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Big, attention-grabbing numbers are frequently used in policy debates and media reporting: \"At least 200,000-250,000 people died in the war in Bosnia.\" \"There are three million child soldiers in Africa.\" \"More than 650,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.\" \"Between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked across borders every year.\" \"Money laundering represents as much as 10 percent of global GDP.\" \"Internet child porn is a $20 billion-a-year industry.\" Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill see only one problem: these numbers are probably false. Their continued use and abuse reflect a much larger and troubling pattern: policymakers and the media naively or deliberately accept highly politicized and questionable statistical claims about activities that are extremely difficult to measure. As a result, we too often become trapped by these mythical numbers, with perverse and counterproductive consequences. This problem exists in myriad policy realms. But it is particularly pronounced in statistics related to the politically charged realms of global crime and conflict-numbers of people killed in massacres and during genocides, the size of refugee flows, the magnitude of the illicit global trade in drugs and human beings, and so on. InSex, Drugs, and Body Counts, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and policy analysts critically examine the murky origins of some of these statistics and trace their remarkable proliferation. They also assess the standard metrics used to evaluate policy effectiveness in combating problems such as terrorist financing, sex trafficking, and the drug trade.

\"Why do democracy protests emerge in some countries at certain times, but not in others? Why do governments accommodate these protests, undertaking sweeping reforms in some cases, and in others find ways to suppress protests? In Democracy Protests, Brancati highlights the role of economic crises in triggering protests. She argues that crises increase discontent with governments, and authoritarianism in particular, and also increase support for opposition candidates who are more likely to organize protests, especially during election periods. Economic crises are also shown to create chances for opportunists to capitalize on anti-regime sentiment and mobilize support against governments. However, if crises are severe and protests concomitantly large, governments are likely to be compelled to make accommodations with protestors, regardless of their likelihood of retaining office. Brancati's argument rests on a rich statistical analysis of the causes and consequences of democracy protests around the globe between 1989 and 2011, combined with qualitative case studies\"-- Provided by publisher.

Digital spaces, and in particular social networking sites, are becoming increasingly present and influential in the functioning of our democracies. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology for the data collection, the reconstruction, the analysis and the visualization of the development of a country's political landscape from Twitter data. The proposed method relies solely on the interactions between Twitter accounts and is independent of the characteristics of the shared contents such as the language of the tweets. We validate our methodology on a case study on the 2017 French presidential election (60 million Twitter exchanges between more than 2.4 million users) via two independent methods: the comparison between our automated political categorization and a human categorization based on the evaluation of a sample of 5000 profiles descriptions; the correspondence between the reconfigurations detected in the reconstructed political landscape and key political events reported in the media. This latter validation demonstrated the ability of our approach to accurately reflect the reconfigurations at play in the off-line political scene. We built on this reconstruction to give insights into the opinion dynamics and the reconfigurations of political communities at play during a presidential election. First, we propose a quantitative description and analysis of the political engagement of members of political communities. Second, we analyze the impact of political communities on information diffusion and in particular on their role in the fake news phenomena. We measure a differential echo chamber effect on the different types of political news (fake news, debunks, standard news) caused by the community structure and emphasize the importance of addressing the meso-structures of political networks in understanding the fake news phenomena. Giving access to an intermediate level, between sociological surveys in the field and large statistical studies (such as those conducted by national or international organizations) we demonstrate that social networks data make it possible to qualify and quantify the activity of political communities in a multi-polar political environment; as well as their temporal evolution and reconfiguration, their structure, their alliance strategies and their semantic particularities during a presidential campaign through the analysis of their digital traces. We conclude this paper with a comment on the political and ethical implications of the use of social networks data in politics. We stress the importance of developing social macroscopes that will enable citizens to better understand how they collectively make society and propose as example the \"Politoscope\", a macroscope that delivers some of our results in an interactive way.

