In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Germany Left the Republic of LettersKasper Risbjerg EskildsenA common culture of scholarship existed across Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. This culture possessed its own institutions, traditions, and rituals that connected its members across borders and religious divides. A professor from Lisbon, a librarian from Hanover, and a schoolmaster from Turku would all speak nearly the same language and wear nearly the same clothing. They would (...) share many of the same dreams, celebrate many of the same heroes, and have similar memories from their youth and adult life. They were convinced that they belonged to the same cultural group and were normally willing to make personal and economic sacrifices when called upon by members of this group. Long before the emergence of European nation-states, the community of scholars formed what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined community, united by the forces of language, culture, and writing.1From around 1500, the community of scholars went by the name respublica litteraria—the Republic of Letters. Italian humanists already used the metaphor in the early fifteenth century, and with Erasmus of Rotterdam's Antibar-barorum liber, it became commonplace within Europe.2 To Erasmus and his [End Page 421] circle the Republic of Letters signified the natural community between all students of creation, divine reason, and Greek and Roman antiquity. It gathered scholars across space and time and set them apart from the hordes of ignorant barbarians. To most early modern scholars, however, respublica litteraria signified much more than a community of reason and knowledge. They used the metaphor to describe every aspect of the culture of scholarship that connected its members and demarcated them from surrounding society. Universities, academies, and secret societies were talked about as parts of the Republic of Letters. Scholarly letters and conversations tête-à-tête, books, lectures and seminars, rituals and traditions were all included. The metaphor demarcated invisible borders between learned and lay, tacitly known to insiders but rarely strictly defined.3The Republic ChallengedDuring the last decades of the seventeenth century the metaphor of the Republic of Letters lost much of its force and elasticity. Scholars used and debated the metaphor more than ever before, but these heated and emotional discussions were not necessarily—as is assumed in much of the work on the eighteenth century4 —a sign that the metaphor and the culture it represented had gained ground. The discussions were, much rather, a symptom of crisis. The end of the great religious wars and the emergence of modern centralized states forced scholars to rethink their role in society and their relationship to the new military and administrative elites. Philosophical skepticism and philological criticism threatened established academic teachings and methods.5 Debates about the Republic of Letters reveal the scholars' efforts to answer these political and intellectual challenges. In her studies of learned Huguenots who, after 1685, were spread across Europe, Anne Goldgar has described how the alienated community of scholars at the turn of the eighteenth century came increasingly under pressure.6 The Huguenots felt marginalized in their adopted [End Page 422] homes, lost income and patronage, and suffered a decline in social prestige. According to Goldgar, these external pressures resulted in stronger internal bonds, as exiled scholars rallied around the ideal of the borderless Republic of Letters. But already before Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot scholars defined a French version of the republic—La République des Lettres—in strong opposition to the forces suppressing the Protestant minority. In 1684 Pierre Bayle defiantly declared from his Dutch refuge,It is not a matter of religion, but of science: therefore one should put an end to all boundaries that divide men into different camps, and consider only that which unites them, namely their rank as noblemen in the Republic of Letters. In this sense all scholars should regard themselves as brothers, and consequently one another as family. They should say:We are all equal We are all relatives } as children of Apollo.7Protestant Northern Europe did not witness the same religious and political conflicts that France did.8 Scholars there were also ridden by crisis at the turn... (shrink)

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by (...) internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home. (shrink)

trapped behind the Iron C~. Prague and Budapest, along with Vienna, are an especially popular journey in central Europe, An easy one-hour train ride east from Vienna is Bxatislava, capital city of the Slovak Republic, part of the former Czechoslov~, which spht into two nation-states in 1993. Ticket prices in Vienna can leave Americans gasping, especiaHy with the collapse of the doHar against Eutopean ctu rencies, making the trip east aH the more worthwhile to see The Slovak National..

