Until Oregon voters approved an aid-in-dying referendum in 1994, no jurisdiction in the United States had given legal approval to aid in dying. Moreover, fourteen years passed before a second state, Washington, legalised aid in dying. Since then, recognition has accelerated. Now, aid in dying is permitted in nine states and the District of Columbia, with nearly one in four Americans living in a jurisdiction that permits the practice. While a right to aid in dying has taken different paths—voter approval, legislative action, or judicial decision—all legalising US jurisdictions recognise the right in the same basic way: patients must be adults with decision-making capacity, must be terminally ill, and must self-administer the lethal dose of medication. This chapter discusses why the different jurisdictions have converged on the same legal framework for a right to aid in dying. In particular, there are key reasons for limiting a right to aid in dying to patients who are terminally ill (i.e., life-expectancy of six months or less). The chapter also discusses the implications of the common legal framework for future evolution of the right to aid in dying in the United States.

Immediately after the partial withdrawal of the Syrian army from several towns in the north and north-east of the country in July 2012, Kurds seemed to emerge ‘out of nowhere’. More significantly, after more than forty years of dictatorship and political marginalization, Syrian Kurds appeared to become masters of their own destiny. For one, both the Democratic Union Party (PYD) - a Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has been fighting the Turkish state since the 1980s – and its military force, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), have been exercising state-like power in the Kurdish regions of Syria. However, in parallel, reports from the region have revealed a murkier picture: Syrian Kurdish parties appeared highly divided, and the PYD ascent brought about significant consequences in the Kurdish enclaves among growing Turkish intervention in northern Syria. This chapter argues that both continuities between 1946 and 2019 (e.g. division of the Kurdish political field, its openness to external influences and ambiguities with regard to the Syrian regime) and changes (e.g. Syrian war context, adoption of armed struggle strategies by Kurdish political parties and ideological transformations) may help us to better grasp current dynamics in northern Syria.

Self-determination operated as an organizing principle for national liberation movements around the world in the twentieth century. This was no different for Kurdish political movements assuming the principle that a nation is entitled to a state which exercises exclusive territorial control. National self-determination became the grounding of the right they claimed to establish the independent state of Kurdistan. Since the constitutive power of the state relied for its justification on the existence of a self-determining nation, Kurdish political parties emerging after the Second World War framed their struggle in terms of state formation. However, in the course of the twenty-first century, the emphasis on the Kurds as a people without a state became one of the Kurds as a people beyond the state. In this chapter, these contemporary political developments are discussed within a historical context. The chapter looks at the relation of Kurds and Kurdish politics with the state as an object and objective of political struggle. In so doing, it distinguishes between two strong currents in Kurdish politics over the last decades.

This chapter will provide an overview of the various ways in which addictive disorders can be studied using human participants in laboratory settings. Human laboratory research provides an important piece of the translational research chain by enabling researchers to examine addictive behaviors in controlled settings using validated experimental methodologies. This chapter will cover three common laboratory techniques: cue exposure protocols, stress induction protocols, and addictive object self-administration protocols. The primary goal is to provide a methodological guide to conducting research using these approaches, but not extensively review previous research. Therefore, for each technique, we discuss the background and rationale, ethical considerations, strengths and limitations, and representative examples and promising future directions in the use of the technique to study substance and behavioral addictions.