Biopolitics and Human Agency of North Korean border crossers: The Ethics of Coexistence, Mobility-Identity-Security Analysis (MISA), and Risk Analysis (RA)

This thesis discusses mobility, identity, and security (MIS), risk to life, emancipatory everyday peace in the context of biopolitics and human agency of North Korean border crossers. It begins with providing a new concept of human agency comprised of ability and answerability laid on the ground of the ethics of coexistence. Next, the thesis provides prevalent definitions of three identity groups of human mobility – defector, refugee, and international migrant – and reconceptualizes them into descriptive definitions adjusted to North Korean border crossers rest on legal frameworks of five states – South Korea, China, Russia, the US, and the UK. Based on the findings gained from the empirical cases, the thesis develops its mobility-identity-security analysis by reconfiguring the relationship between state and non-state actors and human agents, depoliticizing the identity groups of border crossers, and tracing the emancipatory journey of everyday peacebuilding. At the heart of the analysis is interrelatedness in which coexistence and human agency are two main pillars. Noting that attention to the risk of the border crossing at the individual level in previous academic and professional literature has been insufficient, this thesis sets forth its risk analysis using individual border crossers as a research unit and explains the risk to life circulating in the ecology of border crossing. Specifically, risk assessment methods are developed in this thesis by applying theoretical grounds of human security and peace to the practice of migration politics. The thesis presents a set of analytical tools covering from theoretical exploration of bare life in the international scapegoat system to the quantification of life-threatening risks in border crossing at the individual level, having direct policy relevance to migration management and humanitarian practices. It attempts to empower the disempowered life, border crossers, in the discussions of their identity and security and shape the vision of peace, emancipation, and coexistence freed from negation, competition, and disciplines. The thesis concludes with its contributions to Korean politics, biopolitics, and peace studies and suggests avenues for future research to improve the values that this thesis has unveiled

Coexistence of GMO production, labeling policies, and strategic firm interaction

This dissertation analyzes the market effects of the coexistence of genetically modified organism (GMO) and conventional production, labeling policies, and strategic firm interactions through vertical product differentiation. Although we focus on GMOs, the applied frameworks can be adopted and extended to other differentiated products where similar concepts apply. The main body of the dissertation consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, we estimate the perceived costs of legal requirements (‘coexistence measures’) for growing genetically modified (GM) Bt maize in Germany using a choice experiment. The costs of the evaluated ex-ante and ex-post coexistence measures range from zero to more than 300 euros per hectare per measure, and most of them are greater than the extra revenue the farmers in our survey expect from growing Bt maize or than the estimates in the literature. The cost estimates for temporal separation, which were the highest in our evaluation, imply that the exclusion of this measure in Germany is justified. The costliest measures that are currently applied in Germany are joint and strict liability for all damages. Our results further show that neighbors do not cause a problem and that opportunities for reducing costs through agreements with them exist. Finally, we find that farmers’ attitudes toward genetically modified crops affect the probability of adoption of Bt maize. Our results imply that strict liability will deter the cultivation of Bt maize in Germany unless liability issues can be addressed through other means, for example, through neighbor agreements. The coexistence costs have implications for the supply of products in which GMOs are excluded from the production process (i.e., non-GM labeling). This is the topic of the second chapter. In that chapter, we discuss and illustrate the complexity of non-GM food labeling in Germany. We show how a multi-stakeholder organization that sets a voluntary private production and certification standard can combine the opposing and agreeing interests of its members. This cohesion reduces the fears of retailers of NGO pressure in the case of mislabeling. Whereas non-GM labeling in Germany started as a niche for farmer-to-consumer direct marketing and small processors, it was further driven by anti-GMO organizations. Today, retail chains label some of their store brands and are now the drivers. We also discuss how informing consumers through non-GM labeling addresses imperfect information, but at the same time, can create new information imperfections if consumers are not well informed about the labeling system itself. Non-GM labeling, together with the EU-wide mandatory labeling of GMOs and their requirements on coexistence, have implications for the potential regulation of crops derived by new plant breeding techniques (NPBTs). In the third chapter, we analyze the market and welfare effects of regulating crops derived by NPBTs as genetically modified or conventional products. We consider the mandatory scheme for labeling GM products and a voluntary non-GM scheme for labeling livestock products derived from non-GM feed. We develop a partial equilibrium model that explicitly takes into account both the coexistence costs at the farm level and the segregation and identity preservation costs at the downstream level. By applying the model to EU rapeseed, we find that regulating NPBTs as GM (as compared to non-GM) in combination with mandatory and voluntary labeling increases prices and therefore makes producers better off. We also show that higher coexistence costs make the price increasing effect even stronger. Voluntary non-GM labeling applied to feed makes consumers in this sector overall worse off, but it benefits farmers and rapeseed oil consumers overall as long as segregation costs are low. Consumers of biodiesel and industrial products, such as lubricants produced from GM rapeseed, benefit from high segregation costs. We show that the effects of farm-level coexistence costs largely differ from the effects of downstream market segregation costs. In the last of the four chapters, we consider the effects of market power and analyze the decision of investing in quality updating when high-quality product demand is growing. We model a decision of a duopoly that initially offers a product perceived as lower quality (e.g., GM product) to invest in an emerging high-quality (e.g., labeled non-GM) product. We investigate whether the smaller or the larger firm invests first. Either preemption or a war of attrition can result, depending on demand and cost factors. For each case, we derive the unique Nash equilibrium. We show that a firm’s timing to invest in high-quality production (e.g., implement a voluntary production standard) depends on several factors, such as the difference in firm size between competing firms and the level of vertical differentiation, growth and discount rate, demand parameters, and per-unit production costs. We show that institutions, which set private or public certification standards, can affect firms’ investment in differentiated products because the standard stringency affects the production and compliance costs as well as the level of product differentiation. Hence, through the setting of these standards, private and governmental institutions can impact the market structure as well as the growth of an emerging market. Finally, we discuss policy implications and how an adjustment of the EU-regulatory framework from a process- to a product-based system can make several issues discussed in this thesis problems of the past.</p