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

This article critically surveys the current bioethical and politico-philosophical debate about the ethical permissibility of a so-called ‘liberal eugenics’ and argues that neither the liberal argument for nor the liberal argument against human genetic enhancement is internally consistent as, ultimately, each ends up violating the very liberal principles it nonetheless pretends to defend. In particular, it will be shown that while the argument against a new eugenics necessarily entails a preemptive dehumanization of any potential enhanced form of life, the argument (...) for it threatens to reduce any non-enhanced form of life to a “wrongful life” or a life not worth living. It will therefore be concluded that the specific stakes of this contentious issue cannot be grasped within a liberal conceptual framework. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Objective: To identify perceived barriers to capacity building for local research ethics oversight in El Salvador, and to set an agenda for international collaborative capacity building. Methods: Focus groups were formed in El Salvador which included 17 local clinical investigators and members of newly formed research ethics committees. Information about the proposed research was presented to participants during an international bioethics colloquium sponsored and organized by the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in collaboration with the National Ethics Committee of (...) El Salvador and the University of El Salvador. Interviews with the focus group participants were qualitatively analyzed. Results: Participants expressed the need to tailor the informed consent process and documentation to the local culture; for example, allowing family members to participate in decision‐making, and employing shorter consent forms. Participants indicated that economic barriers often impede efforts in local capacity building. Participants valued international collaboration for mutual capacity building in research ethics oversight. Conclusions: Research ethics committees in El Salvador possess a basic knowledge of locally relevant ethical principles, though they need more training to optimize the application of bioethical principles and models to their particular contexts. Challenges increase the value of collaborative exchanges with ethics committee members in the United States. Further research on facilitating communication between host country and sponsor country ethics committees can maximize local research ethics expertise, and thus raise the standard of protecting human participants involved in international research. (shrink)

Here, I offer a rapid overview of the theory of metaphor, in order to situate the contributions to this volume in relation to one another and within the field more generally.

This article explores the potent force of material objects in testimional culture by enacting an encounter with the ‘debris’ of a World War Two internment camp for Japanese Canadians. Pushing beyond the limits of the repetition of linear history, the article moves instead towards a phenomenological analysis of how yielding to remains of the past might allow us to reconnect with the destroyed worlds from which they were removed. Using Michel Taussig's notion of mimesis and Peggy Phelan's work (...) on mimicry, alongside Merleau‐Ponty's work on the habit‐body, this article brings into relief the neglected place of material objects collected by archives and brought to memorials in testimonial culture. (shrink)

Some recent commentators have acquiesced in the efforts of some religious groups to co-opt concepts of morality, thus leading many—inappropriately, I believe—to think we must keep all morality out of our civic life and especially out of the reasoning in our legal system. I review examples of the confusion in characterizing the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision as a conflict between constitutional rights and religious moral precepts. I argue that this approach capitulates to particular views of morality as religious morality. (...) I consider the appeals to morality in the dissent and the ensuing confusion among commentators about the significance ofthis opinion. I review alternate readings of the Lawrence majority opinion, including proposals that it be considered from the perspectives of the ethicalframeworks of Locke, Mill, or Kant. (shrink)

ArgumentTwo medical delegations, one from Palestine and one from the United States, were sent to detainment camps in Cyprus in the summer of 1947. The British Mandatory government had set up these camps in the summer of 1946 to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants into Palestine after World War II. The purpose of the medical delegations was to screen the camps' inhabitants and to propose a mental-health program for their life in Palestine. We examine the activities of these two (...) delegations within the context of their scientific interest in the psycho-pathology of displaced persons after World War II and as part of a broader project of mental hygiene. According to the delegations, the detainees would be a potential source of strength for building a new society if they adapted to life in Palestine. However, they would become a burden if they failed to be absorbed. At the same time, the medical delegations also saw the detainee camps as a potential “living laboratory” for scientific exploration. The case of the two medical delegations in Cyprus is also a story about constructing and transgressing medical borders. Apart from the obvious fact that this case study deals with movement of people, refugees as well as health-care workers, it is also about the transmission of knowledge and professions across the ocean. (shrink)

