In an era of heightened scrutiny and complexity, understanding the dynamics of corporate board effectiveness has become central to organisational performance and governance integrity. Across both private and public sectors, boards are now positioned not only as oversight bodies but as strategic partners in value creation. In Zimbabwe, the performance of corporate boards within State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) has become emblematic of broad international efforts to strengthen accountability and counteract impunity. This paper re-examines the foundations of board effectiveness through the lenses of board health drivers, behavioural archetypes, and governance ecosystems, drawing on contemporary governance theory and emerging evidence from developing economies. Drawing on agency theory, stakeholder theory, and dynamic capabilities, the paper critiques enduring myths about board chemistry. It explores how contextual dynamics, such as political interference, institutional maturity, and leadership culture, mediate board functionality. It further argues that Zimbabwe’s reform trajectory, anchored in the Public Entities Corporate Governance Act [Chapter 10:31] (2018), demands a shift from compliance-based governance to adaptive, evidence-driven, and performance-oriented board leadership. The analysis offers a framework for cultivating agile, accountable, and value-creating boards within the SOE sector and beyond.
The aim of this article is to explore the intellectual and political trajectory of the Dominguan planter, scientist, and agronomist Jean Barré de Saint-Venant (1737-1810). As a member of the Circle of the Philadelphes and of the Chamber of Agriculture of Le Cap Français, between the end of the Old Regime and the Napoleonic period, Barré de Saint-Venant outlined through his memoires and printed works a creole path to agricultural, economic, and institutional progress in the plantation society of Saint-Domingue. By blending philosophy, racial theory, colonial history, scientific experiments, and empirical knowledge, his reflection and action within the central and peripheral imperial administration demonstrate the active participation of Barré de Saint-Venant and other Dominguan colonists in the pursuit of a so-called «colonisation nouvelle», based on expertise in the service of the legislator, on technological and governmental modernisation, on the promotion of an enlightened public sphere, and on the exploitation of the enslaved African. On the other hand, Barré de Saint-Venant’s ideas and reform projects invite us to reflect further on the notion of «Caribbean Enlightenment».
Introduction
Evidence shows that racism can have a negative effect on mental health in the lived experiences of Black people and People of Colour. In critical theory discourse including postcolonial and decolonial approaches, racism is suggested to be an everyday phenomenon. Additionally, racism specifically targets the perceived cultural and phenotypic foreignness of Black migrants and migrants Of Colour, as well as the ascribed migrant status attributed to the perceived foreignness of racialized persons who do not actually have any direct migration experiences.
Objectives
The stigma associated with severe mental disorders such as psychosis has historically been applied to Black people and People of Colour who have been engaged in anti-racist activism as a form of punishment and social control. Higher incidence rates of psychosis in racialized communities have frequently been conceptualized as cultural differences in family composition and levels of expressed emotion in families. The objective of this study is to sensitively investigate psychosis as a potential mental health consequence of racism.
Methods
The incidence rates of psychosis - positive symptoms, negative symptoms, non-affective psychosis disorders and first episode psychosis - among migrants by country of migration were compiled in an umbrella review, which offers a summary of meta-analyses. Quantitative research has the limitation of enabling the observation of patterns but not allowing an understanding of the reasons behind them to be theorized through the data. Therefore, qualitative methods complement the quantitative data. Twenty people of diverse genders who self-identified as Black people or People of Colour in Berlin were interviewed about their experiences of racism and sexism and about how those experiences affected their mental health.
Results
The umbrella review found an association between migration and psychosis, with migration from the Caribbean and African countries showing the strongest correlation. A constant comparative analysis of the qualitative data suggests that racism contributes to the emergence of a subclinical psychosis symptomatology profile that consists of a sense of differentness, negative self-awareness, paranoid ideation regarding general persecution, and self-questioning with self-esteem instability.
Conclusions
The findings are interpreted as a situational diagnosis, as coined by the psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon in the seminal book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ (1975). The findings are also contextualized within a critique of institutional racism, both historically and currently, and within an intersectional discussion of the need for structural competency and the provision of safety for racialized groups in clinical settings.