Background Migrant women face an increased risk of poor obstetric and neonatal outcomes. Norway implemented a multicultural doula (MCD) program in 2018, which was designed to improve pregnancy care for this group in vulnerable circumstances. This study aimed to assess the impact of MCD support, provided in addition to standard care, on obstetric and neonatal outcomes for selected newly arrived migrants. Methods This was a multi-centre case–control study involving all nine hospitals actively running the MCD program, which covers four of Norway’s five regions. Women who received MCD support at the time of childbirth ( n  = 339), from 2018–2023, were compared to similar newly arrived immigrant women who did not receive MCD support ( n  = 339) and gave birth within the same timeframe. Hospital records were reviewed, and outcomes were analysed using binary logistic regression. The results are expressed as crude and adjusted associations with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results Women receiving MCD support exhibited a 41% lower likelihood of undergoing emergency caesarean sections (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0.59, 95% Cl 0.34–0.98) and those giving birth vaginally had a 75% lower risk of estimated blood loss ≥1000 ml (aOR 0.25, 95% Cl 0.12–0.52) compared with women without MCD support. Additionally, MCD support was associated with more use of pain-relief (aOR 2.88, 95% Cl 1.93–4.30) in labour and increased rates of exclusive breastfeeding at discharge (aOR 2.26, 95% Cl 1.53–3.36). Conclusions Our study suggests that MCD support may contribute to improved outcomes for migrants in vulnerable circumstances, potentially impacting their future reproductive health and children’s well-being.

A new theory of ethnic cleansing based on the most terrible cases (colonial genocides, Armenia, the Nazi Holocaust, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda) and cases of lesser violence (early modern Europe, contemporary India, and Indonesia). Murderous cleansing is modern, 'the dark side of democracy'. It results where the demos (democracy) is confused with the ethnos (the ethnic group). Danger arises where two rival ethno-national movements each claims 'its own' state over the same territory. Conflict escalates where either the weaker side fights because of aid from outside, or the stronger side believes it can deploy sudden, overwhelming force. Escalation is not simply the work of 'evil elites' or 'primitive peoples'. It results from complex interactions between leaders, militants, and 'core constituencies' of ethno-nationalism. Understanding this complex process helps us devise policies to avoid ethnic cleansing in the future.

With recent aging demographic trends, the needs for enhancing geo-spatial analysis capabilities and monitoring the status of accessibilities of its citizens with healthcare services have increased. The accessibility to healthcare is determined not only by geographic distances to service locations, but also includes travel time, available modes of transportation, and departure time. Having access to the latest and accurate information regarding the healthcare accessibility allows the municipal government to plan for improvements, including expansion of healthcare infrastructure, effective labor distribution, alternative healthcare options for the regions with low accessibilities, and redesigning the public transportation routes and schedules. This paper proposes a new method named, Seoul Enhanced 2-Step Floating Catchment Area (SE2SFCA), which is customized for the city of Seoul, where population density is higher and the average distance between healthcare-service locations tends to be shorter than the typical North American or European cities. The proposed method of SE2SFCA is found to be realistic and effective in determining the weak accessibility regions. It resolves the over-estimation issues of the past, arising from the assignment of high healthcare accessibility for the regions with large hospitals and high density of population and hospitals.

Insufficient attention has been paid to how research can be leveraged to promote health policy or how locality-based research strategies, in particular community-based participatory research (CBPR), influences health policy to eliminate racial and ethnic health inequities. To address this gap, we highlighted the efforts of 2 CBPR partnerships in California to explore how these initiatives made substantial contributions to policymaking for health equity. We presented a new conceptual model and 2 case studies to illustrate the connections among CBPR contexts and processes, policymaking processes and strategies, and outcomes. We extended the critical role of civic engagement by those communities that were most burdened by health inequities by focusing on their political participation as research brokers in bridging evidence and policymaking.

Why do some global health initiatives receive priority from international and national political leaders whereas others receive little attention? To analyse this question we propose a framework consisting of four categories: the strength of the actors involved in the initiative, the power of the ideas they use to portray the issue, the nature of the political contexts in which they operate, and characteristics of the issue itself. We apply this framework to the case of a global initiative to reduce maternal mortality, which was launched in 1987. We undertook archival research and interviewed people connected with the initiative, using a process-tracing method that is commonly employed in qualitative research. We report that despite two decades of effort the initiative remains in an early phase of development, hampered by difficulties in all these categories. However, the initiative's 20th year, 2007, presents opportunities to build political momentum. To generate political priority, advocates will need to address several challenges, including the creation of effective institutions to guide the initiative and the development of a public positioning of the issue to convince political leaders to act. We use the framework and case study to suggest areas for future research on the determinants of political priority for global health initiatives, which is a subject that has attracted much speculation but little scholarship.