ABSTRACT This article documents different dimensions of militarisation observed in Mexico since the start of the war on drugs. It argues that militarisation is a multidirectional phenomenon that is characterised by rationales that justify the use of illegal means to address complex issues, promising expediency and efficiency but rarely delivering on it. In this case, it provides evidence about tactical, economic and organisational dimensions. Its main contribution is to present an analytical review of these patterns, whereby faulty governance has led to profound institutional transformation caused by the crosstalk between the military and state institutions. It concludes by suggesting that further research is required on the organisational dimension to elucidate how militarisation can be a powerful transformative force in the institutions of the state beyond the tactical application of coercive force.
ABSTRACT Conventional wisdom suggests that higher education (HE) and national prosperity (or wealth) contribute to improved life satisfaction. Is this also true for first‐generation immigrants? Using multilevel models on 16,368 individuals across 35 European countries from the European Social Survey, the results demonstrate that, although immigrants generally become more satisfied with their lives as country‐level prosperity increases, highly educated immigrants enjoy a greater life‐satisfaction advantage in less prosperous countries than their less‐educated counterparts; however, this advantage is partly reversed in highly prosperous countries. The present study examined two mechanisms for this observation: perceived discrimination and occupational downgrading. Results reveal that occupational downgrading, rather than discrimination, constitutes the primary pathway, accounting for approximately one‐quarter of the negative effect observed among highly educated immigrants in high‐prosperity contexts. The psychological harm of working below one's qualification level intensifies with country prosperity, suggesting that blocked mobility is particularly damaging where meritocratic advancement is expected. The substantial positive direct effect of HE suggests that when labour market integration is successful, education provides considerable benefits for life satisfaction. However, institutional barriers to credential recognition in more prosperous host countries prevent many highly educated immigrants from accessing appropriate positions, partially offsetting the advantages of high prosperity. These findings have significant policy implications for reforming credential recognition in migration programmes in developed countries.
ABSTRACT This article examines how contemporary environmental governance can criminalize care by reclassifying subsistence, custodial and place‐based practices as environmental crime. Rather than treating ‘green mafia’ as a specific organization, the article conceptualizes it as a recurring governance configuration in which environmental authority is consolidated through alliances among states, conservation organizations and market intermediaries, whereas everyday stewardship becomes legible as illegality. Drawing on green criminology as the synthesizing framework, and on political ecology, legal pluralism and governmentality, and care ethics as supporting interpretive lenses, the study develops a three‐layer model linking environmental value claims, legibility infrastructures and enforcement outcomes. Using comparative process tracing across India's forest governance, Amazon frontier regulation and carbon market regimes, the article reconstructs how protected‐area rules, forest permits, audits, timber documentation systems, monitoring and verification protocols, audits and carbon accounting rules translate environmental benefit claims into legal and administrative categories. The analysis shows that criminalization is most likely when three conditions converge: Environmental value is made administratively measurable, customary use lacks formal documentary recognition and enforcement agencies prioritize visible, low‐capital practices over structurally embedded drivers of degradation. The article distinguishes criminalization from broader regulation by identifying the offences, sanctions and enforcement routines through which care practices are converted into trespass, encroachment, illegal collection, unauthorized extraction, permit violations, or non‐compliance with conservation and carbon rules. The findings reveal a recurrent misalignment between ecological harm and enforcement intensity. The article argues that environmental crime should be interpreted not only as a response to harm but also as a governance technique that reallocates authority, produces green assets and facilitates accumulation. It concludes that green criminology can strengthen environmental governance by shifting analysis from legality alone to harm, proportionality and the recognition of local stewardship as governance capacity.
