In his perspective “Navigating between stealth advocacy and unconscious dogmatism: the challenge of researching the norms, politics and power of global health,” Ooms argues that actions taken in the field of global health are dependent not only on available resources, but on the normative premise that guides how these resources are spent. This comment sets out how the application of a predomina...

This article agrees with recent arguments suggesting that normative and epistemic power is rife within global health policy and provides further examples of such. However, in doing so, it is argued that it is equally important to recognize that global health is, and always will be, deeply political and that some form of power is not only necessary for the system to advance, but also to try and ...

There are several systems in real situations that only accept a single and acceptable benchmark for efficiency improvement. For instance, when we are going to select a target for a country, the target country should be as close as the view of culture, economics and politics to the inefficient country. Otherwise, it would not be acceptable. Therefore, an inefficient country for several reaso...

The death on 7 April 2009 of Samuel Beer, still vigorous at the age of 97, marks the passing of an era in the study of British politics, not least in the United States where he towered over the field for more than 50 years. This is an appropriate moment to reflect on the distinctive perspectives Beer brought to the study of politics. Although he was a scholar of American federalism and European...

Islamic economists preoccupation with the deductive approach needs being moderated by a greater recourse to induction, especially in discussing the role of values in the economic system. Values have played an important role in the Christian West in the past, not withstanding the current advocacy of moral relativism. Every social decision implies a value judgment. Values permeate the contemporar...

The abortive attempts of Sir Humphry Davy to introduce modest reforms at the Royal Society of London during his Presidency (1820-27) contrast with his (largely unstudied) earlier experience of administration at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI). Davy's attempts to combat the systemic weaknesses in governance and funding, and his role in effecting changes at the RI, in association with...

The Mexica Empire reached an outstanding social, economic and politic organization among Mesoamerican civilizations. Even though archaeology and history provide substantial information about their past, their biological origin and the demographic consequences of their settlement in the Central Valley of Mexico remain unsolved. Two main hypotheses compete to explain the Mexica origin: a social r...

The concurrent development of political economy and the modern conception of medicine was reflected from the first decades of the seventeenth century by a degree of interdisciplinary borrowing based on analogy between the human body and the body politic. It seemed perfectly feasible that the growing knowledge of the human body and its diseases might inspire new concepts, and vindicate the use o...