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This chapter deals with bottom up pressures on the state. It focuses on the challenges that cities and regions are posing to the nation state in Western Europe, rather than on the rise of ‘meso–government’ in Europe. It analyses three sets of pressures (the fragmentation of the public policy process; the competition for resources (finance) and the threat of impoverishment; and the legitimacy of the nation state – the deregulation of identity structuring), and the role that they play in the transformation of the state.

Competition occurs when different species or individuals require the same limiting resources. It can occur within colonies for reproductive rights, between colonies of the same species (intraspecific competition) and between populations of different species (interspecific competition). Evidence for intraspecific competition includes overdispersion of nests, territoriality, and reallocation of castes in response to new neighbours. Evidence for interspecific competition includes spatial ant mosaics, agonistic behaviour, chemical defence and behavioural dominance hierarchies. Experiments in interspecific competition show that it is highly conditional varying with resource quality and quantity, biotic and abiotic conditions. The discovery–;dominance trade‐off suggests a possible mechanism for species coexistence. The dominance–impoverishment relationship suggests that species richness is reduced where the abundance of dominant ants is high.

This chapter deals with the relationship of the rapid rising of impoverishment which has affected a substantial number of the populations of Eastern and Central Europe in recent years. Poverty in the region rose to 70 million during the transition period from 1989 to 1995. Transition to market economy caused declines in incomes per capita of the people in the region which in turn affected the social and economic security of the people. As a result of poverty, a rapid increase in poverty-related diseases took place. These poverty-related diseases may also be caused by poor nutrition and decreased consumption of foods. These poverty-related diseases are coupled with poor health-care services in these countries. Poverty affects every aspect of a person’s life.

This chapter examines the substantive impoverishment of presidential rhetoric. Specifically, it provides the evidence of linguistic simplification with evidence of substantive anti-intellectualism. As presidents have taken the rhetorical path of least resistance by serving up simplistic sentences to citizens, they have correspondingly offered an easily digestible substantive menu devoid of argument and infused with inspirational platitudes, partisan punchlines, and emotional and human interest appeals. Moreover, it shows that presidential rhetoric today is short on logos, disingenuous on ethos, and long on pathos.

This chapter reviews Amartya Sen's contribution, providing a point of departure from political theories and debates relating to the argument of both libertarian and liberal traditions. In the domain of fundamental freedoms and human rights, there are other issues excluded such as hunger and starvation, premature morality, excess morbidity, illiteracy, and inadequate lack of educational attainment. Basic forms of deprivation and impoverishment are often not taken into consideration and a framework focusing on the negative obligations, rights, and freedom is proposed like those developed by Hayek and Nozick, in order to define the conditions that ultimately restrict freedom. Emerging international standards on global poverty are necessary as they affect resource allocation and human survival and this is where the works of Berlin, Pogge, Rawls, and O'Neill are referenced.

This chapter examines the general and the special principles of irrevocability. The special principle invalidates gifts that the donor has the power to revoke. The general principle, namely that executed gifts may not be unilaterally revoked, suffers exceptions in many systems to take account of the donee's ingratitude, the donor's impoverishment, the birth of a child, and the failure of a condition.

This chapter examines the economic trends during the first 40 years of the State of Israel and their implications for the economic situation of Arab minority in the state. During this period, the general economic situation of the Arabs changed because of impoverishment and the break in relations with Arab states. The majority Jewish sector dominated key economic positions and the Arab sector remained largely dependent on them. In the 1980s, relative employment rose in the Arab sector, though not as much as that of the Jewish population. This chapter concludes that in the absence of economic growth, the weaker groups among the Arabs and part of the Jewish population suffered.

This chapter discusses how seizing the opportunities to remove cruelties depends on enthusiasm for a revived democratic politics, plus facility in language to reinterpret human rights, advocate UN peace-keeping responsibilities, and promote the principles of humane governance. A language for humanity includes questions of identity, ideals of humane governance, and determination not to be cruel to future generations. Politicians have been curtailing freedoms in the interests of 'security', allegedly to make nation-states more efficient and to combat terrorist threats. These developments, coupled to a burning planet, display immediate crises. Instead of undue reverence for the integrity of nation-states, humane governance would champion the principle of the Responsibility to Protect. Advocacy of humane governance rests on indictments of the worst effects of capitalism: worldwide inequity, the invisible powers of corporations and appropriation of resources, impoverishment, huge incidence of mental illness, and vast numbers of people feeling worthless.

This chapter examines the processes of differential impoverishment: why and in what ways the urban poor and rural migrants in Hadong have reinforced the distinctions between them rather than recognized their commonalities. In particular, the chapter scrutinizes the workings and outcomes of “dividing the poor,” which is one governmental intervention for recruiting from the poor an army against the poor. China's urban poor are not merely excluded from the wider society; they are prompted to voice their grievances not against the state but against other poor people. Thus impoverished urbanites and rural migrants in Hadong are divided by themselves as well as by state officials.

