This book is my way of sharing two decades of experience in helping people with drug problems. Using the latest science on how drugs work in the brain, I have tried to show their attraction as well as the problems they cause. Drug use peaks in adolescence, just at the time when the developing brain is uniquely vulnerable to their harmful effects.

For parents with children who are not using drugs, I hope the advice in this book will help stop problems developing. Having the drug conversation with your child before they are exposed to drugs will allow you to return to the topic if needed, without your child fearing that you are unable or unwilling to discuss it. They may then come to you earlier and be more honest about drugs, giving you a better chance of helping.

Populist Discourse, Historical Narratives, and the Hazards of Essentialism

There is a growing consensus that populism should not be approached as a clearly identifiable or coherent ideology (Morgan 2022). Instead, it might be better to analyse populism as a discourse revolving around the creation of political identity (Ostiguy 2017). Like most collective identities, populism is constructed by denying other identities. Beyond the usual left–right axis, populists pit ‘the people’ against a minority blamed for monopolizing economic and institutional resources – the elite, or those at the top (Laclau 2005).

As a reaction to the destabilization of ‘ontological securities’, populism tends to be seen as either relying on or leading to essentialist conceptions of social and political identities (Steele and Homolar 2019; Bartoszewicz 2021). It is based upon Manichean friend–enemy counter-concepts (Junge 2011), which grant it a strong ontological grounding. On the other hand, it engages in a counter-hegemonic struggle vis-à-vis an oligarchy portrayed as, in essence, deeply corrupt. Its antagonistic rhetoric is prone to the naturalization of otherness, but it typically does not entail the tactic of adopting essentialist self-identification often used by subaltern groups engaged in identity politics (Panizza 2017; Bell 2021).

Still, populism remains an identity discourse that targets the emotions of an allegedly underrepresented ‘we’ (Ferrada Stoehrel 2017). Ideational approaches to populism stress that, beyond exposing the power elite, populist discourse has among its goals the mobilization of a homogeneous community of decent and rightful commoners (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019). This leads to a number of prevalent narratives in populist discourse, which are increasingly seen as a form of performative storytelling through which leaders provide meaning to extended injustices and offer simple alternatives that are appealing to the majority (Ungureanu and Popartan 2020; Nordensvard and Ketola 2021).

Specifically, populist narratives construct in-group identity by referring to the ‘people’ (Panizza 2017). Providing the people with a narrative inscribes an essentialist tension into populist discourse. Some advocates of populism are aware of this hazard: post-Marxists, in particular, critically tackle the potential hazard of essentialism by conceptualizing the people as an ‘empty signifier’ for populist ideologues to fill with contextual grievances and values (Laclau 2005).

Introduction

Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain published a remarkable report in 1991 in which they differentiated between ‘survival emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’. It would not be an exaggeration to say that no other report has had a comparable impact on global debates and scholarship on climate justice. This distinction between survival and luxury emissions has been central to some of the most important pieces of scholarship and advocacy on climate justice (Shue 1993). Based on this report, common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) became the defining feature of the Indian government's position in international climate negotiations (Jasanoff 1993). Despite having such a massive influence on international climate negotiations, the distinction between survival and luxury emissions is rarely referenced in domestic climate policy debates. Even as climate disasters, including cyclones, floods, and heatwaves, become more intense, there is limited public debate on climate action and policy in India (J. Das 2020). On the other hand, while there is robust scholarship on India's climate policy and action in the international arena, engagement with questions of domestic climate justice within Indian academia is quite sparse (Fisher 2015; Chu and Michael 2019). The potential for domestic injustices was apparent even in 1991 and was duly acknowledged in the same Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) report that made CBDR foundational to India's position in international negotiations:

For a variety of reasons that require deeper inquiry, questions of domestic climate justice fell through the intertwined cracks of international climate change politics and sectoral silos that are endemic to both academic research and grassroots social movement organization (Gupta 2014). Many argued, quite appropriately, that the policy priority should be addressing issues of employment, food security, education, and primary healthcare for the poorest people in India and other countries in the Global South.

This case study examines the human rights implications arising from the construction of Cambodia’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Lower Sesan II. As a long-standing initiative intended to dramatically expand access to reliable energy sources within Cambodia, the Lower Sesan II was adopted by and labeled a “key project” of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). However, project developers and contractors face significant criticism as the construction efforts have displaced Indigenous communities and failed to address environmental reports that projected a substantial disruption to local biodiversity, adverse effects that were later documented by local groups and nongovernmental organizations. Drawing from international, transnational, and domestic sources of law, and interviews with various community stakeholders, this study illustrates how Chinese parties building BRI projects engage with applicable human rights obligations through the example of the Lower Sesan II and discusses the consequences of noncompliance.

Chapters 6–8 use a comprehensive new dataset on the universe of Japanese municipalities in existence between 1980 and 2014 to examine whether tournaments are being conducted within tournament-possible electoral districts. Using regression specifications designed to minimize the influence of confounders, weigh up evidence for rival theories, and take advantage of distinctive features of the two electoral systems Japan has used, I test two hypotheses. First, I show that LDP politicians make the amounts of money municipalities in their electoral districts receive after Lower House elections conditional on where each municipality places in a rank order of municipalities. Second, I show that the difference in amounts received by municipalities at different ranks is larger at higher ranks, which is also evidence of a tournament. In addition to regression analyses, I consider two of the theory’s microfoundations which are that LDP politicians are capable of lobbying bureaucrats and voters are aware money is tied to support, respectively. Case studies, anecdotes, interviews, election manifestos, and voter surveys offer evidence for these microfoundations. Finally, I use the logic of a tournament to explain why prior studies of the relationship between votes and money in Japan reached strikingly different conclusions.