British Muslims and the anti-war movement

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All I'm asking, is for a little respect: assessing the performance of Britain's most successful radical left party

This article offers an overview of the genesis, development and decline of the Respect Party, a rare example of a radical left party which has achieved some degree of success in the UK. It analyses the party's electoral fortunes and the reasons for its inability to expand on its early breakthroughs in East London and Birmingham. Respect received much of its support from Muslim voters, although the mere presence of Muslims in a given area was not enough for Respect candidates to get elected. Indeed, despite criticism of the party for courting only Muslims, it did not aim to draw its support from these voters alone. Moreover, its reliance on young people and investment in local campaigning on specific political issues were often in opposition to the traditional ethnic politics which have characterised the electoral process in some areas

Managing care environments: reflections from research and practice

This chapter considers the role of senior staff in managing the use of space and the physical environment within care settings. These day and residential settings come under the broad umbrella of social work and social care but the care may also be organized from within health. This is a subject that does not appear on the curriculum of many management courses in the UK, but arguably it is critical in relation to social work and social care where managers are involved with residential homes, day centres and other provision where the physical environment can enhance or be detrimental towards service users' wellbeing. In such settings many activities go on under one roof, particularly in group care or when the care is provided in a person's own home. The care environment is complex and can be bounded within space, place, time and behaviour. Activities and time available compete or have different meanings for the participants. Managers have different kinds of relationships with workers and with service users. The environment in which care takes place often frames these

Managing environments

Although a context might be solid - like a building - it has different meanings for the people who use it. The impact of the physical space is the focus for 'Managing environments'. Peace and Reynolds note that any one environment may be multifunctional. Taking an innovative approach to management, they argue that a residential care home, for example, may be simultaneously a place for living for residents, working for staff and managers and visiting for relatives and other professionals. The atmosphere in a care home makes a critical difference to the experience of service users who live there. The authors review how the environmental factors that influence care may be managed and how the careful design and us of space can contribute to improved quality of life in the management of care. Peace and Reynolds also consider relationships between people, places and quality, recognising the impact of the manager on caring environments. A focus on practice here emphasises the role of the manager in drawing out debates over values and best practice to help care workers feel supported and confident about the care they provide

Teaching Peace – The Need for Teacher Training in Poland to Promote Peace

The aim of the paper is to stimulate the discussion on peace education and the need of teacher training for peace and multicultural understanding. This paper is organized in two sections: the first section presents the importance of peace education for Europe in the Twenty-first century. This section discusses peace as a spiritual and moral values, European achievements for peace in the field of philosophy as well as educational reports focused on peace education. The second section seeks the importance of teacher training for peace education, the possibilities of including of peace topic into in-service teacher educatio

Peace education, militarism and neo-liberalism: conceptual reflections with empirical findings from the UK

This article explores ‘peace days’ in English schools as a form of peace education. From a historical overview of academic discussions on peace education in the US and Great Britain since the First World War, we identify three key factors important for peace education: the political context, the place in which peace days occur and pedagogical imperatives of providing a certain narrative of the sources of violence in politics. Although contemporary militarism and neoliberalism reduce the terrains for peace studies in English schools, peace days allow teachers to carve out spaces for peace education. Peace days in Benfield School, Newcastle and Comberton Village College, Cambridgeshire, are considered as case studies. We conclude with reflections on the opportunities and limitations of this approach to peace education, and on how peace educators and activists could enlarge its reach

'Hollow promises?' Critical materialism and the contradictions of the Democratic Peace

© Cambridge University PressThe Democratic Peace research programme explicitly and implicitly presents its claims in terms of their potential to underpin a universal world peace. Yet whilst the Democratic Peace appears robust in its geographical heartlands it appears weaker at the edges of the democratic world, where the spread of democracy and the depth of democratic political development is often limited and where historically many of the purported exceptions to the Democratic Peace are found. Whereas Democratic Peace scholarship has tended to overlook or downplay these phenomena, from a critical materialist perspective they are indicative of a fundamental contradiction within the Democratic Peace whereby its universalistic aspirations are thwarted by its material grounding in a hierarchical capitalist world economy. This, in turn, raises the question of whether liberal arguments for a universal Democratic Peace are in fact hollow promises. The article explores these concerns and argues that those interested in democracy and peace should pay more attention to the critical materialist tradition, which in the discussion below is represented principally by the world-system approach

Training for design of experiments using a catapult

Design of experiments (DOE) is a powerful approach for discovering a set of process (or design) variables which are most important to the process and then determine at what levels these variables must be kept to optimize the response (or quality characteristic) of interest. This paper presents two catapult experiments which can be easily taught to engineers and managers in organizations to train for design of experiments. The results of this experiment have been taken from a real live catapult experiment performed by a group of engineers in a company during the training program on DOE. The first experiment was conducted to separate out the key factors (or variables) from the trivial and the second experiment was carried out using the key factors to understand the nature of interactions among the key factors. The results of the experiment were analysed using simple but powerful graphical tools for rapid and easier understanding of the results to engineers with limited statistical competency

Short-term and long-term effects of United Nations peace operations

Earlier studies have shown that United Nations peace operations make a positive contribution to peacebuilding efforts after civil wars. But do these effects carry over to the period after the peacekeepers leave? And how do the effects of UN peace operations interact with other determinants of peacebuilding in the long run? The author addresses these questions using a revised version of the Doyle and Sambanis dataset and applying different estimation methods to estimate the short-term and long-term effects of UN peace missions. He finds that UN missions have robust, positive effects on peacebuilding in the short term. UN missions can help parties implement peace agreements but the UN cannot fight wars, and UN operations contribute more to the quality of the peace where peace is based on participation, than to the longevity of the peace, where peace is simply the absence of war. The effects of UN missions are also felt in the long run, but they dissipate over time. What is missing in UN peacebuilding is a strategy to foster the self-sustaining economic growth that could connect increased participation with sustainable peace.Post Conflict Reintegration,Peace&Peacekeeping,International Affairs,Post Conflict Reconstruction,Politics and Government