We study the representation of sets of desirable gambles by sets of probability mass functions. Sets of desirable gambles are a very general uncertainty model, that may be non-Archimedean, and therefore not representable by a set of probability mass functions. Recently, Cozman (2018) has shown that imposing the additional requirement of even convexity on sets of desirable gambles guarantees that they are representable by a set of probability mass functions. Already more that 20 years earlier, Seidenfeld et al. (1995) gave (...) an axiomatisation of binary preferences—on horse lotteries, rather than on gambles—that also leads to a unique representation in terms of sets of probability mass functions. To reach this goal, they use two devices, which we will call ‘SSK–Archimedeanity’ and ‘SSK–extension’. In this paper, we will make the arguments of Seidenfeld et al. (1995) explicit in the language of gambles, and show how their ideas imply even convexity and allow for conservative reasoning with evenly convex sets of desirable gambles, by deriving an equivalence between the SSK–Archimedean natural extension, the SSK–extension, and the evenly convex natural extension. (shrink)

If code is law then standards bodies are governments. This flawed but powerful metaphor suggests the need to examine more closely those standards bodies that are defining standards for the Internet. In this paper we examine the International Telecommunications Union, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium. We compare the organizations on the basis of participation, transparency, authority, openness, security and interoperability. We conclude that the IETF and (...) the W3C are becoming increasingly similar. We also conclude that the classical distinction between standards and implementations is decreasingly useful as standards are embodies in code – itself a form of speech or documentation. Recent Internet standards bodies have flourished in part by discarding or modifying the implementation/standards distinction. We illustrate that no single model is superior on all dimensions. The IETF is not effectively scaling, struggling with its explosive growth with the creation of thousands of working groups. The IETF coordinating body, the Internet Society, addressed growth by reorganization that removed democratic oversight. The W3C, initially the most closed, is becoming responsive to criticism and now includes open code participants. The IEEE SA and ITU have institutional controls appropriate for hardware but too constraining for code. Each organization has much to learn from the others. (shrink)

This book reevaluates premodern, modern and contemporary conceptions of affects, passions and emotion by analyzing various historical manifestations of the discourse on emotion. Unlike most previous research, which? especially in the German tradition? often focused exclusively on the rise of the modern interiority without paying attention to the underlying dichotomy of interiority / exteriority, this study explores the historical preconditions, the internal logic and the possible shortcomings that inform our thinking of emotion.".

A universal issue of scholastic deliberation, human rights involves a sizeable international involvement in its global deliberation. This article discusses the two broad sets of theoretical perspectives that tend to dominate the empirical examination of both the issues of commitment and compliance: one based on rational actor assumptions and the other largely focused on socialization and the diffusion of norms. The article analyses the general substantive expectations of each of the theoretical perspectives and then discusses the evidence and insights generated (...) by the body of empirical analysis, firstly in regard to state commitment to human rights agreements and then in regard to compliance with these formal commitments. Finally, it discusses the limitations that have constrained this body of research and makes suggestions for future research. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