Disclosure of Interest
None Declared
While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it, reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to late night conversations and confabulations.
The paper reflects on the concept of modern democracy as we encounter it in Czech philosophy, specifically in the work of Masaryk and his interpreters and critics, i.e. especially Rádl and Patočka, then in critical theory, focusing especially on the work of Habermas, and then in the work of Arnason, where we trace his inspiring political philosophical movement between Czech philosophy (Masaryk, Patočka, Kosík) and critical theory in both its German (Marx, Max Weber, Habermas) and French versions (Lefort, Castoriadis) and his creative critical dialogue with Eisenstadt. Modern democracy is not fundamentally different from liberal democracy, but more emphasizes autonomy, emancipation, its socially imaginary and critically creative dialogical participation.
Bu makale, yüksek performanslı çalışma sistemleri (YPÇS) hakkında Türkiye’de bugüne kadar yapılmış çeşitli çalışmaların kapsamlı olarak incelenmesini ve mevcut bilgi birikiminin gözden geçirilmesini amaçlamaktadır. Yazarlar, mevcut iş ekosistemini göz önünde bulundurarak, YPÇS kavramının Türkçe literatürdeki belirsizliğini ortaya koymayı hedeflemektedir. Kavramın daha iyi anlaşılabilmesi için sistematik literatür tarama metodolojisi benimseyen Türkiye’deki ilk çalışma olma özelliği taşımaktadır. Türkçe çalışmalarda yer alan YPÇS boyutları, teori, metodoloji ve uygulama alanları ortaya konulmuştur. Çeşitli çalışmalardan toplanan bilgiler tematik olarak analiz edilmiş ve mevcut literatürü değerlendirmek için sentezlenmiştir. Dâhil etme ve hariç tutma kriterleri belirlenmiş ve bu kapsamda Türkiye literatüründen 23 çalışma analiz edilmiştir. Çalışma sonucunda, Türkiye literatüründe YPÇS’nin sadece olumlu etkilerinin tartışıldığı, özellikle sosyal mübadele ve AMO (Beceri-Motivasyon-Fırsat) teorilerine yer verildiği ve bu kavramın çok farklı boyutlarıyla ele alındığı görülmektedir. Gelecekteki çalışmalara öneriler sunulmaktadır.
The world is accelerating globalization and urbanization; thus, planning plays an irreplaceable role in the macro development, especially in sustainable development. Planning research is important in turning theories of planning into urban practices. This research based on the theory that planning research is crucial, as it represents that planning-related activities improve processes in urbanization. However, the current understanding of the importance of planning research is limited. There is no research on the interaction between planning research and macro national development to support the importance of planning or its research. This study uses 750,000 articles on urban planning fields from WoS from 1950 to the present. Firstly, the study concludes the investment pattern changes of the global planning research. Over the past 70 years, the total number and diversity of countries engaged in planning research have grown rapidly, and developing countries have gradually integrated into the mainstream research community and become the main contributors. Secondly, the investment intensity and characteristics of planning research are consistent with the speed and characteristics of urbanization, which proves that to some extent, the demand of urbanization development drives the investment of planning research. Then, according to the different characteristics of planning research investment in different countries, this paper summarizes the main investment characteristics of major countries, analyzes the development rule behind the investment characteristics, and predicts the interaction with the international political and economic pattern. By analyzing the relationship between planning research intensity and urbanization, it is found that the investment intensity of planning research has a time rule with urbanization and has different interactions in different stages of urbanization development. It was found that the intensity of planning research was strongly correlated with HDI, and the amount of research was crucial.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.
