Peacebuilding After Civil War

Book Summary: This comprehensive new Handbook explores the significance and nature of armed intrastate conflict and civil war in the modern world. Civil wars and intrastate conflict represent the principal form of organised violence since the end of World War II, and certainly in the contemporary era. These conflicts have a huge impact and drive major political change within the societies in which they occur, as well as on an international scale. The global importance of recent intrastate and regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nepal, Cote d\u27Ivoire, Syria and Libya – amongst others – has served to refocus academic and policy interest upon civil war. Chapter Summary: This chapter provides an assessment of current theories regarding peacebuilding efforts following civil war, evaluates UN peacebuilding efforts over the past 20 years, and offers suggestions regarding future research on the topic

Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity

For most people in the United States, war is almost always elsewhere. Since the Civil War, declared wars have been engaged on terrains at a distance from the continental space of the nation. Until the attacks on the World Trade towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, many people in the United States perceived war to be conflicts between the standing armies of nation-states conducted at least a border—if not oceans and continents—away. Even the attacks of September 11 were localized in such a way as to feel as remote as they were immediate—watching cable news from elsewhere in the country, most U.S. residents were brought close to scenes of destruction and death by the media rather than by direct experience. Thus, in the United States, we could be said to be "consumers" of war, since our gaze is almost always fixed on representations of war that come from places perceived to be remote from the heartland

Vietnam’s trade policy: a developing nation assessment

Aim/PurposeThis paper is a review of the progress of the Vietnam socio-economic and development plan and an assessment of the extent to which Vietnam is putting in place the critical social and economic development structures that will enable it to reach the status of “developed nation” in the time set (2020) by its national strategic plan. The research will identify and review trade patterns, trade policy and the effect of foreign aid on Vietnam’s plan to transform its economy and society from a developing nation status to status of developednation. The overriding question stands as “is” Vietnam effec-tively moving towards developed nation statussoon”?BackgroundThis paper examines the history of Vietnam from the command economy in its transition to a market driven economy, the criteria, hurdles and challenges as the country moves towards a developed country status. MethodologyApplied research based on the body of research in socio-economic develop-ment theory, international trade and market theory. The review is conducted by collecting and analyzing data on foreign trade, foreign aid, business and general economic growth, development and social wellbeing. Itidentifies and appraises the trade patterns,trade effects, socio-economic policies and the effect of foreign aid] on the economic growth and the progress of the coun-try towards becoming a developed nation state

The Equity Premium

Recent research on the equity risk premium has questioned the ability of historical estimates of the risk premium to provide reliable estimates of the expected risk premium. We calculate the equity risk premium for a number of countries over longer horizons than has been attempted to date. We show that the realised US equity premium is consistent with the premia obtained elsewhere. Furthermore, using well over a century of data, we find that current estimates of the equity premia are close to those observed during the pre-1914 era. This is of particular relevance given the argument that the financial environment during that period bears a closer resemblance to today than the 1914-1945 period, and possibly also the 1945-1971 period. This points to a current equity risk premium that is considerably lower than consensus forecasts (Welch 2001)

Parsing the Australian English curriculum: Grammar, multimodality and cross-cultural texts

The release of the Australian Curriculum English (ACE) by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has revived debates about the role of grammar as English content knowledge. We consider some of the discussion circulating in the mainstream media vis-à-vis the intent of the ACE. We conclude that this curriculum draws upon the complementary tenets of traditional Latin-based grammar and systemic functional linguistics across the three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy in innovative ways. We argue that such an approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts. To demonstrate the utility of this new approach, we draw out a set of learning outcomes from Year 6 and then map out a framework for relating the outcomes to the form and function of multimodal language. As a case in point, our analysis is of two online Coca-Cola advertising texts, one each from South Korea and Australia

Deterministic chaos theory and forecasting in Social Sciences. Contribution to the discussion

Forecasting social phenomena may be hampered in many ways. This is because in nature of these phenomena lies strong and multilateral connection with other social phenomena; but not only – also physical and biological (natural) ones. The content of this publication constitutes presentation of chosen problems of forecasting in social sciences. The attention in the article was focused among others on deterministic chaos theory, on the attempt of its implementation to phenomena from the scope (or from borderline) of social sciences: economy, logistics, science about safety etc. Moreover, one of the threads of ponderation was the attempt to consider whether it’s possible to create so-called final theory. The aim of the publication is to signalize possibilities of taking advantage of seemingly exotic for “political scientists” methodology of modeling and explaining phenomena, having its source in exact sciences (in chaos theory) to study social phenomena and processes

Strategies for trade liberalization in the Americas

Regional free trade zones have been unexpectedly successful in the last decade. Since 1980 the European Community enlarged significantly its membership and its scope. It now includes southern European countries, and market-integrating features allowing goods, people, services and capital to flow freely around an area accounting for about one fourth of world economic output. Based on economies of scale - we find a condition that determine whether trading blocks Such as NAFTA and the EU are complementary with and encourage global free trade - when this condition fails, instead, trading blocks undermine free trade. It is the purpose of this paper to re-examine the positive and negative aspects of trading blocs as they relate to gains from free trade. The paper is primarily a discussion of conceptual issues, although it is based on facts and on particular cases which are of interest to the trade liberalization in the Americas. We take a somewhat different approach to a familiar issue. Rather than asking the standard question of whether regional blocs help or hinder global free trade, we ask a more detailed question: what type of customs union is likely to lead to a trade war between the blocs, and what type of customs union is, instead, likely to lead to expanded global trade. In practical terms: what type of trade policies within the blocs will provide economic incentives for expanding free trade. We shall compare the impact on the world economy of free trade blocs which are organized around two alternative principles: one is traditional comparative advantages, the other is economies of scale. The aim is to determine how the patterns of trade inside the blocs determine the trade relations among the blocs.trading blocs; free trade; trade wars; international trade; international policy; comparative advantage; economies of scale; patterns of trade; GATT; NAFTA; EC; trade diversion; resources; emissions; protectionism; returns to scale; interdependence; global environment

Using Markets to Measure Pre-War Threat Assessments: The Nordic Countries Facing World War II

Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did not mobilize their armies until it was too late. This paper questions this established notion by deriving new estimates of widely held war threat assessments from the fluctuations of sovereign market yields collected from all Nordic bond markets at this period. Our results show that the Nordic contemporaries indeed perceived significant war risk increases around the time of major war-related geopolitical events. While these findings hence question some, but not all, of the standard Nordic World War II historiography, they also demonstrate the value of analyzing historical market prices to reassess the often tacit views and opinions of large groups of people in the past.Structural breaks; Sovereign debt; Capital Markets; Historiography; Cliometrics; World War II