ABSTRACT Coastal cities in the Indian subcontinent have been experiencing severe cyclonic occurrences. Therefore, slum communities are no exception, and their adaptation strategies to cope with these climatic events are less studied in practice and research. Hence, the current study seeks to study the socio‐economic variables that enhance the slum dwellers' adaptability to recurring cyclones in India's first smart city, Bhubaneswar. With the help of a structured questionnaire, a total of 200 households are randomly selected from two cyclone‐prone slums, such as ‘Kedar Palli’ and ‘Phd Sahi’. As the ‘adaptation measures’ we have considered here are ‘dichotomous’ or ‘binary’, the study uses a logistic regression model to determine the factors responsible for adaptation. The significant findings of the study are: (1) the level of education of the respondent is positive and significant in the model, implying better education leads to better cyclone adaptation; (2) if the slum household has house ownership, they are better adapted; (3) credit facility available to the slum dwellers enhances their adaptability to recurring cyclones, (4) slum dwellers have learned from previous cyclone experience, that is, there is a ‘learning effect’ as they are better adapted, (5) ‘income of the household’, ‘gender,’ ‘family type’ whether ‘nuclear or joint’ also impacts the adaptation of slum dwellers. From a policy perspective, the study illustrates that local government should upgrade the slums by enhancing their socio‐economic conditions to help the community adopt more generic and location‐specific adaptation strategies.
ABSTRACT The article introduces a computational theory explaining why some people support strong leaders in politics, arguing that this support sometimes arises because people view a strong leader as means to address social problems. The theory proposes that people develop a causal map concerning the consequences of the rise of a strong leader. This predicts that support for strong leaders grows when a person believes that a strong leader fosters unity within the community, that unity is needed to address social problems and that failure to address the problems is costly. These predictions are corroborated in three experimental online studies based on vignettes. The theory clarifies why support for strong leaders is often situational (e.g., it occurs only when the leader is thought to foster unity) and why it can sometimes emerge within groups (e.g., the political left and centre) that typically dislike strong leaders as such.
ABSTRACT This study examines how different policy issues and institutional factors influence the strength of political consensus and polarized voting in the United States (US) Congress between 1991 and 2020. Utilising the Jordan Tama important congressional votes dataset, the analysis investigates the impact of external factors, such as foreign trade, immigration, domestic policy, spending, military/security issues and presidential position, as well as internal factors, such as divided party control. Our analysis employed descriptive statistics for all variables, pairwise correlation, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, binary logistic regression and marginal effects modelling to estimate predictors. The results indicate that immigration and domestic policy issues significantly reduce consensus and increase polarization, while spending bills foster greater bipartisan agreement. Presidential involvement and periods of divided‐party control emerge as strong predictors of polarized voting, whereas foreign trade and international finance do not significantly alter underlying partisan and consensus dynamics in both houses. The findings contribute to partisan and electoral theories by demonstrating how specific policy domains and institutional dynamics interact to shape legislative outcomes in the contemporary polarized political environment. The study highlights challenges facing efforts to restore legislative functionality and the foundational role of compromise in American democracy.
ABSTRACT Achieving ecological and economic equilibrium has become a major policy issue within contemporary sustainable development transition. As a result, advanced industrial economies, such as the G7, have prioritized systematic policy changes to ensure balance between economic and environmental equilibrium. Within such discussion, the current research extends the sustainable development policy debate within the agriculture sector by analyzing the empirical association between area under greenhouses, chemical fertilizer consumption, climate change, renewable energy (RE) investments and agricultural economic growth. For empirical investigation, the current study has utilized CS‐ARDL, Driscoll–Kraay, panels corrected standard error (PCSE), AMG and CCEMG econometric strategies to determine that agricultural area under greenhouses and RE investments contribute to agricultural economic growth, whereas climate change and chemical fertilizer consumption have the opposite impact. To improve sustainable development practices within the agricultural sector, the current study proposes that G7 policymakers must focus on the reliability and durability of RE resources, green financing and technological advancements to reshape agricultural productivity and environmental sustainability in agriculture.