The JDC-Lauder International Jewish Youth Camp at Szarvas is perceived today as the single most important Jewish outreach and educational programme in Central and Eastern Europe; it is a key symbol for Eastern European Jewry. This paper emphasises the importance of the Szarvas camp, located some 170 km south-east of Budapest in Hungary, and its impact on the Jewish identity of the Central and Eastern European participants, and by extension on their families and communities. It focuses on the (...) camp’s history and uniqueness, and includes a personal experience on the part of the author, who has participated in the camp and today works as its programme director. It also presents information collected from those who have experienced the impact of the camp on themselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Visual EmpireSusan Buck-Morss (bio)1 The Sovereign IconThe Question of SovereigntyJust when the nation-state appeared to be waning in significance, national sovereignty is back in the spotlight. The issue takes on special urgency in the United States, where sovereign right has been proclaimed persistently by the president in an attempt to justify policies of military aggression and violations of international and domestic law, executing these policies with disregard for traditional (...) judicial and constitutional procedures.1 Giorgio Agamben’s recently translated book State of Exception has touched off a small case of collective hysteria among American academics by claiming that by their intrinsic nature, democracies undermine themselves, that dictatorship is an ontological necessity of modern politics, and that the sovereign’s power to declare a state of emergency and with it a state exception to the law places potentially the whole world under the sign of the concentration camp.Agamben’s revelation, however, is not the scandal. It is a logical truism that something cannot be a member of its own set, that constituting power (pouvoir constituens) cannot be synonymous with constituted power (pouvoir constituent).Plato in the Timaeus described a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe–an immortal, perfectly constructed animal [image 1]. Agamben seems shocked to find that such an animal does not exist. If democracies could be self-constituting and self-reproducing, if they could realize the perfect closure of the Oroborus (snake consuming its tail), there would be no decay and no history—but also no hope, no escape from the magic circle of power that is capable of mystifying any political regime, no matter how democratically conceived. The historical event that ruptures the circle’s mythic repetition is also the possibility of a better future.Unlike both Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, upon whom he relies, Agamben uses history ahistorically, in order to abstract from it a timeless ontology of power. In contrast, Benjamin is attentive to historical concreteness, as is Schmitt—this attention is their common bond. But when Benjamin criticizes the parliamentary democracy of the early Weimar Republic, it is not, as it is for Schmitt, out of yearning for a strong executive to cut through parliamentary legalism and compromise.2 Rather, it reminds twentieth-century [End Page 171] parliaments of their own violent origins. A present-day executive leader who, in using the emergency powers of his office, fails to be reminded of the historical origins of representative governments no longer feels It necessary to submit to democratic rule. Benjamin believed that the watered-down versions of democracy in his own time had become little more than bourgeois governing cliques, and for that reason, he might have appreciated Thomas Jefferson’s suggestion that every generation needs a new revolution. The sovereign who declares a state of exception would then be the citizens themselves.The question we need to ask is why Thomas Jefferson’s call for permanent revolution is not predictive of the history of democracies in modern times—why it is so difficult to cut off the head of the king so that it stays off, why popular sovereignty consistently resurrects an aura of quasi-mystical power around the sovereign figure—which since Hobbes’s Leviathan has been recognized as a human artifact, a merely mortal god [see image 2]. In a democracy where only the citizens have the legitimate right to declare a state of exception to the law, the real scandal occurs when an executive branch usurps that power and is allowed to get away with it.More than the sum of merely empirical individuals of which Hobbes’s Leviathan is composed, sovereignty is a transcendent category. The sovereign is an icon in the theological sense. He (or she) embodies an enigma—precisely the power of the collective to constitute itself. The sovereign figure as personification of the collective demonstrates the power of the visible image to close the circle between constituting and constituted power, explaining why even when the illegalities of an individual sovereign are exposed, the faith of the believer is still not shaken. As long as the circle appears closed, sovereign power remains intact; likewise, and... (shrink)

This paper sketches the antilogism of Christine Ladd-Franklin and historical advancement about antilogism, mainly constructs an axiomatic system Atl based on first-order logic with equality and the wholly-exclusion and not-wholly-exclusion relations abstracted from the algebra of Ladd-Franklin, with soundness and completeness of Atl proved, providing a simple and convenient tool on syllogistic reasoning. Atl depicts the empty class and the whole class differently from normal set theories, e.g. ZFC, revealing another perspective on sets and set theories. Two series of Dotterer (...) and the theorem proved by Russinoff are re-characterized in antilogistic formulas corresponding to the square of opposition and twenty-four moods of syllogism. Then the restricted equivalence between two forms of antilogism and minimal inconsistency is built up, implying the internal connection between antilogisms and minimal inconsistency and leaving two related conjectures not proved. Besides, this paper provides a new explanation for the reason why contrariety, subcontrariety, and subalternation and the nine special moods require the non-empty assumption. (shrink)

I argue that it is in the philosophers’ best interest to rule Kallipolis because that life is the best available to them. Although the life of pure contemplation of the Forms would make them happiest, I make the case that, on Plato’s view, this life is not an option for them because of the essential psychological connections that he posits between the individual and the city. To make this argument, I first draw on Plato’s city/soul analogy to explore why it (...) is in reason’s best interest to rule the soul. The answer, I claim, rests in the interconnectedness of the three parts of the soul. If reason does not rule the soul, Plato says that reason will be ruled by another part of the soul and will be forced to serve the ends of the ruling part, which is worse for reason than ruling the soul. Similarly, the philosophers must rule or be ruled. I argue that, as we would expect from the city/soul analogy, Plato thinks that it is worse for the philosophers to be ruled by another part of the city than to rule Kallipolis. This is because, on Plato’s view, individuals internalize their culture, and if the philosophers do not rule, they internalize an unjust culture, which adversely impacts their ability to contemplate the Forms. However, if the philosophers rule Kallipolis, they internalize a just society, which best facilitates their contemplating the Forms. The upshot is that, due to the interconnections that Plato sees between psyche and city, he thinks that ruling Kallipolis is the best option available to the philosophers. (shrink)