Rethinking Copyright from the ‘Capabilities’ Perspective in the Post-TRIPs Era: How can human rights enhance cultural participation?

The current scholarship on copyright predominantly considers this area of law from the standpoint of economics. Likewise, since the adoption of the TRIPs Agreement, contemporary copyright law-making and practice has mainly been constructed around the assumption that its job is to create incentives to make more expressive works in the form of copyright embedded in goods and investment. Copyright law has heavily skewed towards the protection of corporate copyright ownership rather than individual authorship. In this model, culture is seen as the marketplace for merchandising and producing the products of copyright industries and an economic space facilitating the process of creativity. Intellectual properties are said be essential assets in firms’ portfolios and an important component in the macro-economic development of a country. Thus, current copyright law has predominantly an economic-oriented model that shapes its cultural and development policies. This thesis offers an alternative framework for copyright law focusing not on economic development alone but on more broadly promoting human development and one of its predominant framework, namely the ‘capabilities approach’, to transform the ‘controlled culture’ that individuals live in to a ‘fair culture’. Thus, this study’s central research questions are: How could western (UK, EU, and US) copyright laws’ economic-oriented development and culture visions be reshaped through the capabilities approach and ‘participatory culture’ considerations in order to enhance participation in culture? And what legal resolutions and remedies could be drawn from the fundamental rights framework (specifically from the right to take part in cultural life and freedom of expression) to make such a shift in copyright laws? Freedom is a crucial value in the construction of a fair culture within copyright. Inspiration here is Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘development as freedom’ and Martha Nussbaum’s idea to rationalise these freedoms as touchstone values in constitutional entitlements. To promote ‘development as freedom’, in Amartya Sen’s words, copyright law cannot be detached from the considerations of fostering people’s capabilities to participate in cultural and political life. Therefore, the main contention of this thesis is that copyright law does more than encouraging the creation of more commodities and investment: it fundamentally affects human development and substantive freedoms, or capabilities, of all people to live a good life in a democratic culture and society. The challenge that this thesis posits is how to bring the politics of human dignity and the politics of welfare into a single framework within copyright law. To this end, the capability-oriented human rights assessment of copyright law is brought to open a fresh discussion over the conventional wisdom mentioned above. To replace the existing ‘culture and economic development model’ with the ‘culture and human development model’, this study identifies capabilities or substantive freedoms (cultural human rights and freedoms), as a way of evaluating copyright law’s goals in general and its impact on individuals’ capabilities to freely express themselves and participate in cultural and political life. As an alternative to traditional development measures, Sen and Nussbaum propose the concept of the advancement of ‘central capabilities’ in which capabilities represent ‘what people are actually able to do and to be’. This inquiry aims at creating a synergy between the ‘capabilities approach’and human rights framework through the identification of relevant capability-based cultural human rights and freedoms to set a normative base for the construction of a fair culture. Again from a capabilities perspective, this thesis further analyses some contemporary issues surrounding contemporary copyright enforcement measures - namely notice-and-4 takedown and graduated response procedures, file sharing, disclosure orders, filtering and website blocking orders, the extension of copyright terms, pre-established/statutory and additional damages, technological protection measures and the intermediary liability, the extension of criminal liability and notice-and-staydown - where the tension between copyright law and cultural human rights and freedoms are more acute. This helps to identify the important cultural netibilities (freedoms/capabilities on the Internet) in a networked world. In the final analysis, this thesis proposes two frameworks, one for legislators and one for courts, to engage with these cultural human rights and freedoms which are of importance for the advancement of human development. In the former framework, the copyright rules laid down by the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement are discussed as a case study to show more concretely how copyright law affects human development and to make proposals for future direction of treaty and law-making with respect to it. The second framework, by fundamentally relying on the legal test proposed by Abbe Brown in her book “Intellectual Property, Human Rights and Competition: Access to Essential Innovation and Technology,” aims to complete this thesis with the introduction of a legal test (deconstructive multiple proportionally test) for courts to engage with a conflict of norms between human rights and copyright, which will make them take cognisance of human development paradigm, when such a conflict is encountered.University of Exeter, College of Social Sciences and International Studie