This chapter explores various efforts to “sell” neighborhoods as well as the construction and destruction of community through commodification. Using as examples Paseo Boricua in Humboldt Park and Halsted North (Boys Town) in Lakeview, it shows how particular ethnicities or lifestyles have been appropriated by cities and capital to be commodified and consumed. It also considers how some residents benefit while others confront the daily realities of continuous displacement and impoverishment created by the commodification process. While forces within Paseo Boricua and Halsted North carved out differential spaces, the chapter argues that commodification has transformed them into spaces for sale and what they represent—gayness and Puerto Ricanness. These cases illustrate the openings, dynamics, and contradictions involved in neighborhood change.

Zero, especially under the heading of zero morphemes is one of the ideologically most loaded subjects in theoretical morphology and phonology. However, discussions of the topic suffer from partial terminological confusion since ‘zero morpheme’ is a notion which is not well-defined in realizational theories of morphology, and does hence not make technical sense in any major contemporary approach to morphology since these are all basically realizational. The goal of this chapter is to show that zero exponence is ubiquitous and central in current approaches to exponence with quite subtle differences between different frameworks, and to discuss the main restrictions on zero which have been proposed in the literature.

This chapter classifies the typology of morphological dissimilation effects into four distinct stages of the mapping from syntax to exponence: linearization, prosodic readjustment, M-Word formation, and allomorph selection, in that order. Each module has its own properties, structure-sensitivities, and suite of potential repair operations; for example, the earliest stage is insensitive to adjacency and phonological form, while the latest stage is sensitive to strict adjacency and aspects of phonological form. A modular architecture for exponence allows one to distinguish the properties of each type of dissimilation, thereby enabling predictive correlations between structural sensitivity and possible repair.

In the final chapter I undertake a comparison between Sanguma’s heard future and the musical present, before concluding with a pointed critique of the way music has been commodified, and who has benefited, through the local implementation of neoliberal capitalism. There are valuable insights to be gleaned from those who have navigated highly charged political and social changes over relatively short time spans and this will be increasingly important as nations grapple with issues around immigration, aid, and developing more neighborly regional presences. This is of particular importance for those of us whose own ancestral history has been marked by arrival over sea, forced settlement, atrocities against indigenous peoples, economic exploitation, environmental vandalism, and of course misunderstanding, as most recently expressed in the “hell” narratives over 100 years after regular contact with the area, and some 38 years after PNG’s political independence.

Dene (Athapaskan) languages typically have a small inventory of semantically light verbs. This chapter demonstrates that their interpretations derive wholly from their syntactic context in predictable ways and proposes these verbs are spellouts of morphosyntactic structure with either semantically vacuous roots or none at all. They are shown to form a cline of structural complexity and it is suggested that some of the cross-linguistic semantic variability observed in light verbs may originate from this structural variation. Additionally, since these verbs serve as matrix verbs of full clauses, they cast doubt on claims that light verbs are syntactically dependent on main verbs. The extreme semantic impoverishment and configurational relatedness of these verbs suggests that they are a unified class. Two of them are commonly termed copulas; the data and analysis presented here, however, suggest that a principled distinction between copulas and light verbs may ultimately be illusory.

Most Romance languages manifest in the verb a robust modal opposition between indicative and subjunctive. Some Romance varieties also mark the relevant distinction in the C-domain through the formal shape of the complementizer. However, in many dialects of southern Italy such morphological marking in the T- and C-domains has been drastically eroded. The evidence reviewed here highlights how in these dialects the relevant modal distinction is still very much alive in the syntax, where the relevant distinction has come to manifest itself in the different positions lexicalized by the verb and the complementizer in the T- and C-domains, respectively. In particular, there emerges an asymmetrical distribution of the verb in realis and irrealis contexts, respectively targeting low and high positions in the sentential core which, in turn, directly correlate with the placement of the (morphologically undifferentiated) complementizer merged in Force in the former case and Fin in the latter.

This chapter explores two questions in detail: How should we determine the threshold for costs that individuals are asked to bear through insurance premiums or care-related out-of-pocket costs, including user fees and copayments? and What is an adequate relationship between costs and benefits? This chapter argues that preventing impoverishment is a morally more urgent priority than protecting households against income fluctuations, and that many health insurance plans may not adequately protect individuals from health care costs that threaten to drop their financial status below a decent minimum. A design that places greater emphasis on preventing impoverishment and finances the achievement of that goal by reducing unnecessary subsidies to better-off households would better accord with a sufficientarian approach to health care.