Most crisis studies assume that crisis response should end disruption and restore order. This approach effectively upholds the status quo and tends to neglect structural inequalities in society. In particular, gender, race, and class inequalities render some groups more vulnerable than others. Response operations may even further discriminate against marginalized groups. Such discrimination can go unnoticed, since crisis organizations are often characterized by internal discrimination against members of these social groups as well. Alternatively, by explicitly recognizing the political nature of crisis response, frontline personnel can also try to reform society and correct structural inequalities through social transformation, although this is very challenging in practice. The goal of crisis response, therefore, constitutes a dilemma. At the very least, frontline response should avoid reinforcing discrimination and commit to social equity. Striving for more diverse and inclusive organizations would mean a step toward more equitable crisis responses. Even though our expectations should be modest, crisis response operations can and should contribute to fairness and justice.

Recent scholarship has sought to read Smith in TMS as an ethical critic of market inequality, one motivated by egalitarian commitments. This chapter pushes back against this reading, arguing that the position Smith adopts in TMS is most accurately labelled sufficientarian, not egalitarian. However, Smith’s sufficientarian considerations are deliberately focused on what is most apt for securing individual happiness. He says little of direct or decisive bearing on the plausibility of egalitarianism as a political commitment. Yet because ethical questions are not, in this area at least, isomorphic with political ones, we ought not to assume the latter can straightforwardly be read off the former. This ought to temper both our reading of Smith’s argument, and what we can appropriately extract from his text for present normative debate.

During the Renaissance, central–northern Italy was both Europe’s intellectual and artistic hub and its most prosperous economy. From the seventeenth to early nineteenth century, the Italian economy drifted from center to periphery, in a long economic decline. During that decline, Italy was fragmented and subject to foreign occupations. Structural divides got deeper and a distance between citizens and public authorities emerged. We summarize the fruits of Italy’s “modern economic growth” since political unification through four periods in Italy’s transition from poverty to abundance: a) 1861–1896 slow growth and divergence from Western Europe’s leading economies, b) secular movement from “periphery” to the “center” of the developed world; 1896–1995 was a century of almost uninterrupted, if uneven, convergence with the world’s richest countries, c) 1995–2007 was a period of losing ground: slow growth and relative decline, d) 2008–2019 from relative to the absolute decline of the Italian economy.

The I Am Your Child campaign in 1997 introduced the public to early brain development and shaped public understanding of the developing brain. In its design and impact, it illustrates “campaign journalism” that mobilizes public engagement through a large-scale communications strategy that weds science and advocacy and creates media momentum. This approach bypasses traditional science journalism and foreshadowed the current era of advocacy through viral social media messaging. This chapter documents the events leading up to the campaign, its planning and central themes, the events, its impact on parents, and the reactions of commentators. The chapter profiles how developmental scientists responded both critically and constructively, and describes the report of a federal blue-ribbon committee formed in response, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. In assessing the campaign and its impact, the chapter shows how the messaging integrated neuroimaging studies with research on children’s behavioral development in ways that were both helpful and misleading to public understanding; how cultural frames shaped how the messaging was received and accepted; and the problems deriving from the selectivity of the campaign’s messaging, including insufficient attention to prenatal development, brain growth after early childhood, and the effects of poverty.

Two stories of brain development are described. The first is from the perspective of developmental neuroscience, describing the core story of developing neurons, synapses, and neural networks, and showing how these create the brain’s developing capacities for memory, language, self-regulation, and other abilities. The second story is from the perspective of developmental science, summarizing the large literature on developing concepts and reasoning skills and the influence of early relationships in their growth. The two stories are then compared to reveal how complementary they are (as we should expect, since they both concern the developing child), but how their integration is still a work in progress, especially because the stories of brain and mind have somewhat different perspectives on development deriving from different research methods, levels of analysis, vocabulary, and concepts. The last section describes overlooked topics in the brain development story that was publicly messaged: the effects of poverty, fetal brain “programming,” and adolescence as a period of renewed brain plasticity and growth. The chapter shows how the science of brain development is constantly evolving, how the interaction of mind and brain is only slowly becoming understood, and the selectivity of the public communication of developmental brain science.

The twin crises of 2008–9 and 2011–12 witnessed the largest GDP loss in Italian history, except the last two WWII years. In 2020, Italy’s GDP per person was still below the 2007 level. The economy was slow and uncertain in reacting to the crisis. The fiscal response proved to be inadequate, but it nevertheless resulted in a substantial increase in the debt/GDP ratio, which fed into uncertainty about the future of the country, affecting investments. The growth rate of the economy was low, spreading doubts about debt sustainability in the medium-long run. Zero growth accentuated the antagonistic mentality in politics. The traditional North–South gap widened, as did poverty, income inequality, and social divides. Distributional coalitions gained political leverage. The 2018 general elections yielded a populist majority.

Chapter 3 explains the principle of the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights (‘the principle of indivisibility) as recognising: (a) the equal importance of economic, social and cultural rights with civil and political rights, and (b) the interdependence of rights within and across categories. It explains how the privileging of civil and political rights, including the right to legal capacity, erroneously frames state restraint as always rights-affirming; such framing, in turn, demands the abolition of decision-making by substitutes. It argues that depending on how an adult with cognitive disability is contingently situated even after all supports are provided, they may require a decision to be made by a substitute to fulfil an immediate socio-economic need and to claim their human rights. It argues that Article 12, in requiring supports for legal capacity, is a ‘hybrid’ civil and political and socio-economic right, illustrating and driving the principle of indivisibility in the CRPD.

