"Global Health": Time to Refocus while We still Have Time.

Two decades of growing resource availability from agencies and foundations in wealthy countries has transformed approaches to health in poorly resourced nations. This progress looks increasingly unstable as climate change, social unrest, and, now, disruptive pandemics present threats not only to health but also to the mechanisms that manage it, and to funding itself. The growth in "global health" schools, technology development laboratories, nongovernmental organizations and multilateral institutions in donor countries has delivered not only successes but also disappointment, and reflect a paradigm that is in many ways contrary to the principles of population-based ownership that they espouse. Although the COVID-19 crisis has underlined the importance of health access and health service capacity, we may have a limited window of opportunity in which to rethink the current model and improve both efficiency and effectiveness. With a dose of humility, we may all benefit from studying our own rhetoric on human-centered design and applying these principles across global health to ensure that our approach is effective, efficient, and defensible.

The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests.

Social media have provided instrumental means of communication in many recent political protests. The efficiency of online networks in disseminating timely information has been praised by many commentators; at the same time, users are often derided as "slacktivists" because of the shallow commitment involved in clicking a forwarding button. Here we consider the role of these peripheral online participants, the immense majority of users who surround the small epicenter of protests, representing layers of diminishing online activity around the committed minority. We analyze three datasets tracking protest communication in different languages and political contexts through the social media platform Twitter and employ a network decomposition technique to examine their hierarchical structure. We provide consistent evidence that peripheral participants are critical in increasing the reach of protest messages and generating online content at levels that are comparable to core participants. Although committed minorities may constitute the heart of protest movements, our results suggest that their success in maximizing the number of online citizens exposed to protest messages depends, at least in part, on activating the critical periphery. Peripheral users are less active on a per capita basis, but their power lies in their numbers: their aggregate contribution to the spread of protest messages is comparable in magnitude to that of core participants. An analysis of two other datasets unrelated to mass protests strengthens our interpretation that core-periphery dynamics are characteristically important in the context of collective action events. Theoretical models of diffusion in social networks would benefit from increased attention to the role of peripheral nodes in the propagation of information and behavior.

Orphans and political instability.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigates the security implications of growing orphan populations, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Little has been written about the security implications of this especially vulnerable group of children. Are growing orphan populations associated with increases in political instability as has been suggested? METHOD: Using data from several sources, we employ regression analysis to test whether Sub-Saharan African countries with larger proportions of orphans and those with increasing orphan populations experience higher rates of political instability. RESULTS: We find that the increase in the orphan population is related to an increasing incidence of civil conflict, but do not find a similar relationship for the proportion of orphans. In addition, we find that the causes of orphanhood matter. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that increases in orphan populations (rather than simple proportions) are destabilizing. We suggest possible avenues for mediating the security risks posed by growing orphan populations.

Climate change, conflict and development in Sudan: global neo-Malthusian narratives and local power struggles.

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict­environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top-down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab-African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines. Today, Darfur has been labelled 'the world's first climate change conflict', masking the long-term political-economic dynamics and Sudanese agency underpinning the crisis. Simultaneously, the global food crisis is instrumentalized to launch a dam programme and agricultural revival that claim to be African answers to resource scarcity. The winners, however, are Sudan's globalized Islamist elites and foreign investors, whilst the livelihoods of local communities are undermined. Important links exist between climatic developments and security, but global Malthusian narratives about state failure and conflict are dangerously susceptible to manipulations by national elites; the practical outcomes decrease rather than increase human security. In the climate change era, the breakdown of institutions and associated violence is often not an unfortunate failure of the old system due to environmental shock, but a strategy of elites in wider processes of power and wealth accumulation and contestation.

"Ready to shoot and do shoot": black working-class self-defense and community politics in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s.

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks' response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks' everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses­self-defense, legal redress, and journalists' remonstrations­as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.

"Our struggle is for the full loaf": protests, social welfare and gendered citizenship in South Africa.

The waves of popular protest sweeping contemporary South Africa are inadequately explained by anti-globalisation, anti-neoliberal and even anti-government sentiments and analysis. Attention to the gendered dynamics of township life, including the nature of households, gender relations and the critical importance of social welfare provisions to poor women and their households, yields a revised understanding of protests and movements. The Durban-based shack-dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo is used to illustrate these points, as are original quantitative and qualitative data from urban townships in KwaZulu-Natal.

