The requirement for parental consent for conducting abortion for minors has always been a highly debatable and controversial ethical issue. In terms of ethical debate, there are manifolded 'pros' and 'cons' of liberal legislation on abortion for the underage girls. Worldwide experience has revealed that the variations in the laws as well as the arguments for and against abortion for teenagers differ depending on geographical location, ethnicity, religion, and cultural peculiarities. This paper juxtaposes arguments in favor for and against parental consent, as well as neutral arguments neither for nor against, narrowing down the issue to the context of Kazakhstan. At the same time, the paper also uses ethical stances of virtuous and utilitarian aspects for argumentative purposes and touching upon the aspects of morality. In conclusion, the paper argues in favor for mitigating the access for underage girls in Kazakhstan on a legislative level and suggests that Kazakhstan should reconsider as well as readapt its regulation and laws on abortion in order to maintain health, happiness, utility, and reproductive abilities of future-to-be mothers. Thus, a law mitigating the access to abortion for youngsters could make a huge positive impact for both underage girls as well as the society to reach an agreeable consensus between the two.
This paper analyzes several aspects concerning the national issues of rape and sexual harassment incidences in the context of Kazakhstan via a discourse analysis approach of social media activist movements. The article touches upon crucial social media movements, such as ‘#MeTooTalgo’, ‘NeMolchi.kz’ or ‘#OrtashaEmes’, which all emerged after the 2016 incident with the rape case in a Talgo Train, causing eventually an upward rising tendency for awareness-raising social media campaigns across the country. Alongside that, the paper also provides insight into the discussion about the societal influence of the contextual conservative patriarchal state on women, the factors causing women to become victims of sexual and physical abuse as well the power of the social media as a tool and platform for catalyzing the enraged voices of women into influential instruments for societal changes. On top of that, this paper also looks at how the movements of social media activism have influenced government decisions and law amendments in the country towards tightening legislations. The paper follows a discourse analysis research methodology, where only secondary sources of information are used and referred to. In conclusion, the significance of this paper is that it tries to enlighten and bring forth one of the societal problems that women and under-aged girls in Kazakhstan face, and which has yet to be accepted as a “societal problem” by the society itself. Hence, despite the conservative regime with a still developing but much promising civic society, social media has shown to be ‘a free fighting space’ for those who want to voice their problems and for those who want to be heard.
The ransom dilemma problem all around the world raises not only moral concerns for the government, but also for the society as a whole in whether to save the kidnapped person or to do nothing against it. While the U.S. and U.K. deal with this according to its strict laws and regulations ruthlessly in order to preserve the integrity of the society, the European Union deals it with a more flexible and is oriented toward a human-centered approach. This paper will try to analyze this ethical dilemma from three diverging viewpoints. These concern the consequentialist/utilitarian viewpoints and the deontological approach. While consequentialists support the argument that states ought to preserve the security of their citizens without giving in to the demands of terrorists for an exchange of the kidnapped person, deontologists on the other hand put human values and individual rights to the forefront and urges states to save people no matter what the circumstances they are in. Here, we will refer to the arguments presented by ethicists such as Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill as well as experts like Peter Singer. However, in terms of deontological approach it comes with caveats in arguments between Kantian absolutism approach in categorical impetrative beliefs and Rossian intuitive prima facie duties approach. This paper serves the purpose of informing and enlightening readers on the ethical issues that ransom dilemma presents with a more informational-analytical standpoint. The rationale of our research paper lies within the fact that very little research has been conducted in regards to ethical approaches towards the aspects of ransom dilemma phenomenon. Hence, with this research paper, we would like to fill in this research gap and bring in something new and interesting within the studies on ethics.
Environmental issues in Kazakhstan are one of the most undermined research areas in Kazakhstan, particularly if we are speaking about aspects on environmental awareness. This study asked Kazakhstani eco-activists to provide their expert-rich responses to eleven open-ended questions related to environmental awareness aspects in Kazakhstan, which were divided into five sections, namely 1) degree of the environmental problem in the country; 2) reasons for the existence of the environmental problem; 3) role of the government in environmental awareness aspects; 4) the role of civil society in environmental awareness matters; and 5) solutions and prospects. For that, ten eco-activists have participated in our study, who were selected from the social media website ‘Linkedin’ via a convenience sampling method. As a data analysis, a content analysis approach was used. Our results have indicated that environmental awareness level has improved since 1990’s and numerous factors ranging from low levels of ecological literacy and environmental activism were mentioned as reasons for existence of low level of environmental awareness. By now, there are practically no empirical data on how eco-activists view, comprehend and assess environmental awareness issues in Kazakhstan. Such primary data could help share valuable insight on important policy and research aspects, namely concerning ineffectiveness of government-initiated actions, role of civil society in pro-environmental projects, studying level of awareness for government-initiated environmental programs, or policy proposals in tackling low environmental awareness levels. Thus, our research could be both valuable for researchers in filling the research gap and for practitioners in proposing viable policy alternatives to address environmental awareness issues. Despite the study’s research limitations concerning lack of international eco-activist’s focus, social-desirability-response bias and low sample size representativeness, this study recommends conducting expert interviews with NGOs (e.g. UNECE or CARECECO), reintegrate environmental concern and activism aspects as well as focus on policy solutions.
This paper analyzes the role of social media in fighting radical extremism in Kyrgyzstan by looking at the pilot project conducted by Search for Common Ground Organization that was initiated from 2016 to 2017. The pilot project was aimed at the youth population in order to raise the awareness for issues of radical recruitment risks and create a social media platform for public discourses about radicalism problems. Firstly, the paper introduced the sources and reasons for the emergence of radicalism problems in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here, the triangular rise of nationalism, religious ignorance and secularist beliefs were discussed alongside the erosion of education system and the issue of ideological vacuum. All this resulted eventually in the social marginalization of the youth and the society overall. Secondly, we analyzed the reasons of why terrorists and radical movements targeted the youth via the social media platforms and discussed in detail how the social media campaign could help in fighting against it via the distribution of various counter-extremist information sources and tools. Thirdly, the problems and limitations of the project were discussed, where matters such as the difficulty on recognizing the sources of factors enabling the causes of radicalism or criticism towards effectiveness of the use of positive counter-radical messages have been mentioned. Fourthly, the paper draws lessons from this project for the Central Asian region in terms of its importance, relevance and applicability in different contextual environments. In conclusion, this paper showed on the one hand the vulnerability of the social media to the influence of radical ideas and ideologies, but also on the other hand the potential of the social media as a tool to counter the radical movements and protect the youth from social marginalization, risk of radical recruitments and manipulation.
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