ABSTRACT Centuries of colonial and apartheid rule have left South Africa with a landscape of violent histories and hundreds of missing and dead. This article extends current research framed inside critical forensics, arguing that encounters between the spectral, the body and the forensic generate productive, layered meaning‐making—as distinct from knowledge production—in the search for repair inside landscapes of historical and ongoing violence. What offers healing in these complex landscapes with deep cosmological roots is not only a scientific approach aimed at forensic bodily identification, leading to presumed justice and closure. In South Africa, where visions, spirits and visits to the ancestral plane are social facts, the spectral offers pathways towards addressing harm that upset linear chronologies and mapped sites for forensic exhumations of the missing. Our empirical research from the KwaZulu‐Natal province is a careful interpretation of how sangomas—through a variety of sensorial experiences and affective registers—are part of a social ecology that navigates pathways towards repair inside landscapes of violence.
ABSTRACT This study explores the relationships between present bias, emotional reactivity and perceived digital advertising exposure in relation to impulse spending behaviour. The aim is to examine how these psychological factors and marketing perceptions are associated with impulsive consumer purchases. Using a quantitative survey design, data were collected from 617 UK‐based consumers who reported their tendencies toward impulse spending, emotional responses and exposure to personalised ads. The findings indicate that present bias is significantly associated with impulse spending, whereas emotional reactivity strengthens this relationship. Furthermore, perceived digital advertising exposure is associated with the relationship between present bias and impulse spending, highlighting its potential to reinforce impulsive tendencies. On the basis of these findings, the study recommends that businesses adopt ethical marketing strategies that address consumers’ psychological vulnerabilities, such as promoting responsible consumption and financial education. For consumers, it suggests the importance of emotional regulation and awareness of cognitive biases. The study contributes to the understanding of impulse spending by integrating cognitive, emotional and environmental factors, providing insights for businesses, policymakers and consumers to better understand impulsive spending behaviours.
ABSTRACT Across much of the Global South and increasingly in the Global North, authoritarian populist imagination blurs boundaries between legality and illegality, weaponising law to suppress dissent while tolerating violence by allied actors. This imagination establishes a symbolic boundary mechanism between punitive/eliminative violence for political dissidents and marginalised groups, and the impunity of violence for privileged groups aligned with incumbent political power. Non‐democratic politics in Turkey demonstrate how the incumbent regime's shifting sense of power due to declining popular support translates into more explicitly coercive strategies and the masculinist entrenchment of authoritarian populist imagination. Criminal selectivity and lawfare are utilised for this purpose; however, their effectiveness is underpinned by cultural intimacies that reflect the cultural and political processes of negotiation and recognition between the top‐down majoritarian–authoritarian–securitarian political agenda and its bottom‐up receptions. Cultural intimacies rooted in masculinist entrenchment involve both the enactment of familial codes as a cultural template for the masculinist protection of the family, state and nation, and the performance of swashbuckling masculinity as a cultural script for righteous aggression against targeted groups. Both reframe the mechanism of criminal selectivity and lawfare, reinforcing the incumbent regime's authoritarian populist imagination by constantly presenting itself as an indispensable and invincible ruling actor.
ABSTRACT This study investigates how different forms of entrepreneurship education academic programmes, certification‐based training and the absence of formal entrepreneurship education shape entrepreneurial propensity and the mechanisms through which learners develop entrepreneurial capabilities and motivation. Drawing on Human‐Capital Theory and the Theory of Planned Behaviour, the study examines how educational design, personal traits and contextual influences jointly contribute to entrepreneurial development. Data were collected from 410 entrepreneurs using a stratified survey, and analyses included a one‐way analysis of variance (ANOVA) supplemented by ANCOVA controlling for age, gender and country income, comparing entrepreneurial propensity across educational pathways, followed by hierarchical regressions conducted separately for each group. Results show that entrepreneurs with formal entrepreneurship education, whether academic or certification‐based, report significantly higher entrepreneurial propensity than those without structured training, with no statistically significant difference between academic and certification routes. Self‐reported creativity was positively associated with entrepreneurial propensity in all three groups, although this association should be interpreted cautiously given the shared self‐report method and common Likert response format, whereas critical thinking was a significant predictor only within academic programmes. Gender, parental support and country context emerged as group‐specific influences, highlighting the developmental and sociocultural factors that shape entrepreneurial learning. The study contributes to entrepreneurship education research by clarifying how diverse learning modes foster entrepreneurial readiness and by emphasizing the pedagogical importance of experiential depth, creative problem‐solving and supportive learning environments in programme design.