BackgroundThe rating of perceived exertion scales with respiratory and muscular illustrations are recognized as simple and practical methods to understand individual psychometric characteristics in breathing and muscle exertion during exercise. However, the implementation of respiratory and muscular RPE to quantify training load in futsal training camps has not been examined. This study investigates respiratory and muscular RPE relationships during domestic training camps and overseas training camps in an under 20 futsal national team.MethodsData collected from eleven field players were used for (...) comparison in this study. All players reported Borg CR10 RPE and 7-scales respiratory RPE and muscular RPE after training sessions and matches. Additionally, total distance covered and training impulse were used to quantify external and internal loads via the Polar Team Pro system. Paired-sample t-tests were used to compare the RPECR10, RPErespiration, RPEmuscle, TD, and TRIMP between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression was performed to determine the relationships among all RPE scales, TD, and TRIMP.ResultsThe RPECR10, TD, and TRIMP showed significant difference between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression analyses showed significant correlation between RPErespiration and RPEmuscle, RPECR10 and RPErespiration, and RPECR10 and RPEmuscle.ConclusionPictorial RPErespiration or RPEmuscle can be used as an alternative to quantify perceived measures of internal loads during DTC and OTC in futsal players. Interpretation of perceived measures of training load and cardiac-related responses in association with external training loads during short-term training camps would be useful in further understanding the demands of futsal players’ experience in these circumstances. (shrink)

Тһе аrtісlе іs dеvоtеd tо аnаlуzіng tһе һіstоrіоgrарһу оf һіstоrісаl аnd роlіtісаl fundаmеntаl wоrks dеdісаtеd tо studуіng tһе һіstоrу оf іntеrnаtіоnаl rеlаtіоns оf tһе Rерublіс оf Kаzаkһstаn durіng tһе уеаrs оf іndереndеnсе. Тһе аuthоrs іn tһіs dіrесtіоn оf wоrk аrе соnvеntіоnаllу сlаssіfіеd іntо sеvеrаl grоuрs, dереndіng оn tһе еssеnсе аnd соntеnt. Аt tһе sаmе tіmе, аn аttеmрt wаs mаdе tо sуstеmаtіzе tһеm frоm tһе роіnt оf vіеw оf сһrоnоlоgу. Тһе аuthоrs tооk а comрrеhеnsіvе аррrоасһ tо еxаmіne tһe wоrks оf hіstоrіаns, (...) роlitісаl scіеntіsts, аnd dірlomаts, fосusіng nоt оn identіfуіng dіfferеnсеs but оn fіndіng intеrrelаtionshірs. Bаsеd оn tһе аnаlysіs, іt іs indісаted tһаt tһе Rерublіс оf Kаzаkhstаn rерresеnts аn асtivе subjесt оf іntеrnatіоnal rеlatіоns, mаkіng а signіfісаnt соntributіоn tо strеngthеning rеgіоnal аnd glоbal sесuritу. Tһе аuthоrs fоund tһаt rеsеаrchеrs wһо studіеd tһе hіstоry оf іntеrnatіоnal rеlatіоns, іn thеіr аbstrасt соnclusіоns, rеlіеd оn thеоretісаl аnd mеthоdolоgісаl аpprоасhes prоposеd bу еx-Prеsidеnt оf Kazakhstan N.А. Nаzarbауev аnd сurrеnt Prеsіdеnt оf Kаzаkhstаn K.K. Tokауеv. Tһе gеnеrаlly ассерted assеssmеnt іs tһаt N.А. Nаzаrbауev wаs tһе fоundеr оf Kаzаkhstаn's fоrеіgn роlicу, a kеу асtоr whо hаs dеtеrminеd іts prіоritу аrеаs оvеr tһе раst 30 уеаrs. (shrink)