Wave of mutilation: the cattle mutilation phenomenon of the 1970s.

During the 1970s many small-scale cattle ranchers across the Midwest reported finding their cattle mutilated. The episode, often dismissed as mass hysteria or sensationalized reporting, demonstrates the growing dissatisfaction of many ranchers concerning government intrusiveness and restrictive policies. These frustrations found a release in response to the mutilation phenomenon during which ranchers vented their anger by taking direct aim at the federal government. The turbulent economic conditions of the period paired with government interference in the cattle industry helped sustain the mutilation phenomenon as ranchers projected their fears and insecurities through the bizarre episode. The hostility ranchers showed toward the federal government during the mutilation scare presaged and helped provide the impetus for events such as the Sagebrush Rebellion. The mutilation phenomenon also underscores the pronounced effects of the libertarian movement of the 1960s that gave rise to the New Right and gained adherents across the West and Midwest.

Nationalism and social welfare in the post-Soviet context.

This paper offers hypotheses on the role that state social welfare measures can play in reflecting nationalism and in aggravating interethnic tensions. Social welfare is often overlooked in theoretical literature on nationalism, because of the widespread assumption that the welfare state promotes social cohesion. However, social welfare systems may face contradictions between the goal of promoting universal access to all citizens on the one hand, and social pressures to recognize particular groups in distinct ways on the other. Examples from the post-Soviet context (particularly Russia) are offered to illustrate the ways in which social welfare issues may be perceived as having ethnic connotations.

"But burn - no": the rest of the crowd in three civil disorders in 1960s Chicago.

Examining the internal dynamics of three civil disturbances on the West Side of Chicago during the late 1960s, this article describes the presence of numerous people who were not participating in the upheaval. It pays particular attention to "counterrioters," civilian residents of the neighborhoods and members of local organizations, who tried to persuade those engaging in violence to stop. Local dissent from the tactic of violence suggests that historians should describe these events using the neutral language of social science rather than the politically loaded labels of "riot" or "rebellion." The article argues that American historians of urban disorders should use the methods of European scholars of the crowd to study the actions of participants in order to ascertain their political content, rather than relying on an examination of their motives.

The "politics of the queue": the politicization of people living with HIV/AIDS in Tanzania.

Starting from a body of literature on movements around "biological citizenship," this article analyses the political significance of HIV-positive people's collective action in Tanzania. We explore reasons for the limited impact of Tanzanian AIDS activism on the wider political scene, concluding that the formation of a "movement" is still in its infancy and faces many constraints, though some breakthroughs have been made. Participation in PLHA groups in Tanzania encourages politicizing struggles over representation, democratic forms and gender that can lead to a process of political socialization in which members learn to recognize and confront abuses of power. It is in such low-level, less visible social transformations that the greatest potential of participation in collective action around HIV/AIDS in Tanzania lies.

Food security in an era of economic volatility.

This article analyzes international commodity price movements, assesses food policies in response to price fluctuations, and explores the food security implications of price volatility on low-income groups. It focuses specifically on measurements, causes, and consequences of recent food price trends, variability around those trends, and price spikes. Combining these three components of price dynamics shows that the variation in real prices post-2000 was substantially greater than that in the 1980s and 1990s, and was approximately equal to the extreme volatility in commodity prices that was experienced in the 1970s. Macro policy, exchange rates, and petroleum prices were important determinants of price variability over 2005­2010, highlighting the new linkages between the agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today. These linkages contributed in large part to misguided expectations and uncertainty that drove prices to their peak in 2008. The article also argues that there is a long-lasting effect of price spikes on food policy around the world, often resulting in self-sufficiency policies that create even more volatility in international markets. The efforts by governments to stabilize prices frequently contribute to even greater food insecurity among poor households, most of which are in rural areas and survive on the margin of net consumption and net production. Events of 2008­and more recently in 2010­underscore the impact of price variability for food security and the need for refocused policy approaches to prevent and mitigate price spikes.

Back to the garden: communes, the environment, and antiurban pastoralism at the end of the sixties.