ABSTRACT Under the sustainable development goals (SDGs), all goals are interconnected and interdependent; therefore, assessing their attainment requires an understanding of their interrelationships. However, the literature lacks research on interconnectedness and high‐impact SDGs. Thus, this study explores the interconnectedness of SDGs, recognizing their mutual dependence for success by categorizing these SDGs into societal, environmental and economic sectors. A systemic impact (SI) index is developed to evaluate the significance of SDGs as prerequisites for achieving other SDG targets. The concept of systems thinking is utilized as a practical method to represent the interconnectedness and feedback of the actions of SDGs through causal loop diagrams (CLDs). SDGs are classified as systems structures that seek to accomplish an achievement or control a problem in a system. The findings suggested that SDGs 4 (quality education), 8 (decent work and economic growth), 10 (reduced inequalities) and 17 (partnerships for the goal) exhibit high SI, thereby serving as essential prerequisites for broader sustainable development objectives. The findings of this study offer valuable insights for policymakers and researchers by distinguishing high‐impact SDGs from the others, thereby highlighting the need to prioritize policy formulation and implementation focused on SDGs with high SI.
Mounting climate and environmental crises remain a key challenge for West African countries. More vulnerabilities among West African populations seem to have been created due to increased uncertainty and lack of confidence to invest in the business environment. In view of this, the study explores the impact of climate change vulnerability on per capita GDP/income in the West African context over the period 2000–2023. Using pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and panel non‐causality test, climate change vulnerability index has an adverse impact on both per capita GDP and gross national income (GNI) per capita in the long run. This suggests that high susceptibility to climate risks is likely to reduce the availability of economic resources, exacerbating poor development outcomes in the long term. Findings further stress that increased climate vulnerability could amplify existing inequalities and other socioeconomic problems. The study also recognizes that the associated challenges of the levels of climate vulnerability and socioeconomic conditions are interconnected, as these indicators could reinforce each other based on the evidence of bidirectional causality between them. It is emphasized that the prevailing socioeconomic conditions, particularly in West Africa, can be strongly linked to climate phenomena. Growth and income gains are unlikely to be sufficiently high in the face of rising susceptibility to changing weather patterns, generating renewed socio‐economic concerns. Hence, it is recommended that more equitable and effective responses to climate change in terms of mitigation and adaptation measures are imperative and be fully motivated towards desired socioeconomic outcomes across the West African sub‐region.
What if the key to unlocking a country's financial development lies not only within its financial system but in its broader macroeconomic landscape? Can factors like trade, inflation and remittances shape the path to long‐term financial growth? This study delves into these questions, analysing a robust 48‐year dataset to uncover how macroeconomic variables interact with financial development. The findings highlight that although global trade is crucial for fostering financial development, challenges like inflation and growing remittance inflows can obstruct progress. Interestingly, economic growth—typically viewed as a fundamental driver—does not show a strong correlation with financial development. These insights are especially valuable for developing economies, where managing inflation and optimizing remittance flows remain critical issues.
ABSTRACT The growing intricacy of US–China tensions (UCTs) has garnered significant interest among scholars globally, prompting investigations into its effects on multiple dimensions of the global economy. In this quest, the present study attempts to explore the impact of UCT on the banking stability of the South Asian countries. In addition, the study also explores the moderating role of quality of governance on the aforementioned relationship. To empirically test the aforementioned objectives, the study employs the system generalised method of moments (Sys‐GMM) on the newly constructed UCT index and alternative proxies for measuring banking stability, that is, Z ‐scores and non‐performing loans (NPLs), of South Asian countries covering the period from 2001 to 2023. In addition, the study also employed the SELPDM model as a robustness estimate. The Sys‐GMM estimate indicates that the UCT impedes banking stability by reducing Z ‐scores and increasing NPLs in South Asian countries. The results also suggest that both the composite quality of governance index and its individual dimensions positively impact banking sector stability by strengthening Z ‐scores and lowering NPLs in South Asian countries. Finally, the moderating variable indicates that when quality of governance interacts with the UCT index, it assists in moderating the negative impact of the UCT index on the banking sector's stability. The moderating variable assists in reinforcing the robustness of a strong institutional framework in making the banking sector more resilient against the UCT index. The study is an original work that offers significant practical implications to comprehend the role of quality of governance and the adverse implications of UCTs on the banking stability within emerging economies.
