International Social Science Journal

Gill‐Leslie, Robyn; Kaufmann, Mareile; Saba, Athandiwe; Bongeka Gumede, Nobuntu

doi: 10.1111/issj.70052pmid: N/A

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.

Udayanga, Samitha

doi: 10.1111/issj.70050pmid: N/A

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.

Bashir, Muhammad Farhan

doi: 10.1111/issj.70055pmid: N/A

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.

Dwivedi, Amitabh Vikram

doi: 10.1111/issj.70053pmid: N/A

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.

Rigoli, Francesco

doi: 10.1111/issj.70051pmid: N/A

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.

Yetiş, Erman Örsan

doi: 10.1111/issj.70054pmid: N/A

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.