The challenge of orphans and vulnerable children has become central to the response of many organisations today. The number of OVC throughout northern Nigeria is growing as a result of the Boko Haram pandemic. Mostly, this is caused by the death of parents who have been killed by the insurgents. It has been estimated that by 2015, 200 000 children under the age of 18 had been orphaned by the Boko Haram insurgents. As the number of OVC is growing, it (...) is becoming more and more difficult for their communities to address all their needs, including their need for positive role models and mentors. This article discusses the role that mentoring can play in the development of OVC affected by violence in northern Nigeria, specifically those in internally displaced person camps. This article argued that one approach to improve the holistic care of OVC in IDP camps in northern Nigeria is through the use of mentors. (shrink)

The expression “République des lettress” is still used today. It appears in most recent dictionaries of the French language, and it even occasionally occurs in ordinary conversation or in the press, a pompous and ironic circumlocution to designate the Parisian literary “milieu.” This archaistic and pejorative survival masks (somewhat similarly to the word “rhetoric”) the attention that researchers are now according to the older meaning of this surviving expression, and to the concept of an international exchange of ideas that it (...) represented for scholars of the Ancien Régime. As proof that this scientific interest is recent, Paul Hazard, in the famous Crise de la conscience européenne (1936), devotes not a single line to the “Republic of Letters,” while in the chapter dealing with Pierre Bayle he cites the “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (1684), the learned periodical published in Amsterdam by this erudite Calvinist, apparently without feeling a need to explain a title that seemed self-evident. For the history of ideas, this notion was not a subject for history. It resided outside the field of perception of a discipline that was completely devoted to a sort of chemistry of pure ideas, removed from the literary form that carried them, and a fortiori from institutional circuits, and forms of sociability and dialogue that “invent” and spread them, and even more so from the awareness that “scholars” might have had of the solidarity that united them and of the meaning they might be able to attribute to it. (shrink)

In Books Three and Four of The Republic, Socrates and Plato's brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, discuss the best way to educate leaders for a just republic. In the course of their dialogue, the meaning of justice in individuals and in society shifts from external order imposed through rules and regulations to the harmony and balance internal to every person in the republic. Only then will an individual be ready to act—whether in acquiring wealth, in the care of the body, or (...) in any public or private affairs. This dramatized version is an adaptation of the Benjamin Jowett translation. (shrink)

With the independence of Republic of Macedonia and the adoption of the Constitution of Macedonia, the country went through a substantial socio-political transition. The concept of human rights and freedoms, such as religious freedoms in the Macedonian Constitution is based on liberal democratic values. The Macedonian Constitution connects the fundamental human rights and freedoms with the concept of the individual and citizen, but also with the collective rights of ethnic minorities, respecting the international standards and responsibilities taken under numerous international (...) human rights conventions and treaties, of which the country is a party. Republic of Macedonia has ratified all the so called “core human right treaties” and now the real challenge lies in the implementation of the international standards. Some of these international conventions and treaties of the United Nations and of the Council of Europe are inherited by succession from the former Yugoslavian federation. Religious freedoms are guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of human rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. According to the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia “The freedom of religious confession is guaranteed. The right to express one's faith freely and publicly, individually or with others, is guaranteed„. After the conflict of 2001 the Ohrid Framework Agreement secured group rights for ethnicities that are not in majority in the Republic of Macedonia. The present Law on the legal status of the church, religious communities and religious groups of 2007, repealed the Law on religion and religious groups of 1997. (shrink)

Should refugees govern refugee camps? This paper argues that they should. It draws on normative political thought in consulting the all-subjected principle and an instrumental defense of democratic rule. The former holds that all those subjected to rule in a political unit should have a say in such rule. Through analyzing the conditions that pertain in refugee camps, the paper demonstrates that the all-subjected principle applies there, too. Refugee camps have developed as near distinct entities from their host states. They (...) have formed their own economic, legal and even political systems within which refugees are subjected to political rule. The paper then demonstrates that democratic rule should be preferred over any other decision-making procedure. No amount of experts can replace the institutions that would lead to the accountability of decision-makers and to the incorporation of refugees as situated and epistemically diverse knowers of the problems they face and the solutions that would work best. (shrink)

