifested as dualisation in South Korea and deregulation in Hong Kong. It explains the extreme manifestations of inequality by reference to the nature of economic co-ordination, organised labour power and societal corporatism, and the politics of democratisation. It finds that South Korea's legacy of state-orchestrated co-ordinated market economy favoured the retention of a manufacturing core despite globalisation. However, the neo-liberal inclinations of the state and big business groups led to the marginalisation of less privileged firms and workers. These inclinations reinforced the defensiveness of the small but strong labour organisations, preventing effective societal corporatism. These phenomena are fully understandable only with reference to the country's conservative democratisation that divided the liberal and left political forces. The geo-political legacy also induced identity conflicts that overshadowed socio-economic issues. By contrast, Hong Kong's liberal market economy coupled with the absence of security concern had allowed a radical de-industrialisation in the 1990s and wholesale casualisation in the 2000s. Divided by identity politics, organised labour was unable to challenge the trend. The same conflicts also led pro-China labour organisations to side with business interests in the post-1997 electoral autocracy and prevented the introduction of more fundamental reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian technology industry is an economic asset for the State. Successive governments and corporations identify tech workers as privileged and their mobilisation as unnecessary. High-skilled tech workers are apparently different from non-tech workers and remain secluded from politics. Tech workers' trade unions, however, can decisively subvert these claims. From three tech unions' Facebook posts in 2020, the first COVID-19 year, this study finds that politics remains central to their discourses. Even though tech workers are understood to be "apolitical," their trade unions have been interacting with political institutions, ministers, bureaucrats, and other non-tech trade union organisers. Some of these tech unions are even affiliated to political parties. The article also identifies some explicit similarities between the unions of tech and non-tech workers in India, and politicised labour movements worldwide. The continuing precarity of unemployment, overwork, and drastic pay cuts that peaked during the pandemic has exposed the tenuous structures of white-collar privilege. By affecting workers in all industries, oppressive neoliberal forces have ironically paved the way for labour solidarity through political resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Gothic comedy Satanic Panic, this article examines how the film uses satire as a liberal reaction to the patriarchal, theocratic agenda of Trumpism, following a notable tradition of Satan adopted as a symbol of countercultural, individualist revolution. I argue that the text's youth-focus, as well as its representation of gender, national identity and economic class, negotiates feminism and competing ideologies of satanism to suitably reflect the opposing strands of the contemporary culture wars. Indeed, the post-truth, paranoiac United States under Trump has seen apocalyptic rhetoric and occult conspiracy-thinking flourish alongside left-wing satanic activism. A sociopolitical climate that draws distinct parallels with the 1980s and 1990s 'Satanic Panic' era and Y2K premillennialism. This work conceptualizes, through close analysis, how the film effectively articulates such postmodern retroactivity – at both a thematic and narrative level – to reflect the gendered, generational divide and troubling legacy of Reaganite neo-liberalism at the heart of the Trump era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to examine neo-liberalism and its ideological influences in the design and delivery of hospitality higher education in the United Kingdom. The study is underpinned by a qualitative approach, with semi-structured interviews employed as the method for data collection, with thematic analysis as the method for data analysis. Fifty-five hospitality academics working in nine universities were interviewed regarding their perceptions of being a hospitality academic teaching hospitality-related subjects in higher education. Findings were explored and analysed in relation to the broader influence of neo-liberalism on higher education and three key themes emerged, which are: restrictive conception of hospitality as the commercial hotel sector, issue of academic identity, and corporatized institutional leadership. Under the backdrop of neo-liberalism, the higher education sector has prioritized graduate employability as one of its primary responsibilities. Subsequently, hospitality higher education is predominantly viewed akin to a form of professional training programme for the commercial hotel sector, and being a hospitality academic is mainly perceived as an industry mentor, educating students with industry-relevant skills and professional practices. Institutionally, the increasing corporatization of higher education has created an environment which hospitality programmes are positioned to satisfy market demands and secure student recruitment. Informed by these findings, the current study draws the conclusion that there is a strong presence of the neo-liberal ideology reinforcing a vocational 'filter' on the design and delivery of hospitality higher education, which legitimizes certain educational values and practices while neglecting and undermining others. This article proposes that greater interdisciplinary engagement with other academic subjects, more recruitment of academics with a broader understanding of hospitality, and institutional leadership that appreciates and encourages alternative pedagogical approaches, are keys to creating possibilities to incorporate a more critical and humanistic underpinning in the academic development of hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this conceptual paper is to revisit the relationship between leadership and bureaucracy. The dominant and unquestioned way of thinking about leadership is to equate it as an undertaking exercised by leaders, those officers who occupy hierarchical positions in organizations. For example, senior leadership and middle leadership in schools are often associated with formal hierarchical roles played by senior and middle leaders. However, it can be argued that this perspective is problematic, not only because it is leader-centric but also due to its limitations in explaining the phenomenon of leadership. In order to understand the relationship between leadership and bureaucracy and leadership outside of bureaucracy, the paper reviews some of the extant literature in the field, including a brief history of bureaucracy, its pervasiveness in educational institutions, and current neo-liberal policies