Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations

Erskine, Toni, Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp.xii+241 RAE2008

Multi-party actions as a route to collective redress for mass arm, having particular regard to environmental mass harm

Accepted Version

Northern Ireland, America and the emerging church movement: Exploring the significance of Peter Rollins and the Ikon collective

The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is a primarily Western religious phenomenon, identifiable by its critical ‘deconstruction’ of ‘modern’ religion. While most prominent in North America, especially the United States, some of the most significant contributors to the ECM ‘conversation’ have been the Belfast-based Ikon Collective and one of its founders, philosopher Peter Rollins. Their rootedness in the unique religious, political and social landscape of Northern Ireland in part explains their position on the ‘margins’ of the ECM, and provides many of the resources for their contributions. Ikon’s development of ‘transformance art’ and its ‘leaderless’ structure raise questions about the institutional viability of the wider ECM. Rollins’ ‘Pyrotheology’ project, grounded in his reading of post-modern philosophy, introduces more radical ideas to the ECM conversation. Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ and ‘marginal’ location provides the ground from which Rollins and Ikon have been able to expose the boundaries of the ECM and raise questions about just how far the ECM may go in its efforts to transform Western Christianity.

Organizing women as women: Hybridity and grassroots collective action in the 21st century

The Million Mom March (favoring gun control) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (focusing on foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq) are organizations that have mobilized women as women in an era when other women's groups struggled to maintain critical mass and turned away from non-gender-specific public issues. This article addresses how these organizations fostered collective consciousness among women, a large and diverse group, while confronting the echoes of backlash against previous mobilization efforts by women. We argue that the March and Code Pink achieved mobilization success by creating hybrid organizations that blended elements of three major collective action frames: maternalism, egalitarianism, and feminine expression. These innovative organizations invented hybrid forms that cut across movements, constituencies, and political institutions. Using surveys, interviews, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article explains how the March and Code Pink met the contemporary challenges facing women's collective action in similar yet distinct ways. It highlights the role of feminine expression and concerns about the intersectional marginalization of women in resolving the historic tensions between maternalism and egalitarianism. It demonstrates hybridity as a useful analytical lens to understand gendered organizing and other forms of grassroots collective action. © 2010 American Political Science Association.

Collective action and individual choice: rethinking how we regulate narcotics and antibiotics.

Governments across the globe have squandered treasure and imprisoned millions of their own citizens by criminalising the use and sale of recreational drugs. But use of these drugs has remained relatively constant, and the primary victims are the users themselves. Meanwhile, antimicrobial drugs that once had the power to cure infections are losing their ability to do so, compromising the health of people around the world. The thesis of this essay is that policymakers should stop wasting resources trying to fight an unwinnable and morally dubious war against recreational drug users, and start shifting their attention to the serious threat posed by our collective misuse of antibiotics.

Integrating simultaneous prosocial and antisocial behavior into theories of collective action.

Trust and cooperation constitute cornerstones of common-pool resource theory, showing that "prosocial" strategies among resource users can overcome collective action problems and lead to sustainable resource governance. Yet, antisocial behavior and especially the coexistence of prosocial and antisocial behaviors have received less attention. We broaden the analysis to include the effects of both "prosocial" and "antisocial" interactions. We do so in the context of marine protected areas (MPAs), the most prominent form of biodiversity conservation intervention worldwide. Our multimethod approach relied on lab-in-the-field economic experiments (n = 127) in two MPA and two non-MPA communities in Baja California, Mexico. In addition, we deployed a standardized fishers' survey (n = 544) to verify the external validity of our findings and expert informant interviews (n = 77) to develop potential explanatory mechanisms. In MPA sites, prosocial and antisocial behavior is significantly higher, and the presence of antisocial behavior does not seem to have a negative effect on prosocial behavior. We suggest that market integration, economic diversification, and strengthened group identity in MPAs are the main potential mechanisms for the simultaneity of prosocial and antisocial behavior we observed. This study constitutes a first step in better understanding the interaction between prosociality and antisociality as related to natural resources governance and conservation science, integrating literatures from social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, behavioral economics, and ecology.

Entanglement between collective operators in a linear harmonic chain

We investigate entanglement between collective operators of two blocks of oscillators in an infinite linear harmonic chain. These operators are defined as averages over local operators (individual oscillators) in the blocks. On the one hand, this approach of "physical blocks" meets realistic experimental conditions, where measurement apparatuses do not interact with single oscillators but rather with a whole bunch of them, i.e., where in contrast to usually studied "mathematical blocks" not every possible measurement is allowed. On the other, this formalism naturally allows the generalization to blocks which may consist of several noncontiguous regions. We quantify entanglement between the collective operators by a measure based on the Peres-Horodecki criterion and show how it can be extracted and transferred to two qubits. Entanglement between two blocks is found even in the case where none of the oscillators from one block is entangled with an oscillator from the other, showing genuine bipartite entanglement between collective operators. Allowing the blocks to consist of a periodic sequence of subblocks, we verify that entanglement scales at most with the total boundary region. We also apply the approach of collective operators to scalar quantum field theory.

Hydrogen bonding and collective proton modes in clusters and periodic layers of squaric acid: A density functional study

Hydrogen bonding in clusters and extended layers of squaric acid molecules has been investigated by density functional computations. Equilibrium geometries, harmonic vibrational frequencies, and energy barriers for proton transfer along hydrogen bonds have been determined using the Car-Parrinello method. The results provide crucial parameters for a first principles modeling of the potential energy surface, and highlight the role of collective modes in the low-energy proton dynamics. The importance of quantum effects in condensed squaric acid systems has been investigated, and shown to be negligible for the lowest-energy collective proton modes. This information provides a quantitative basis for improved atomistic models of the order-disorder and displacive transitions undergone by squaric acid crystals as a function of temperature and pressure. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.

Ultrafast Probing of Collective Electron Dynamics Driven by Dielectronic Repulsion

We use the time-dependent R-matrix approach to investigate an ultrashort pump-probe scheme to observe collective electron dynamics in C(+). The ionization probability of a coherent superposition of the 2s2p(2) (2)D and (2)S states shows rapid modulation due to collective dynamics of the two equivalent 2p electrons, with the modulation frequency linked to the dielectronic repulsion. The best insight into this collective dynamics is achieved by a transformation from LS symmetry to the uncoupled basis. Such dynamics may be important in high-harmonic generation using open-shell atoms and ions.

Collective excitations of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates in the energy and time domains

A time-dependent method for calculating the collective excitation frequencies and densities of a trapped, inhomogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate with circulation is presented. The results are compared with time-independent solutions of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. The method is based on time-dependent linear-response theory combined with spectral analysis of moments of the excitation modes of interest. The technique is straightforward to apply, extremely efficient in our implementation with parallel fast Fourier transform methods, and produces highly accurate results. For high dimensionality or low symmetry the time-dependent approach is a more practical computational scheme and produces accurate and reliable data. The method is suitable for general trap geometries, condensate flows and condensates permeated with defects and vortex structures.