Commentators on Machiavelli's Discourses have disagreed about whether he seeks to establish a new, more democratic form of republic, revive an imperial republic like Rome, or educate a new political elite, because they have not seen the logic that connects the three books. Machiavelli first argues that the internal liberty of Rome depended on arming her people. He then shows how a modern republic can avoid the destructive effects of Roman imperialism. Finally, he teaches his readers how to preserve a (...) republic better than the Romans. (shrink)

In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of a sample from a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the (...) Romanian Press to represent the French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s need to gloss over its failure to comply with the Schengen accession requirements and acquire full European Union membership. (shrink)

_Relevance. _The role of internal audit in the entity's governance structure is constantly evolving. For a variety of reasons, internal auditors engage in an in-depth analysis of business processes to help ensure that these processes are working properly and effectively. One reason is that advanced entities expect internal auditors not only to verify compliance with laws and procedures, but also to suggest ways to make internal control more effective. However, often internal auditors in entities do not perform the function they (...) could and should perform. They focus on tax matters, financial statements, and assess compliance with procedures. Internal auditors are sent where problems arise to play the role of auditors to detect errors and report blame. In some entities, internal auditors are separated from business or operational problems, leaving them with the traditional function of verification [Daujotaitė et.al. (2015), Tarptautiniai vidaus audito profesinės praktikos standartai (2004), Rupšys et.al. (2007), Lakis (2017)]._ _ Scientists investigate internal audit from different angles, highlighting issues in the design and implementation stages of internal audit. Recently, the scientific literature has increasingly focused on the quality of internal audit and its evaluation. The collapse of banks also contributed to this, although in 2007 Bank SNORAS Internal Audit Service was awarded the title of "Oldest Internal Audit Service" by the Lithuanian Association of Internal Auditors. Although it is believed that poor quality audit is only due to insufficient qualification and professionalism of the auditor, this view can be negated by the list of factors determining the internal audit environment [Lakis (2007), Lietuvos Respublikos vidaus kontrolės ir vidaus audito įstatymas (2002), Pickett (2011)]. Modern performance and business management tools require employees to change their well-established work habits, but internal audit is still associated with the function of verifier for many managers and internal auditors themselves. The speed of adapting to changes in the environment depends on the success of operations and business, which requires managers to have a modern approach to their internal audit function. _Research aim:_ Identify and evaluate the determinants of the internal audit environment. _Research methods: _Systemic analysis of scientific literature and legislation and questionnaire survey. _Research results and conclusions_: Systematic analysis of the literature suggests that the following key factors exist in the internal audit environment: the legislative environment; regulatory enactments; business practices in the region. The first two factors are otherwise known as legal regulation. It should be noted that there are significant differences in the legal level of audit regulation between external, public and internal auditing. Most of the regulations are for external audit, and least for internal audit. An analysis of the legal literature and regulatory documents on internal audit suggests that only the public sector and, to some extent, commercial banks are required to comply with statutory and regulatory requirements that are binding on them. The activities of private sector internal auditors are not regulated by law, the functions of internal auditors are determined by the managers of the entity in which they work, and the standards are purely advisory. The beginning of the establishment of internal audit in Lithuania is considered to be 1995, when the Board of the Bank of Lithuania approved the Procedure of the Internal Audit Service of Commercial Banks and obligated commercial banks to establish internal audit services. The development of internal audit in the Lithuanian public sector was started only in 2000. In accordance with the 2000 February 7th Government of the Republic of Lithuania resolution no.127 On Internal Audit of State-owned Enterprises and Institutions, internal audit units or positions have been established within public institutions. 2002 January 1st this resolution was replaced by the Republic of Lithuania Law on Internal Control and Internal Audit. International Standards on Internal Auditing that set out the principles for conducting internal auditing are applied worldwide. The standards themselves are fairly generalized, setting only basic requirements and guidelines, as TVAI seeks to have the standards adopted by the widest possible audience. The Internship Regulations provide interpretations and more detailed explanations of the Standards of Professional Practice in Internal Auditing. Standardization and other supporting materials include methodological literature, studies and reviews, books, seminars, conferences and more. A systematic analysis of the literature indicates that sufficient legislation and regulations have been adopted, which has a positive impact on the internal audit environment. In order to assess the impact of business practices in the region on the internal audit environment, a questionnaire survey was conducted among the employees of the entities. It showed that a manager's attitude towards internal audit is strongly influenced by his education. Internal audit is acceptable to higher education managers because they are more open to change and open to change. Educated executives enable the internal auditor to be qualified and understand that internal audit requires an appropriate amount of knowledge. Respondents were also asked about their views on the internal audit process. When employees are not hostile to auditing and evaluating their work, it positively affects the internal audit environment, enabling internal auditors to play the role they would like to have in the company. (shrink)

