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Corruption in Ukraine is recognized as a threat to national interests, sustainable development and European integration. Despite the significant efforts made by the state and international institutions to overcome corruption in the main spheres of public life, its level still remains high. When defining the essence of corruption, one should first of all proceed from the fact that it cannot be reduced to any specific socially dangerous act, to a specific offense. Corruption is the result of the historical development of society and the state, including Ukrainian society and the Ukrainian state. At the same time, in the last decade, corruption in Ukraine gained an unprecedented scope and influence on political, economic and other social processes. It is found that the problems of countering corruption in Ukraine in many respects coincide with similar problems in other countries. This coincidence is caused by the same social essence of corruption as the corrosion of power, which consists in the abuse by officials of state authorities and local self-government bodies of power or official position for selfish or other personal interests. Regardless of the differences in the state system, the main socio-economic prerequisites of corruption are the same in principle for all countries -- the imperfection of the mechanism of the exercise of power, the desire of subjects endowed with power to use this power for personal purposes, and the main directions of combating corruption -- restrictions, neutralization and elimination of its social prerequisites, causes and conditions of corrupt acts, determination of restrictions and prohibitions for civil servants, establishment of responsibility for their violation. The reduction of corruption to a certain type of offense by a certain part of scientists and practitioners is one of the most significant mistakes in the understanding of corruption. Corruption is a social phenomenon that has social conditions, social patterns of development and exerts a negative influence on social processes. Existing in society and being a product of social relations, it permeates various social spheres of society, deforming social relations in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of cinema by the Young Turk Movement, which played a significant role in transforming the Ottoman Empire from an absolutist regime into a constitutional monarchy in 1908. Upon gaining power, the Young Turks faced various external and internal political challenges, such as imperialist ambitions over Ottoman territory, Balkan states' efforts to reclaim lost lands, and separatist movements within the empire. This article explores how they used cinema to promote their political agenda and address these challenges. It argues that cinema was employed not only to display power and spread propaganda but also to project an image of governance aligned with constitutional ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forty years of scholarship in the history of sexuality and gender studies have delivered a considerable amount of knowledge, framed by an encompassing premise: power is paramount. A preferred object of this kind of attention are the erotic cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The focus on power leads contemporary scholars to adopt binary thinking, namely the attribution to ancient writers and thinkers of dichotomies such as domination versus subjection, or activity versus passivity. This is a fixist view that obliterates the dialectic of desire and, therefore, its fundamental mobility. Desire aims at the other person's desire; roles are exchanged; age and social status can play in surprising ways; hyperactivity can become subjugation. It is time for a change. It is time to look at what mattered for the Ancients themselves: the subjective experience of sensations, bodies and situations; the felicitous, ironic, or tragic reversals of intersubjective games. More importantly: the quest for pleasure, rather than the use of pleasures. The Greeks thought the sexual experience as sensuality. And sensuality inflects what they thought about gender. In poetry, narrations and philosophy, concrete details draw our attention to the felt phenomena of lived bodies – in the plural. When we look for the logic of gender, we discover that bodies can be compared, not as totalities, but as bundles of multiple discreet qualities, ready to be combined and recombined, allotted and exchanged. Qualities can be bits and pieces of anatomy, manners and garments; but also fragments of experience, moments of sensory awareness. The logic of the concrete meets the phenomenal body. For the body is a challenge, to be taken up – as a cinematic life, frame after frame. Sensations can be shared across the boundaries of female and male, which are adjectives, not substances. A granular, corpuscular, pointilliste redistribution of traits, distinctive – or not. Sensuality is queer. Like Plato's pharmacy, erotic materialism can deliver us, beautifully, cathartically, refreshingly from the modern strictures of binary thinking. This is what the Greeks have to tell us. Let us listen! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British government used to herald shale gas as a bridge fuel to a zero-carbon economy, trying (and ultimately, failing) to incorporate this hydrocarbon into a punctuated energy transition that is still under way in the country. On the one hand, planning translated central political decisions into local priorities, but on the other hand, it politicized public opposition to fracking. Although, there have been considerable criticisms of the planning process for fracking in Great Britain, we still lack a grounded understanding of how planning influenced the wider dynamics of public engagement with shale gas development. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory research across three locations in northern England, I explore how the planning process was experienced by the public and how its local participants were impacted by it. The ways in which planning dealt with evidence, public perception and democratic legitimacy suggested that planning was reinforcing the governmental pro-fracking policies while simultaneously undermining its own legitimacy, as questions about validity, impartiality and democracy were being raised. Rather than merely a technocratic arena for adjudicating between private and public interests, planning had a transformative effect on local participants and served as an important moment for mobilizing more politicized forms of public opposition against fracking, which undermined the energy-transition narratives touted by the government. I use anthropological theorizations of ritual to explain the concrete local dynamics that led to this unintended effect. This case study suggests that centrally orchestrated energy transitions may fail when they are enacted through local processes that foster experiences of injustice and lack of local control among the opposing publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This bibliography contains journal articles, book chapters, books, edited volumes, theses, grey literature, bibliographies and other resources on the Syrian conflict. To keep up with the rapid changing political events, the most recent publications have been prioritized during the selection process. The literature has been retrieved by manually browsing more than 200 core and periphery sources in the field of Terrorism Studies. Additionally, full-text as well as reference retrieval systems have been employed to broaden the search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article examines the peculiarities of objectification of the universal opposition «man – woman» in the German language based on lexicographic sources from different chronological periods. German language is interesting for studying this opposition because of its expanded nature, which is particularly evident within the «woman» component: «Mann – Frau / Weib». The analysis of interpretations of the concepts «man» and «woman» in German dictionaries reveals the processes of gender stereotyping reflected in them during different periods of language development. This allows us to understand the development of ideas about these concepts in a specific linguistic culture. The leading characteristics of men and women, as reflected in the semantics of key lexemes such as Mann, Frau and Weib, as well as adjectives derived from these words, are determined. Their cultural and historical context is explored. It is found that during the XVIII and XIX centuries, the concepts of «man» and «woman» consistently reflected the processes of gender stereotyping. However, gender stereotypes regarding women were more varied and complex. Starting in the XX century and especially in the XXI century, stereotypes have been presented to a lesser degree, with a noted neutralization of social oppositions within the considered opposition. It is observed that the opposition between man and woman in German initially had a dual nature, both socially and naturally. It is concluded that at present, in lexicographic sources, naturally oriented traits are the leading features of objectification in the «man-woman» opposition. The issue of the level of accuracy with which different concepts are reflected in explanatory dictionaries of the German language has been identified.