Although homelessness is a societal problem across the US, 60% of people experiencing homelessness are located in urban centers. Structural factors such as lack of affordable housing are the central drivers of urban homelessness, rather than migration patterns or individual characteristics such as substance use and mental illness. Unhoused individuals have a larger burden of disease compared to the general population, with higher mortality rates even when controlling for other factors. Although emergency departments provide access to some of the lowest barrier health care in urban areas, unhoused patients are more susceptible to deviations from the standard of care. Clinicians risk making biased or uninformed triage and treatment decisions for this patient population, which creates the potential for poor clinical outcomes. Emergency clinicians should treat people experiencing homelessness with respect and provide an appropriate evaluation and disposition as determined by presenting complaint as well as associated health and social needs. In addition to clinical care, EDs can provide people experiencing homelessness with connection to support services to improve health outcomes.

Paths to a liberal order are not limited to those followed by Western countries. A possible Middle Eastern starting point was zakat, Islam’s only “pillar” with an explicitly economic function. Zakat appears in the Quran as a system that finances designated state expenses through a tax on wealth and income. The rates were low by the standards of Antiquity, and they were fixed. Besides, the payment of zakat legitimated the underlying wealth or income. Hence, it could have served as the foundation for political checks and balances based on secure private ownership. Yet zakat’s specifics were suited specifically to Arabia; it left out major sources of income and wealth in the broader Middle East. For these reasons alone, rulers imposed extra-Islamic taxes. Having set precedents for arbitrary taxation, they then essentially stopped enforcing zakat. A Quran-based Islamic institution for empowering the individual against the state thus turned into a minor device for local poor relief. The waqf’s emergence in the 700s as a core Islamic institution was a creative response to zakat’s abandonment as a state-enforced transfer system. Its unintended effects, such as the persistent weakness of civil society, are rooted, then, in zakat’s loss of relevance to Islamic governance.

This chapter describes the development, refinement, and key guiding insights of the Reformulated Adaptation to Poverty-Related Stress (APRS) model. The APRS model elucidates how children (and adults) cope with and adapt to the plethora of stressful exposures and conditions that comprise poverty’s developmental context, and why coping in this stressful context often differs from coping found in less stressful developmental contexts. The chapter articulates implications of the APRS for research that takes context seriously and for interventions that meet children where they are; help them grow broad, flexible coping repertoires; develop the ability to differentiate among domains of stress that require different coping approaches; and learn to tailor one’s coping responses to the type of stressor being encountered. In this way, the APRS can guide researchers and interventionists to dump the deficit model of poor people and embrace the possibilities opened by an appreciation for the remarkable adaptiveness of humans.

Chapter 10 offers a way through, not by opposing poverty, but reframing it. Being poor in world and captivated by its technological environment, marks the regress of humans from homo faber to animal laborans; but while the latter still could locate the self within a cosmic and divine order, all such locating is now forfeit. Our second reading of poverty, aided by Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, however, embraces the possibility of new beginning; the wind that stirs and in whose uneven gusts the potential for the revision of the self emerges.

Chapter 6 examines the limits of legal legibility, or what – and whose – problems are legible to the law, and who gets left behind. The chapter looks to the community called Agua Blanca in the western part of Colombia. There, the most visible impact of the 1991 Constitution seems to be the conversion of rights promises into paperwork. While residents of Agua Blanca still use the tutela procedure, accepting the idea that filing tutela claims as what one has to do to try to gain access to services, they see the 1991 Constitution as largely irrelevant to their lives, which are instead constrained by violence and marginality.

The chapter uses global poverty as a case study subset of human rights to expand the smart-mix regulation discourse to the field of human rights where there is little legal affirmation of the methods for tackling challenges. It shows how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) exemplify governance reluctance and uncertainties in international human rights law. It argues that, if properly designed, corporate social responsibility (CSR) can potentially address governance gaps for human rights beyond the scope of the UNGPs. The chapter further shows that CSR can be utilised by willing actors for safeguarding rights and combating the unwillingness of powerful political and economic entities to accept the legalisation of business responsibility for human rights.

Irrespective of where you end up working in the field of human services, most of the people you work with will be living in relative poverty and experiencing a combination of problems that create a vicious cycle of disadvantage for children and families. In this chapter, we draw upon social work as a case study of a profession working to prevent and address poverty, while actively engaging with, and supporting, affected individuals, families, and communities. An understanding of the complexity and inter-relatedness of issues associated with living in poverty is vital to ensure, at a minimum, that practitioners do no (further) harm and do not perpetuate or replicate dominant or oppressive notions of the deserving and undeserving poor, or individual versus structural explanations of poverty. Social workers and human service professionals therefore need to develop their capacities in relation to poverty-aware practice and the multiple actions that are required to address this complex issue.

The literature on Australia’s Stolen Generations and genocide has focused on the twentieth century but forcible child removal was integral to colonization from its beginning in in 1788. This historical analysis chronicles the abuse and deaths of stolen children at colonists’ hands during the nineteenth century through the rubric of the United Nations Convention on Genocide in 1948. This is a history of private kidnapping along spreading frontiers, sanctioned by colonial authorities, and government projects for “Christianizing and civilizing” the children in isolated missions. Both reasons for removing children provided labor for colonists and cleared Aboriginal families from their lands. Despite critics in Britain and the colonies and opposition from Aboriginal families these practices continued into the twentieth century and contributed to the foundations of the modern “Stolen Generations”. The Australian Federal Constitution (1901) left Aboriginal people under the control of state governments. New laws extinguishing citizenship and economic independence increased family poverty and vulnerability of all Aboriginal people, including those of ‘mixed’ descent. Forcible removals to draconian institutions and menial labor for life became normalized for many children until the mid-twentieth century. The enormity of these crimes committed against Aboriginal children and their kin prompts the question, what restorative effects the Genocide Convention might offer their descendants? This chapter traces this history, focusing on the colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.