The sirventes or political songs composed by the troubadour Bertran de Born in the second half of the twelfth century in order to foment strife among the political leaders of his day provide the springboard for an enquiry into the relationship between “music” and “noise” undertaken in the light of psychoanalytic theory. Jacque Lacan’s concept of “voice” situates both “noise” and “music” in relation to the traumatic scream and silence of a newborn baby. Bertran’s explicit themes of love and war may seem more responsive to the notion of “intimate revolt” put forward by Julia Kristeva, which would locate them at some distance from this originary trauma, and yet the sonic dimension of the troubadour’s songs mediates between noise and music in such a way as to threaten the opposition with collapse, while the superimposition of love and war and the threat of death make it possible to envisage performances of these songs in which the singing voice might also evoke the primary, traumatic experiences of silence and the scream
In recent decades, a ‘realist’ alternative to ideal theories of politics has slowly taken shape. Bringing together philosophers, political theorists, and political scientists, this countermovement seeks to reframe inquiry into politics and political norms. Among the hallmarks of this endeavor are a moral psychology that includes the passions and emotions; a robust conception of political possibility and rejection of utopian thinking; the belief that political conflict — of values as well as interests — is both fundamental and ineradicable; a focus on institutions as the arenas within which conflict is mediated and contained; and a conception of politics as a sphere of activity that is distinct, autonomous, and subject to norms that cannot be derived from individual morality. For political realists, a ‘well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable; a modus vivendi without agreement on first principles is often the only practical possibility. Not only will ‘full compliance’ never be achieved, but also it is an assumption that yields misleading accounts of political norms. While realists offer a number of compelling criticisms of ideal theory, there are some lacunae in their stance. It is not yet clear whether realism constitutes a coherent affirmative alternative to idealism. Nor have realists clarified the extent of conflict that is consistent with political order as such. And because both sides accept ‘ought implies can’ as a constraint on the validity of political norms, much of the debate between realists and idealists revolves around deep empirical disagreements that are yet to be clarified.
Jocelyn J. Bélanger, Manuel Moyano, Hayat Muhammad
et al.
The present research examines the social cognitive processes underlying ideologically-based violence through the lens of the 3N model of radicalization. To test this theory, we introduce two new psychometric instruments—a social alienation and a support for political violence scale—developed in collaboration with 13 subject matter experts on terrorism. Using these instruments, we test the theory's hypotheses in four different cultural settings. In Study 1, Canadians reporting high levels of social alienation (Need) expressed greater support for political violence (Narrative), which in turn positively predicted wanting to join a radical group (Network), controlling for other measures related to political violence. Study 2a and 2b replicated these findings in Pakistan and in Spain, respectively. Using an experimental manipulation of social alienation, Study 3 extended these findings with an American sample and demonstrated that moral justification is one of the psychological mechanisms linking social alienation to supporting political violence. Implications and future directions for the psychology of terrorism are discussed.
The article provides an analytical review of the literature on the issue of harm in the theory of international relations, as a result of which this issue has been supplemented and expanded. The issue has initially been posed by Andrew Linklater as a question of physical harm to humans in the context of a state-centered international system. Audra Mitchell entered into a discussion with A. Linklater from the standpoint of post-humanism. From her point of view, harm should be evaluated not only and not so much from the human point of view, but from the perspective the whole world, the totality of animate and inanimate nature, including humanity. Alex Hoseason called into question the nature of causal relations in the theories of A. Linklater and A. Mitchell. From his point of view, in complex social systems, such as international system, non-linear causal relationships and multiple causality prevail. In addition, based on the philosophy of critical realism, Alex Hoseason suggested that not only actors in international relations, but also social structures can cause harm. This narrative is further developed by problematique of biopolitics. Political governance of biological aspects of the life of the population is directly related to the problem of physical harm in the sense that biopolitics, on the one hand, is aimed at maintaining the physical health of the population, on the other hand, politics is still at the core of biopolitics, so sometimes it can turn against all or part of its population as happened in Nazi Germany. Today, biopolitics at the global level is implemented in the UN development programs, in various international and transnational initiatives to promote international development, as well as in global health governance. Expanding the problematique of harm to biopolitics brings us back to the original anthropocentric model of harm proposed by A. Linklater, nevertheless, this step allows us to analyze not only the causes of harm, but also approaches to reducing it.