Geographical indications (GIs) connect products to the places and communities from which they originate, preserving cultural identity while supporting economic development. In Asia, they play a crucial role in sustaining the livelihoods of farmers, artisans and craft producers; yet, the global rules that regulate them often reveal deep imbalances. Under the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement, strong GI protection is granted mainly to wines and spirits. In contrast, other products, such as rice, tea, textiles and handicrafts, which are central to Asian traditions and economies, receive weaker international safeguards. The Geneva Act of the Lisbon Agreement provides a system for international GI registration through the World Intellectual Property Organization, but its centralised and costly procedures remain inaccessible to many Asian countries. Free Trade Agreements, particularly with the European Union, further consolidate European interests and reduce the policy flexibility of Asian governments. At the national and regional level, weak institutions and fragmented enforcement add to these challenges. This article argues for more inclusive and accessible systems of GI protection that broaden coverage to a wider range of products, simplify registration procedures and encourage stronger regional collaboration. Such reforms are essential not only to enhance the competitiveness of Asian products but also to safeguard cultural heritage and strengthen community identities in an increasingly global trading environment.
The deepening integration of economic and productivity resources in recent decades has major environmental implications for global economies. However, the persistent use of fossil fuel as an energy policy component requires immediate policy action to address how energy affects the environment and the sustainable development transition. In light of this consideration, we study documents on how tourism sector developments, nuclear energy (NE) policy and fertility rate (FR) resolve environmental challenges. Furthermore, we test whether a U-shaped connection exists between load capacity factor and income and also observe an inverse U-shaped link among CO 2 emissions, ecological footprint and income. Our extended econometric investigation allows us to report that NE consumption and tourism development are key in the sustainable development transition, whereas FRs may exacerbate environmental challenges. Our findings further validate the load capacity and environmental Kuznets curve, highlighting the necessity for sustainable policies to minimize adverse environmental effects while balancing energy demands. The study offers policy recommendations, including investing in NE research, promoting sustainable tourism, supporting family planning and enhancing education and public awareness.
The rapid development of internet technologies has transformed society, facilitating access to information while amplifying challenges like the spread of misinformation. As one of the most widely used video‐sharing platforms, YouTube has increasingly drawn scholarly attention for its potential role in the dissemination of misleading or manipulative content, including misinformation and disinformation, particularly in the absence of editorial oversight. Conducted in Türkiye, this study investigates how different generational cohorts (Generations X, Y and Z) perceive and consume YouTube news, focusing on media reliability, verification strategies and attitudes toward misinformation. The study involved 30 participants (10 from each generation), selected through purposive and snowball sampling, all of whom actively use YouTube as a news source. This study examines the interplay between generational differences and digital media habits to provide a nuanced understanding of the evolving dynamics of news consumption, thereby addressing a critical gap in the literature. This qualitative study employed semi‐structured interviews, which were thematically analysed using MAXQDA Analytics Pro 2022 to explore generational distinctions in news trust, verification and misinformation attitudes. Although Generation X relies on traditional media and institutional credibility, Generation Y adopts a hybrid approach that blends digital and traditional tools for cross‐referencing. In contrast, Generation Z prioritizes social media and peer networks, placing greater value on speed and interactivity over institutional authority. The findings suggest that media literacy programs should be tailored to generational needs, incorporating platform‐specific guidance and verification skills to improve resilience against misinformation. By highlighting generational dynamics in YouTube news consumption, the study contributes valuable insights into designing strategies for fostering media literacy and promoting accurate information dissemination in the digital age.
