Balance of power, democracy and development: Armenia in the South Caucasian regional security complex

Since 1991, three regional security complexes have emerged on the Eurasian geopolitical extension if the former Soviet Union in Europe, Central Asia and the South Caucasus. The pattern of enmity/amity, well as the nature of a regional security complex (RSC), created the structural context of each of the above-mentioned complex. In addition to the crucial factor of “foreign penetration, ” the process of state building including the transition from Communism to democratic rule and free-market economy played a central role in the formation of the new Eurasian regional security complexes. This essay uses the RSC analytical framework to look closely to the interactions between the three South Caucasian republics. It sustains that the dominant patterns in South Caucasus are those of rivalry and enmity. Foreign penetration, on the other hand, is high. Relations of balance of power, hence, would characterize the South Caucasian Regional Security Complex. How in conditions of a balance-of-power situation is possible development? What are the dilemmas to confront? What role does democracy plays in maximizing development in a balance-of-power situation? These are the questions among others that this essay, focused on Armenia in the context of the South Caucasian Regional Security Complexes, addresses

Accommodating Perceptions, Searching for Authenticity and Decolonising Methodology: The Case of the Australia / Papua New Guinea Secondary School Student's project

This paper discusses the development process of a research methodology for accommodating the exploration of recipients’ perceptions of a foreign educational project. The search for authenticity in methodology remains an issue for qualitative inquiry which has its origins in a constructive epistemology. Theoretically positioned within a postcolonial framework, the search for authenticity in methodology presented a challenge for the researcher. Specifically, this paper will focus on the research problem, issues relating to evaluation of aid programs, decolonising methodology and the search for authenticity. The paper concludes with some findings of the research project, demonstrating that decolonising methodologies create new possibilities in educational research with specific reference to educational assistance and postcolonial societies. It reveals the complexities of cultural politics and its influences on foreign financial assistance. These findings include the concepts of cultural identity, ethnicity, hegemony and ambivalence which characterises the nature of Papua New Guinea education and society

Theorizing EU trade politics

This special issue aims to take the first step towards an inter-paradigmatic debate in the study of European Union trade politics

Patterns of Role Transition: A Taxonomy, A Research Program, and the Three-Body Problem

In foreign policy, role transition as a process of role change implies at least two roles (a state\u27ʹs old role and its new role) and a dynamic process of role location in which Ego’s role changes over time. If every role for Ego presumes a counter-role for Alter, a pattern of role transition for Ego implies as well a potential process of role transition for Alter. In order to model the process of role transition, a taxonomy of mutually exclusive and logically exhaustive roles and counter-roles is desirable, in order to identify and specify the possible combinations of old and new roles as patterns of role transition. Binary role theory provides a taxonomy that meets these criteria and is employed in this paper to model the process of role transition as a transition in Grand Strategy Orientations. The binary model is complete in a way that three-way (or multi-way) models cannot be. Several hypotheses about the role of domestic politics in foreign policy role transitions, however, suggest the conditions under which unstable triads may become provisionally stable. Application of the resulting model to selected episodes of role transition in triadic relations among China, the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, and South Korea illustrates the model’s potential descriptive and explanatory power for analyzing strategic triads and the contours of a research program for understanding foreign policy change as a role transition process

Orientable domination in product-like graphs

The orientable domination number, ${\rm DOM}(G)$, of a graph $G$ is the largest domination number over all orientations of $G$. In this paper, ${\rm DOM}$ is studied on different product graphs and related graph operations. The orientable domination number of arbitrary corona products is determined, while sharp lower and upper bounds are proved for Cartesian and lexicographic products. A result of Chartrand et al. from 1996 is extended by establishing the values of ${\rm DOM}(K_{n_1,n_2,n_3})$ for arbitrary positive integers $n_1,n_2$ and $n_3$. While considering the orientable domination number of lexicographic product graphs, we answer in the negative a question concerning domination and packing numbers in acyclic digraphs posed in [Domination in digraphs and their direct and Cartesian products, J. Graph Theory 99 (2022) 359-377]

India and the Civil War in Sri Lanka: On the Failures of Regional Conflict Management in South Asia

The paper provides an assessment of India’s role in the final years of the civil war in Sri Lanka (2003-2009). In particular, it looks for explanations for India’s inability to act as a conflict manager in its own region, which is in contrast to predominant assumptions about the role of powerful regional states. It also seeks to explain the surprising turn in India’s approach to the conflict, when in 2007 New Delhi began to rather explicitly support the Sri Lankan government— in disregard of its traditional preference for a peaceful solution and its sensitivity for the fate of Sri Lankan Tamils. While historical and domestic pressures led to India’s indecisive approach during the years 2003-2007, starting from 2007 regional and international factors— most notably the skillful diplomacy of the Sri Lankan government and the growing Chinese presence there—induced New Delhi to support the government side in order to keep some leverage on Sri Lankan affairs. The analysis of the Sri Lankan case opens several avenues for further research in the fields of regional conflict management and foreign policy analysis.India, Sri Lanka, conflict management, civil war

Diameter of orientations of graphs with given order and number of blocks

A strong orientation of a graph $G$ is an assignment of a direction to each edge such that $G$ is strongly connected. The oriented diameter of $G$ is the smallest diameter among all strong orientations of $G$. A block of $G$ is a maximal connected subgraph of $G$ that has no cut vertex. A block graph is a graph in which every block is a clique. We show that every bridgeless graph of order $n$ containing $p$ blocks has an oriented diameter of at most $n-\lfloor \frac{p}{2} \rfloor$. This bound is sharp for all $n$ and $p$ with $p \geq 2$. As a corollary, we obtain a sharp upper bound on the oriented diameter in terms of order and number of cut vertices. We also show that the oriented diameter of a bridgeless block graph of order $n$ is bounded above by $\lfloor \frac{3n}{4} \rfloor$ if $n$ is even and $\lfloor \frac{3(n+1)}{4} \rfloor$ if $n$ is odd.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

On a relation between the domination number and a strongly connected bidirection of an undirected graph

As a generalization of directed and undirected graphs, Edmonds and Johnson introduced bidirected graphs. A bidirected graph is a graph each arc of which has either two positive end-vertices (tails), two negative end-vertices (heads), or one positive end-vertex (tail) and one negative end-vertex (head). We extend the notion of directed paths, distance, diameter and strong connectivity from directed to bidirected graphs and characterize those undirected graphs that allow a strongly connected bidirection. Considering the problem of finding the minimum diameter of all strongly connected bidirections of a given undirected graph, we generalize a result of Fomin et al. about directed graphs and obtain an upper bound for the minimum diameter which depends on the minimum size of a dominating set and the number of bridges in the undirected graph