This article explores the relevance of the work of Cambridge historian of political thought István Hont to contemporary political theory. Specifically, it suggests that Hont’s work can be of great help to the recent realist revival in political theory, in particular via its lending support to the account favoured by Bernard Williams, which has been a major source for recent realist work. The article seeks to make explicit the main political theoretic implications of Hont’s historically-focused work, which in their original formulations are not always easy to discern, as well as itself being a positive contribution to realist theorizing, moving beyond a merely negative critique of dominant moralist positions.
Este texto analiza las fuertes discrepancias que hubo en el anarquismo del siglo XIX a propósito del tema independentista cubano. En un principio, la tesis más extendida fue que la liberación de Cuba del dominio español no garantizaba a la isla su libertad, que los anarquistas entendían como una emancipación económica y social y no política. La lucha por la instauración de una república, pensaban, no era su lucha. Sin embargo, el mensaje de Martí caló entre muchos obreros cubanos, incluidos los anarquistas, y en las páginas de los periódicos libertarios, tanto de Cuba como de España o Estados Unidos, se discutió mucho sobre si los anarquistas debían o no apoyar la causa independentista. Personajes centrales en esta polémica fueron los impresores Enrique Roig, Enrique Creci y Pedro Esteve, que utilizaron los periódicos que editaron para reflexionar sobre el tema de la patria, el patriotismo y el independentismo. Finalmente, ganó en el seno del anarquismo cubano la causa de la independencia. Incluso Esteve, el más reticente, acabó aceptando que había que apoyar la guerra por la independencia cubana siempre que el objetivo último siguiera siendo la revolución anarquista.
This text analyses the strong discrepancies that arose in XIXth Century anarchism regarding Cuban independence. At first, the anarchist theory was that the liberation of Cuba from Spanish rule did not guarantee the Island its freedom, which the anarchists understood as being an economic and social emancipation but not a political one. The fight for the establishment of a republic, they thought, was not their fight. However, Martí’s message made an impression amongst many Cuban workers, including the anarchists, and in the pages of the libertarian newspapers, both Cuban and Spanish or North American, there was much debate on whether or not the anarchists should support the cause of independence. Key figures in this controversy were the printers Enrique Roig, Enrique Creci and Pedro Esteve, who used the periodicals they published to deliberate on the themes of homeland, patriotism and independence. Finally, at the heart of Cuban anarchism it was the struggle for independence that prevailed. Even Esteve, the most reluctant, ended up accepting that it was necessary to support the Cuban war of independence as long as the final objective continued to be anarchist revolution.
History (General) and history of Europe, History (General)
This article sets out the case for a mutual cross-fertilisation of normative cosmopolitan thought and the field of comparative political theory. Its argument is that both are useful to the other if their primary claims are warranted. Comparative political theory needs coherence about what distinguishes its enterprise and makes it truly comparative across traditions and normative cosmopolitanism needs transcultural validation of its normative ideal of human community and moral universality. The cosmopolitan agenda exploring comparative views of inclusion and exclusion and universality in the context of a global harm principle provides the field in which the necessary cross fertilisation can occur.
O presente estudo pretende fazer uma análise ilustrativa (não exauriente) da reforma processual penal italiana quanto à busca de um processo mais dialogal, incluindo a referência ao contraditório em senso forte. Neste sentido, o ordenamento jurídico italiano prescreve a possibilidade da investigação defensiva (indagine difensive) em que muda a postura de um processo inquisitivo buscando sua característica acusatória. Neste sentido, pretendemos fazer uma relação com o nosso ordenamento jurídica na busca de uma influência comparada para que tenhamos um maior fortalecimento defensivo em busca de um processo mais equilibrado. Assim, foram indicadas as alterações mais pertinentes sobre o tema, tanto no contexto constitucional, quanto processual penal italiano.
Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law, Political institutions and public administration (General)