and reforms that function effectively within bureaucratic structures. An important contribution of the paper is a synoptic conceptual model that brings together three worldviews or archetypes pertaining to bureaucracy. These are a hard-edged view (system first, people second), a soft-edged view (people first, system second) and a third worldview (issue first, people second, system third). The third worldview signals a departure from the first two archetypes as it is an illustration of leadership outside the confines of bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The end of the Cold War had a great impact on world politics. The destruction of the bipolar system and the emergence of a new international order affected the foreign policy of all countries in the world. On the other hand, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new region called Central Asia emerged, and small and large regional and trans-regional powers defined and redefined their relations with it due to its strategic importance. In this regard, India also made significant changes in its regional and international policies and took a new approach. Central Asia, which is near to the sub-continent, has long had close cultural, social and economic ties with India and renewing old agreements with this region is very important for this country. India's need to secure new energy sources for economic growth and development and access to new markets has made Central Asia an attractive and strategically important region for India. Also, with the spread of religious extremism and terrorism in the region, India is concerned about its spread within its borders. Consequently, India has many reasons to pursue its interests in the region. On the other hand, due to Iran's geopolitical and geostrategic capabilities and its position in the North-South international transportation corridor and other international routes, this opportunity is available for our country to benefit from the advantages of partnership through economic cooperation with India, especially in the Chabahar project. Research question: This research tries to answer the basic question, what is the situation of Central Asia in India's new foreign policy and what opportunities does India's relationship with the region bring to Iran? Research hypothesis: Central Asia has a strategic position for India due to its geopolitical location and rich hydrocarbon and energy resources, market and access to Europe, and India's access to Central Asia through Iran provides the common and individual interests for both sides. Methodology and theoretical framework: This research analyzes the subject by using the qualitative method and sample and process research method using the theory of Neo-liberalism. We will show that the developments of the international system after the Cold War, and the change in the strategic goals of India's foreign policy since the 90s, provides new opportunities for Central Asian countries and India for strategic-economic cooperation in which Iran can also play an important role. Results and discussion: Today, the geo-strategic prominence of Central Asia is emphasized by two main factors. First, Central Asia has gained importance due to the discovery of hydrogen resources and second, the region is a major transportation hub for gas and oil pipelines and multifaceted communication corridors connecting China, Russia, Europe, the Caucasus, the Trans-Caspian region and the Indian Ocean. India pursues numerous interests in Central Asia, but due to the lack of borders with the region and neighboring Afghanistan, India has to explore another way to connect with central Asia. "Connecting to Central Asia" policy focuses on broader aspects of India's cooperation with Central Asia in various issues such as strengthening bilateral and multilateral political relations, achieving strategic and security cooperation through military training, cooperation to counter terrorism and close consultation with Afghanistan. The policy also considers the region as a long-term partner in energy and natural resource issues. It is obvious that due to serious problems between India and Pakistan, the latter will not allow India to pass through its territory and reach Afghanistan and thus access to the Central Asia. The re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan is another problem that has brought serious security and political issues for India. With its capabilities, including the existence of the geopolitical port of Chabahar and being located in the North-South International Corridor, Iran can act as a bridge between India and Central Asia. The North-South International Corridor (NSIC) connects the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean through Bandar Abbas and Chabahar in Iran. Full utilization of NSIC will reduce the cost of transportation as well as the time of moving goods from India to Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Another important point is that Iran's request for full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was accepted. SCO provides a platform for Tehran to come out of isolation and introduce itself as a bridge to the landlocked countries of Central Asia. Conclusion: Central Asia is a region of geopolitical and economic importance to India. The cooperation between India and Central Asian countries in various economic, military and security fields continue with the policies that India pursues in the region. However, Central Asia's neighborhood with Afghanistan, which has once again been under the control of the Taliban, is considered a threat to India's security due to the influence of extremist religious groups, and on the other hand, it poses problems for India's projects with Central Asia. In the meantime, Iran with its capabilities, including the existence of the geopolitical port of Chabahar and its placement in the NSIC, can fill this gap and act as a bridge between India and Central Asia. However, due to their different political positions on regional and international issues, Iran and India have not been able to properly use the existing capacities to promote cooperation between the two sides in various fields. It is time for both sides to put aside their differences and focus on their strengths and common strategic interests. Therefore, Iran's efforts should be to activate the North-South International Corridor project as well as the development of Chabahar international port, and likewise, with the Indians taking more serious measures to access Central Asia, both countries could make the most of the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis article analyses the policy agendas and bureaucratic apparatuses that have shaped the norms and values directing knowledge production in neo-liberal Indonesia. It uses a Gramscian approach to hegemony to understand how knowledge, as power, is organised and imposed on workers. It unpacks the norms and values shaped during