Today, new kinds of space travel are emerging. The year 2001 marked the beginning of space tourism, as a wealthy California businessman, Dennis Tito, became the first paying passenger for a space flight. He paid $20 million to be launched by Soyuz TM-32 via arrangements made between an American company called Space Adventures and a Russian company MirCorp, which oversaw the Mir space station. The ticket sale was to fund the maintenance of the Mir space station; however, a premature deorbit decision diverted Tito’s destination to the International Space Station…
Read MoreMonth: November 2023
HUMANITARIAN GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES FOR HUMANITARIAN AID AND DISASTER MANAGEMENT
Our notion that humanitarian governance must be understood as the interplay of different actors tallies with theories on governance. However, writing about humanitarian governance tends to overly focus on the international humanitarian system, neglecting local and national actors’ involvement. Also, governance theories of the 1990s show that state power is layered and fragmented, and that attaining collective purposes is not solely the domain of the state. The shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’, showed how “the state becomes a collection of inter-organizational networks made up of governmental and societal actors with…
Read MoreWORLD CONFLICTS: CHANGING NATURE OF WARFARE
A few decades ago, it was relatively easy to talk about the nature of warfare, as it was intimately linked to statecraft, so one identified an adversary state and prepared oneself accordingly. In fact, one could even quantify threats and capabilities to arrive at a predictable outcome. In the 21st century, this is no longer so. Shades of grey have crept in; threats are not easy to quantify and, sometimes, even to identify. There is a merging, a fusion of various types of warfare; international rules do not apply to…
Read MoreDISAPPEARING STATES, STATELESSNESS AND RELOCATION
Among the various environmental problems that cause the displacement of people from their habitats, none rivals the potential effects of sea level rise as a result of human-induced changes in the earth ́s climate. Lately, the climate change discourse has become aware of a possible consequence of climate change, the disappearance of the entire territory of a state. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determines that the earth is warming up. The linear warming trend for the last 50 years is twice that compared to the same over 100…
Read MoreFAKE NEWS OR TRUE LIES?: REFLECTION ABOUT PROBLEMATIC CONTENT
Scholars in different scientific fields and practitioners are analyzing the rise of production and diffusion of fake news and problematic information that is rapidly contaminating the digital world. Fake news, defined as “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers”, has just recently gained scholarly attention predominantly in the fields of journalism, psychology and political sciences. Less is done empirically in the marketing and consumer behaviour literature, with some recent and few exceptions. Fake news represents only one aspect of the ongoing crisis of problematic information,…
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