This paper focused on the role of a multicultural professor in teaching a multicultural class in Family Studies. Specifically the author illustrates the Japanese American internment camp experience in numerous aspects of his teaching. The article makes the connection between this social, political and historical experience of Japanese Americans to other ethnic groups suffrage. The article also incorporates a variety of methods and strategies to illustrate the internment camp issue and how that could potentially influence multicultural (...) education in the United States. (shrink)

Urban cities in the sub-Saharan Africa have witnessed unprecedented transformation because of the proliferation of religious orders within the social landscape. From Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon to Uganda, religious practitioners are actively involved in the spatial transformation through the construction of sacred spaces or prayer camps. The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) typifies one of the several examples of African Pentecostal denominations with transnational status in 200 countries across the world with the hub of its international office situated at (...) the Redemption Camp, Mowe, Nigeria. The sacralisation of forest areas spanning 1600 ha of land has redefined religious institutions such as RCCG as perhaps one of the largest owners of private estate in Nigeria. However, there seems to be an intentional replication of the Redemption Camp, Mowe across Nigeria as well as across the Atlantic as part of the RCCG missionary enterprise. This study aims to utilise the ethnography of the Redemption Camps in Nigeria and Floyd, Texas, United States. The theoretical framework of social worlds is employed to examine the dynamics of religious creativity, innovations, contextual challenges of place-making involved in creating Redemption Camps across borders by the leadership of RCCG through the appropriation of religious capital of its community of sentiments. (shrink)

International law has one principal mechanism for settling the legality of humanitarian interventions, the United Nations Security Council's power to authorise coercion. However, this is hardly satisfactory in practice and has failed to provide a more secure juridical basis for determining significant conflicts among states over when humanitarian force is justified. This article argues that, in spite of Immanuel Kant's limited analysis of intervention, and his silence on humanitarian intervention, his political theory provides the elements of a compelling analysis on (...) this topic. Five components of Kant's roadmap towards perpetual peace and an eventual world republic give conditional support for humanitarian intervention even in imperfect juridical conditions. This support is conditional on the achievement of juridical progress within and among states and has implications for the development of cosmopolitan citizenship. From Kant we learn that, ultimately, humanitarian intervention should become a matter of coercive law enforcement rather than an ethical question of ‘saving strangers’. (shrink)

In consoling the lover of sights and sounds at Republic 475e4-479d5, Socrates describes a tripartite distinction among knowledge, doxa, and ignorance. Socrates claims that knowledge is ‘over’ what-is, doxa is over what is and is-not, and ignorance is over nothing at all. I argue that Plato shows that doxa and ignorance are also related to what-is. While knowledge, doxa, and ignorance interact with different first-degree objects, these three capacities have a common second-degree object: what-is. The fact that Socrates claims that (...) doxa is inferior to knowledge, and ignorance is inferior to doxa, shows that these three capacities have a shared aspiration that doxa and ignorance each fail to fulfill in their own way. Following Plato’s analogy to the senses at 477c1-d1, I use an analogy to the senses to demonstrate Plato’s understanding of the relationship between doxa and what is. (shrink)