This essay examines the complicated relationship among hippie communes, the environmental movement, and New Left and Black Power militants in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those relationships lie the roots of the divide that separated environmental issues on one hand and urban issues on the other during the 1970s and beyond. This essay examines how the fight between militants and back-to-the-land communards and environmentalists, between what we might call urban progressives and antiurban progressives, was staged as a fight between those who cared about the issues of the city and those who turned their backs on them. In this way, this essay locates the city more centrally in politics of the era.

Faction fights, student protests, and rebellion: the politics of beer-drinks and bad food in the Transkei, South Africa, 1955-63.

This article examines two cases of conflict from the Transkei region of South Africa. In the first instance in 1955, young men caught up in a stick fight after drinking beer were arrested, tried, and convicted, and they received harsh sentences of six months of hard labor. In the second case in 1961, boys at an elite school in Umtata protested their poor food and lodging arrangements, set fire to the school library, and threatened to kill the headmaster. While they were convicted, their punishment of caning was considered a very light sentence. These two cases illuminate the emerging nature of youthful resistance to the inception of home rule that was later to give rise to the Bantustans, as well as the response by state officials seeking to cope with the enlarging rural opposition to the structures of apartheid. The paradox of the strikingly different sentences is examined and explained.

Cacophonies of aid, failed state building and NGOs in Haiti: setting the stage for disaster, envisioning the future.

The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was a catastrophe not only for the loss of life it caused, but also because it destroyed the very thin layer of state administrative capacity that was in place in the country. This article argues that the fragility of the Haitian state institutions was exacerbated by international strategies that promoted NGOs as substitutes for the state. These strategies have generated a vicious circle that, while solving immediate logistical problems, ended up weakening Haiti's institutions. However, the article does not call for an overarching condemnation of NGOs. Instead, it explores two cases of community-based NGOs, Partners In Health and Fonkoze, that have contributed to creating durable social capital, generated employment and provided functioning services to the communities where they operated. The article shows that organisations that are financially independent and internationally connected, embrace a needs-based approach to their activities and share a long-term commitment to the communities within which they operate can contribute to bringing about substantial improvement for people living in situations of extreme poverty. It concludes that in the aftermath of a crisis of the dimension of the January earthquake it is crucial to channel support towards organisations that show this type of commitment.

Food rationing and the black market in France (1940-1944).

French food rationing was more stringent than that of any other Occupied country in Western Europe in the Second World War, and the nation's resulting aversion to a regime that controlled rations and prices would increase the difficulties of post-war governments. This article investigates the role of French state management in wartime food shortages, assessing the parts played by French policy and German interference in the food shortages, the diversion of supplies to the black market and the inequities in distribution. It finds the French rationing administration to have been poorly organized, but attributes significant responsibility to the German Occupation authorities, whose interference increased the rationing system's dysfunction. French consumers blamed the French state for the problems and relied increasingly on alternate means to supplement inadequate rations. The result was a rationing system that delivered malnourishment, social division and hostility to state management of the food supply.

Tales of deviance and control: on space, rules, and law in squatter settlements.

In Latin American cities, around a third of the urban population lives in tenure situations that can be designated as informal, yet variation in the ways and extent to which these arrangements do not comply with law is extensive. Furthermore, informal dwellers often employ a variety of strategies to legitimize and ultimately legalize their tenure, implying a dynamic rather than a static relationship between illegality and legality. Conceiving of land tenure in dichotomous terms, as simply being either legal or illegal, therefore, fails to reflect this diversity, nor does it capture the evolving nature of the relationship between informal settlements and the state system. Drawing from the development of squatter settlements in Buenos Aires, this article proposes an alternative perspective and shows how settlements alternate strategies of noncompliance with adaptation to the state legal system to gradually increase their legality.

How do voluntary organizations foster protest? The role of organizational involvement on individual protest participation.

Prior research shows that members of voluntary organizations are more likely to protest than nonmembers. But why, among members, do some protest while others do not? I explore whether organizational involvement-the extent in which members engage in the "life" of their organizations-affects protest. I identify four dimensions of involvement-time and money contributions, participation in activities, psychological attachment, and embeddedness in interpersonal communication networks. Only the first dimension has robust effects on protest, and they are nonlinear: intermediate contributors have the highest protest rates. The three other dimensions substantially increase protest only under specific "involvement profiles."