Explore the vast range of titles available.

The article explores the dynamic interplay of heroism and “mythological identity” within the rhetorical strategies employed by pan-Africanist leader Kémi Séba. Using a semiotic framework, the study analyses Seba’s discourses, focusing on the iconic act of burning a CFA Franc banknote as an act of civil disobedience. It examines how Seba’s language embodies extremist characteristics while fostering a collective African identity against neo-colonial oppression. The analysis highlights how his mythopoetic creativity not only challenges external economic and political structures but also mobilizes emotional and symbolic resources to reconstruct and empower a unified African community. This research sheds light on the broader implications of language as a tool for political resistance and identity formation within contemporary francophone African contexts.

Remarkably, even those people who profess to follow a religion with beliefs that all people are created in the image of their god experience hate that degrades or eliminates their ability to empathize with the group of people who are being scapegoated. What facilitates their acceptance of such negative stereotypical narratives about entire groups of people? Andrew A. Nierenberg, MD, holds the Thomas P. Hackett, MD, Endowed Chair in Psychiatry at MGH, and is the Director of the Dauten Family Center for Bipolar Treatment Innovation and Co-Director of the Center for Clinical Research Education, Division of Clinical Research, Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

This article examined Augustine’s just war theory through René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, as posited in his theory of mimetic desire. Augustine, in his development of just war theory, adopted a realist approach to justify the ethical criteria for judging the morality of conflict. Just war theory, in its historical form, interpreted as a positive rule of action based on just war principles that were developed over time. Therefore, through a comparative approach, this article argued the rationality of modern warfare and violence on the notion of the surrogate victim, which is necessary for social order and the formulation of cultures, as posited by Girard. In his corpus, Girard highlights the role of scapegoating and victimisation in the process of unifying a community. Thus, a comparative analysis of just war theory and the scapegoat mechanism can be developed to study the conditions for peace, religious liberty and social cohesion. This article discusses the following points: (1) the modern relevance of just war principles; (2) the effects of scapegoat mechanisms in modern societies and their impact on social order and political discourse; and (3) the role of missio Dei in the context of warfare and violence.ContributionThis article contributes to a comprehensive study of moral philosophy through the thoughts of Augustine and Girard. The convergence between violence, war, peace and justice is studied through anthropology and religious cultural lens. Arguably, this process has the potential to develop an empirical framework to study war and violence acts in our modern polarised world. Furthermore, it considers the ideal praxis for missio Dei in the context of social order and the common good in the 21st century.

In the spirit of Nahmanides (Leviticus 16:8), Hayim Tawil argues that the name is a metathesis of 'azaz-el, fierce deity, and signifies 'azmavet, or Mot, the Canaanite god of death, which, like many such entities, are demoted to angelic status in the Biblical tradition.2 The figure, along with other \"Watchers,\" emerges as a fallen angel cum demonic being in Second Temple pseudepigraphic literature (1 Enoch; Apocalypse of Abraham) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., 4Q180 1.7); this is carried over to Rabbinic literature in an oblique reference in Yoma 67b and in the legend of Shemhaza'i and Azael in the late medieval midrash Bereshit Rabbati.3 Midrashim both early and late-Šifra (Shemini, Mekhilta de-Milu'im) to Pirkei de-Rabbi E//ezer(46)-explicitly state that an offering is being proffered to an entity other than God, but prima facie, such activity seems to run counter to the most basic tenets of halakba and theology, and there is nothing that resembles such an idea in the Biblical text. [...]the Holy (corresponding to the heikhal building in the Temple), containing the golden incense altar, is sullied by involuntary communal sins, either on the part of the \"entire congregation of Israel\" or the high priest as the people's representative. [...]the Holy of Holies, containing the ark-cover and cherubs, is sullied by both the aforementioned involuntary communal sins that damage the Holy, as well as brazen and unrepented individual offenses.9 This is definitively cleansed by means of the blood of the hattat ha-kippurim, the purification-offering of the (day of) cleansings, Yom Kippur, whose service is comprised of all of the above, and more: blood of a bull and a goat, sprinkled separately on the ark-cover, then on the ark-curtain, then mixed and applied to all four corners of the incense altar, and remainder poured on the outer altar base; fats, which, like all of the previous, are burned on the outer altar; meat and skin and the remainder of the animal, which, like the inner hattat, are burned outside the courtyard; and finally, the 'azazel goat, which is dispatched alive to a desolate land. The idea that the consumption of meat is more than waste disposal is supported by the use of the term rei'ah niho'ah, \"sweet savor,\" regarding the individual hattat- a term from the shelamim peace-offering-which indicates that an aspect of Divine appeasement and \"drawing near\" is attached to consumption of its meats and fats.12 For another, Grossman notes that the Bible's description of the manner of burning of the hattat ha-penimit, the \"inner purification-offering,\" is inconsistent with incineration of quarantined waste.

