The Nomadic Peace: A Constructivist Analysis of the Somaliland Peace Process

This qualitative case study utilizes constructivist theory to better understand the success of the Somaliland peace process, which took place in the early 1990’s. The thesis argues that underlying forces, such as social change, social norms, values, beliefs and traditions have been vital in strengthening and legitimizing the peace process. Somaliland has been chosen as the case due to its impressive success at using local resources to lead a bottom-up process of reconciliation and settlement to solve major disputes without international aid or interference. The study examines the use of established traditions and norms, such as the agency of elders as peace makers and an ingrained system of customary law, known as xeer. Norms that are seen as particularly encouraging to the peace in Somaliland include madasha nabada, which stipulates that peace be made directly in the place of the conflict, and gobannimo, which is a highly valued trait of selflessness contributing to an atmosphere of sacrifice towards the peace. Additionally, strongly held religious beliefs set a tone favorable to peaceful and reconciliatory meetings between individuals and communities. Finally, a common shift in attitudes and desires in the years leading up to the peace process encouraged a process of social change, which resulted in reconciliation, forgiveness, and eventually peace

Towards a Framework for Developing Mobile Agents for Managing Distributed Information Resources

Distributed information management tools allow users to author, disseminate, discover and manage information within large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet. Agent technology provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to develop such distributed information management applications. We present a layered organisation that is shared by the specific applications that we build. Within this organisation we describe an architecture where mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate their results back to the user

A cache framework for nomadic clients of web services

This research explores the problems associated with caching of SOAP Web Service request/response pairs, and presents a domain independent framework enabling transparent caching of Web Service requests for mobile clients. The framework intercepts method calls intended for the web service and proceeds by buffering and caching of the outgoing method call and the inbound responses. This enables a mobile application to seamlessly use Web Services by masking fluctuations in network conditions. This framework addresses two main issues, firstly how to enrich the WS standards to enable caching and secondly how to maintain consistency for state dependent Web Service request/response pairs

A Fault-Tolerant Mobile Computing Model Based On Scalable Replica

The most frequent challenge faced by mobile user is stay connected with online data, while disconnected or poorly connected store the replica of critical data. Nomadic users require replication to store copies of critical data on their mobile machines. Existing replication services do not provide all classes of mobile users with the capabilities they require, which include: the ability for direct synchronization between any two replicas, support for large numbers of replicas, and detailed control over what files reside on their local (mobile) replica. Existing peer-to-peer solutions would enable direct communication, but suffers from dramatic scaling problems in the number of replicas, limiting the number of overall users and impacting performance. Roam is a replication system designed to satisfy the requirements of the mobile user. Roam is based on the Ward Model, replication architecture for mobile environments. Using the Ward Model and new distributed algorithms, Roam provides a scalable replication solution for the mobile user. We describe the motivation, design, and implementation of Roam and report its performance. Replication is extremely important in mobile environments because nomadic users require local copies of important data