INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ PROCEDURAL ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS AND TRANSNATIONAL INDIGENOUS ADVOCACY NETWORKS

This thesis analyzes the central question: whether, by engaging with states and extractive multinational corporations (MNCs) within the international system, transnational Indigenous advocacy networks (TIANs) can promote the development and implementation of international legal norms relating to the rights of Indigenous peoples to participate and access information in environmental decision-making. It examines Indigenous peoples’ leadership and contributions to the development of international Indigenous rights norms and their continued roles in advancing the development and realization of their procedural environmental rights. For context, this thesis examines Indigenous peoples’ collaborations that shaped the development of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to exemplify Indigenous peoples’ influence in international law. It identifies and responds to some of the shortcomings of Indigenous rights movements and organizations without discounting their efforts and achievements. Thus, by modifying and adapting Keck and Sikkink’s analysis of transnational advocacy networks, this thesis introduces and explores a structure I term TIANs. TIANs will comprise webs of established Indigenous rights organizations operating internationally and seeking to initiate or maintain connections with domestic groups. Constructivist international relations insights on the norm life cycle inform this thesis’ analysis of the potential roles of TIANs as norm entrepreneurs with the requisite organizational platform. International legal norms on Indigenous peoples’ procedural environmental rights have not been established in specific international rules, and domestic pressure is still being asserted for these rights to be respected. Hence, this thesis argues that these norms are at the first stage of the norm life cycle, and establishes the need for an international law instrument that unequivocally affirms and protects these rights. It analyzes four distinguishing and interrelated potential characteristics of TIANs that respond to the particularities of Indigenous rights advocacy: spheres of operation, shared principled ideas, advocacy strategies, and information strategies. These attributes will make TIANs well-positioned to bridge the gap between international and domestic Indigenous rights advocates, optimize transnational Indigenous alliances, and foster the actualization of international Indigenous environmental rights principles domestically. Essentially, TIANs are suitable to engage with states and MNCs to shape their actions regarding developing and implementing the emerging norms

A new heuristic for influence maximization in social networks

Influence Maximization (IM) is defined as the problem of finding the minimal IM-seed set of nodes maximally influential in a network. IM solution is formulated in the context of an influence spread model describing how the influence is propagated through the network. IM is relevant for applications such as viral marketing, and the analysis of infection diffusion in a community. Such communities are described by graphs model which have some kind of probabilistic description of how influence is propagated from one node to its neighbours. The cascade and threshold propagation models are the most popular in the literature. In this article, a new global heuristic search method for IM is proposed. We provide comparison over a collection of synthetic and real life graphs against other state-of-the-art heuristic search methods, namely Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, Harmony Search and the classical Greedy Search (GS) algorithm. Our new method (IMH) competes with the GS algorithm getting the minimal IM-seed set whose influence spreads the largest amount of nodes. Our method improves Greedy algorithm’s time execution