This article offers a unique interdisciplinary theoretical examination of the stigmatisation of ‘drug addicts’ and its impacts on health and wellbeing. In the present conjuncture, drug addiction has become a metaphor for a ‘wasted’ life. The stigmatisation of addicts creates artificial monsters. They constitute matter out of place—addiction is dirt and the addict a form of symbolic pollution—as their excessive consumption means they are ostracised and branded as failures. Providing a tripartite framework—of failure, feast, and phoenix—this article will suggest that addiction occupies a contradictory social and conceptual space, at once cause, effect, and solution. It is in this context that the stigmatisation of addiction operates, despite the fact addicts constitute a consumer par excellence, solicited by the very system that seeks to punish, control, and cure them. Drawing on Girard’s generative scapegoat alongside the philosophical concept of the Muselmann, which parallels it, this paper will examine the hypocritical and contradictory portrayal, consumption and treatment of addiction; the social harm and stigmatisation arising from this portrayal; the systems of power and privilege that reproduce this; and how these systematically affect not only the health and wellbeing of addicts, but also their medical care and treatment. The health impacts arising from this framework will illustrate how scapegoating can lead to worsening mental and physical health, social isolation, and create barriers to treatment, which ultimately perpetuate the cycle of addiction that create public health challenges (e.g., drug-related deaths). The ensuing discussion will show how the addict is a symptom of capitalism and colonialism before it, sustaining it as well as serving as a convenient distraction from the systematic problems and illustrating the brutal realities of biopolitical power and its inherent contradictions. Only by understanding the broader socio-cultural and political implications of addiction within the context of late capitalism can we start to reduce stigma and scapegoating and focus on addiction as a medical issue rather than a moral and/or criminal one; a key to improving health outcomes.

This study aims at developing a theoretical model for workplace bullying using René Girard’s scapegoating framework. Despite the wide range of labels and related constructs present in workplace bullying literature, the explanation of the phenomenon is often studied under theoretical frameworks that do not always capture the nature of the concept. Indeed, the need to find instruments and tools to reduce or solve workplace bullying overshadowed conceptual and theoretical matters, leaving the concept undertheorized. By broadening the spectrum of social sciences beyond managerial and organizational studies, we propose to use René Girard’s scapegoating framework to shed new light on workplace bullying. The scapegoating framework allows us to understand better some collective and social dimensions of workplace bullying, catching relevant elements that characterize this phenomenon, also those that are less evident from organizational studies. In a Girardian sense, scapegoating is like a trap that every human society falls into, and many aspects of workplace bullying recall its mechanism. For Girard, a human group or society can fall into a spiral of reciprocal violence because of the mimetic desire mechanism, risking a conflict escalation: violence begets more violence, putting at risk the stability or even the existence of this group or society. Scapegoating is a way to overcome reciprocal violence by uniting against a single victim who cannot reciprocate this violence. This study also proposes a tentative way to escape this trap: positive mimesis and gift-giving.

A corporate criminal is no scapegoat, assures the Department of Justice (\"DOJ\"), because it is always a priority to target all culpable individuals at a company. DOJ policy emphasizes that \"[o]nly rarely should provable individual culpability not be pursued, particularly if it relates to high-level corporate officers,\" even if the company settles its case with prosecutors. After all, under the respondeat superior standard that applies in federal criminal cases, a corporation can be prosecuted if and only if an employee committed a crime. As the Supreme Court has put it, \"[T]he only way in which a corporation can act is through the individuals who act on its behalf.\" Yet, as is increasingly the subject of high-profile criticism, more often than not, when the largest corporations are prosecuted federally, individuals are not charged. In this Article, I develop data describing these individual prosecutions-which tend to result in light sentences when convictions are obtained. These data illustrate the special challenges of bringing corporate prosecutions, and they suggest why, in contrast to what prominent critics have argued, bringing more individual cases is no adequate substitute for prosecuting companies. I conclude by proposing how corporate prosecutions could be brought to enhance individual criminal accountability.

Structural racism is increasingly recognized as a key driver of health inequities and other adverse outcomes. This paper focuses on structural racism as an “upstream” institutionalized process, how it creates health inequities and how structural racism persists in spite of generations of efforts to end it. So far, “downstream” efforts to reduce these health inequities have had little success in eliminating them. Here, we attempt to increase public health awareness of structural racism and its institutionalization and sociopolitical supports so that research and action can address them. This paper presents both a theoretic and an analytic approach to how structural racism contributes to disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS and related diseases among oppressed populations. We first discuss differences in disease and health outcomes among people who use drugs (PWUD) and other groups at risk for HIV from different racial and ethnic populations. The paper then briefly analyzes the history of racism; how racial oppression, class, gender and other intersectional divisions interact to create health inequities; and how structural racism is institutionalized in ways that contribute to disease disparities among people who use drugs and other people. It examines the processes, institutions and other structures that reinforce structural racism, and how these, combined with processes that normalize racism, serve as barriers to efforts to counter and dismantle the structural racism that Black, indigenous and Latinx people have confronted for centuries. Finally, we discuss the implications of this analysis for public health research and action to undo racism and to enhance the health of populations who have suffered lifetimes of racial/ethnic oppression, with a focus on HIV/AIDS outcomes.

Decision makers frequently have a spokesperson communicate their decisions. In this paper, we address two questions. First, does it matter who communicates an unfair decision? Second, does it matter how the unfair decision is communicated? We conduct a modified dictator game experiment in which either the decision maker or a spokesperson communicates the decided allocation to recipients, who then determine whether to punish either of them. We find that receivers punish both the decision maker and the spokesperson more often, and more heavily, for unfair allocations communicated by the spokesperson if there is room for shifting blame. The increased punishment results from the messenger’s style of delivery: spokespersons are more likely than decision makers to express emotional regret instead of rational need. Receivers seem to punish the former style of communication because they view it as an attempt to shift blame. Our results establish more generally that the design of communication schemes shapes relationships among organizational members. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2782 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.