Recent research highlights from Duke Kunshan University’s centers and programs, plus a few other places. Use the filter to narrow your search.
Extremist populist parties in some states have won an electoral mandate large enough to democratically refashion liberal democracy into “illiberal democracy.” Political scientist Benjamin Schupmann responds to this problem in a paper for Philosophy and Social Criticism. He analyzes justifications for constitutional guarantees of liberalism and outlines four mechanisms that can do so.
The Sino-American alliance in World War II was critical to halting the advance of the Imperial Japanese Army. But by early 1945, the U.S. Army had outworn its welcome, with one issue sparking a violent backlash: Sexual relations between American soldiers and Chinese women. Historian Zach Fredman examines the narratives surrounding “Jeep girls” in a paper for the Journal of Modern Chinese History.
Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are major contributors to the disease burden and deaths globally. At the same time, nearly half of the world’s population has no access to health care services. Behavioral scientist and medical epidemiologist Abu Abdullah and fellow researchers at the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies have published a policy brief that suggests using community health workers to manage and prevent NCDs. The report is based on studies in China, Bangladesh, Nepal and Vietnam.
Writing in the journal Built Heritage, historian Andrew Field introduces seven ballrooms built in the 1920s and ’30s that reflect the architects’ ambition to create fantastical spaces for Shanghai’s elites to celebrate their status and socialize with other members of high society. These ballrooms featured technological wizardry such as sprung dance floors and sophisticated lighting, and one was decorated in the style of a traditional Chinese palace.
Countries that signed up to the Paris Agreement on climate change, including China, are expected to update their nationally determined contributions by 2020. As policymakers prepare their revised climate action plans, environmental health expert John Ji used a commentary in The Lancet Public Health to urge them to take into consideration the health care sector’s rising greenhouse gas emissions.
In an essay entitled Alain Locke’s New Negro: Of Words and Images, available in “Rethinking America’s Past: Voices from the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection,” Selina Lai-Henderson, a scholar of American literature and history, examines the understudied influence of intellectual Alain Locke on the African American art scene in the U.S. in the early 20th-century. She writes that Locke believed the diasporic nature of black art articulates the universality of human sufferings that cross and transcend cultural, linguistic and national boundaries.
In the September 2019 edition of the European Constitutional Law Review, Laetitia Houben argues that political scientist Benjamin Schupmann’s 2017 book “Carl Schmitt’s State and Constitutional Theory: A Critical Analysis” is “recommended for anyone interested in Schmitt.” Schmitt is one of the 20th century’s most controversial constitutional theorists because of his relationship to Nazism. Despite controversy around Schmitt, Houben writes, Schupmann shows that Schmitt’s thought offers liberal democrats today “new insight into the problem of democratic suicide.”
In a paper on killer robots and human dignity accepted at the second annual ACM/AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society, philosophy professor Daniel Lim focuses on arguments against the development and use of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) – AI killing machines – based on human dignity and suggests that a non-contingent ban on LAWS based on human dignity would be flawed.
Swine influenza continues to pose a danger to people in both developed and developing countries. Infectious disease epidemiologist Gregory C. Gray says a five-year study at Chinese farms shows closer monitoring of workers with “intense” exposure to pigs could help prevent new strains of the virus.
Climate change mean that the very existence of some states is threatened due to environmental changes, such as rising sea levels. In a paper published in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, philosophy professor Kyle Fruh applies just war theory to argue that these states are entitled to defend themselves as if against a more traditional, kinetic threat to their sovereignty. The surprising implication is that a very conservative, consensus doctrine endorses a quite radical conclusion: By perpetrating climate change, we in the developed world are waging war on the less fortunate.
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