processes of neo-liberal capitalist reform, which are identified as knowledge imaginaries; or shared social systems that organise a field of knowledge commodities. Their mobilisation during material and discursive moments are crucial in the juncture between predatory and market interests that fundamentally benefit capital accumulation. It is argued that funding and policies serve as key apparatuses for knowledge elites to normalise and enforce notions of self-reliance, competitiveness, and entrepreneurship as common sense for their managers, which are exploitative for workers. Within the hegemony of knowledge capitalism, there are antagonisms and attempts to form alternative spaces of knowledge by using digital media. While merely leaving a dent on the surface of broader capitalist structures, its promotion of subversive ways of knowing remains no less meaningful in understanding the social positions of academic workers in an increasingly networked but fragmented neo-liberal social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism upon American evangelicalism. It does so in the season of climate change. Given the commitment of neo-liberalism to the sovereignty of individual, the notion of government intervention in implementing climate mitigation policies is perceived as an unacceptable violation of freedom. It sits along the ideological challenge of neo-conservatism. Its emphasis on an 'enduring-moral order' has inadvertently culminated in ethnocentric anti-globalism, which theoretically conflicts with neo-liberalism's ideals. These two worldviews are both to be found in expressions of American evangelicalism, however. What might be a biblical-theological response? The argument draws upon the corporate nature of salvific claims, the early church governance in Luke-Acts and finally the social-gospel movement to challenge the association of evangelicalism with the Republican Party. The significance of this critique is due to the way in which this association lies at the heart of climate scepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the chronology of change in the Spanish prison system, especially during the transition from the Francoist dictatorship (1975–1982). It indicates how the incarcerated population had come to reflect Francoism's management of social change (including via an increasing use of preventive detention). By the early 1970s, political activists represented a minority of those incarcerated, although a minority that had grown steadily again from the late 1960s. The article discusses relations between the different groups of inmate, the rapidly-deteriorating conditions inside the gaols, and the emergence in the early transition period (1976) of prison protests (COPEL) led by common prisoners whose main objective was inclusion in the gaol amnesty then being proposed as part of the exit strategy from dictatorship. The article analyzes the reactive rather than proactive response to COPEL of Spain's transitional governments, composed of reformist Francoists, and the eventual outcome in a prison reform law in 1979. The article assesses the law's limited practical effect inside the gaols, because of severe budgetary restrictions combined with Spain's rising prison population – the latter mirroring developments across Western democracies generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What has happened to conflict? It's a topic on which there is a lively debate. There are those who argue that conflict has died out, for others conflict is more alive than ever. We have looked at conflict from a different perspective. There is no power that does not encounter some friction, that does not arouse some resistance, that does not pay some cost. How does society react to the effects of the now planetary spread of neoliberalism? What techniques of self-defence does it resort to? Society and politics are plural and, in a world that has become monstrously unstable, they react and interact in many ways. The contributions of this special issue present some significant cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luigi Einaudi's economic and political thought is thoroughly valued and studied. However, his contributions to the construction of a European neo-liberal canon in the 1930's and 1940's are often overlooked. This paper aims to shed light on the point, in order to reassert early neo-liberalism's identity as well. We will focus, then, on Einaudi's and European neo-liberals' shared belief in the need to rearrange the framework of free market economy, while criticizing some aspects of contemporary western civilization and facing the challenge of developing a liberal approach to mass democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NZ Golf was established after a merger of the Women's Golf Association and (men's) New Zealand Golf in 2005. The purpose of the study was to examine (1) the gendering of the negotiations and, (2) the implications of the gendered negotiations on the establishment of NZ Golf. We situate our research in the socio-political context of mergers, incorporating gender into organisational literature focussing on their strategic, financial, and integration dimensions. Semi-structured interviews with key female and male stakeholders were informed by document analysis. Findings revealed that the financial and strategic elements of mergers were gendered, and that the gendered integration stage had implications for the for the establishment of the new organisation. The influence of gender fluctuated throughout the merger process. We argue for future research in this area for further research on intersectionality in sport organisations. We encourage managers to understand how gender relations are historically embedded in sport organisations to understand their contemporary state. We call for managers to consider support might be required for future negotiations. We contribute understanding of gender relations in contemporary sport organisations by examining gendered negotiations and their implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1970s energy crises was a decisive point in US culture and in the development of neo-liberal geographies. After the post-war period of rapid economic growth, Western economies sputtered and stalled. Cutting across political, economic, and cultural spheres, the discourse of energy crisis brought narrative coherence to what was, in fact, a heterogenous historical moment. In doing so, energy crisis discourse facilitated dramatic social and economic restructuring, as well as shifts in the distributions of lived spaces and times. More broadly, energy crisis discourse played a significant role in configuring the emerging processes of neo-liberalization and bringing about a set of historical outcomes, herein elucidated in three figures: the suburb, energy, and the entrepreneur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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