Cooperative Radio Communications for Green Smart Environments

The demand for mobile connectivity is continuously increasing, and by 2020 Mobile and Wireless Communications will serve not only very dense populations of mobile phones and nomadic computers, but also the expected multiplicity of devices and sensors located in machines, vehicles, health systems and city infrastructures. Future Mobile Networks are then faced with many new scenarios and use cases, which will load the networks with different data traffic patterns, in new or shared spectrum bands, creating new specific requirements. This book addresses both the techniques to model, analyse and optimise the radio links and transmission systems in such scenarios, together with the most advanced radio access, resource management and mobile networking technologies. This text summarises the work performed by more than 500 researchers from more than 120 institutions in Europe, America and Asia, from both academia and industries, within the framework of the COST IC1004 Action on "Cooperative Radio Communications for Green and Smart Environments". The book will have appeal to graduates and researchers in the Radio Communications area, and also to engineers working in the Wireless industry. Topics discussed in this book include: • Radio waves propagation phenomena in diverse urban, indoor, vehicular and body environments• Measurements, characterization, and modelling of radio channels beyond 4G networks• Key issues in Vehicle (V2X) communication• Wireless Body Area Networks, including specific Radio Channel Models for WBANs• Energy efficiency and resource management enhancements in Radio Access Networks• Definitions and models for the virtualised and cloud RAN architectures• Advances on feasible indoor localization and tracking techniques• Recent findings and innovations in antenna systems for communications• Physical Layer Network Coding for next generation wireless systems• Methods and techniques for MIMO Over the Air (OTA) testin

An integral model for natural regeneration of Pinus pinea L. in the Northern Plateau (Spain) = Modelo integral de regeneración natural para Pinus pinea L. en la Meseta Norte (España)

Natural regeneration is an ecological key-process that makes plant persistence possible and, consequently, it constitutes an essential element of sustainable forest management. In this respect, natural regeneration in even-aged stands of Pinus pinea L. located in the Spanish Northern Plateau has not always been successfully achieved despite over a century of pine nut-based management. As a result, natural regeneration has recently become a major concern for forest managers when we are living a moment of rationalization of investment in silviculture. The present dissertation is addressed to provide answers to forest managers on this topic through the development of an integral regeneration multistage model for P. pinea stands in the region. From this model, recommendations for natural regeneration-based silviculture can be derived under present and future climate scenarios. Also, the model structure makes it possible to detect the likely bottlenecks affecting the process. The integral model consists of five submodels corresponding to each of the subprocesses linking the stages involved in natural regeneration (seed production, seed dispersal, seed germination, seed predation and seedling survival). The outputs of the submodels represent the transitional probabilities between these stages as a function of climatic and stand variables, which in turn are representative of the ecological factors driving regeneration. At subprocess level, the findings of this dissertation should be interpreted as follows. The scheduling of the shelterwood system currently conducted over low density stands leads to situations of dispersal limitation since the initial stages of the regeneration period. Concerning predation, predator activity appears to be only limited by the occurrence of severe summer droughts and masting events, the summer resulting in a favourable period for seed survival. Out of this time interval, predators were found to almost totally deplete seed crops. Given that P. pinea dissemination occurs in summer (i.e. the safe period against predation), the likelihood of a seed to not be destroyed is conditional to germination occurrence prior to the intensification of predator activity. However, the optimal conditions for germination seldom take place, restraining emergence to few days during the fall. Thus, the window to reach the seedling stage is narrow. In addition, the seedling survival submodel predicts extremely high seedling mortality rates and therefore only some individuals from large cohorts will be able to persist. These facts, along with the strong climate-mediated masting habit exhibited by P. pinea, reveal that viii the overall probability of establishment is low. Given this background, current management –low final stand densities resulting from intense thinning and strict felling schedules– conditions the occurrence of enough favourable events to achieve natural regeneration during the current rotation time. Stochastic simulation and optimisation computed through the integral model confirm this circumstance, suggesting that more flexible and progressive regeneration fellings should be conducted. From an ecological standpoint, these results inform a reproductive strategy leading to uneven-aged stand structures, in full accordance with the medium shade-tolerant behaviour of the species. As a final remark, stochastic simulations performed under a climate-change scenario show that regeneration in the species will not be strongly hampered in the future. This resilient behaviour highlights the fundamental ecological role played by P. pinea in demanding areas where other tree species fail to persist

Physical and Biological Drivers of Juvenile Fish Distributions in Unstructured Shallow Tropical Nearshore Habitats

The structural complexity of aquatic habitats can influence the ecological processes that occur within them, as fine-scale topographic features act as refugia for small fishes, buffering the effects of environmental stressors. Accordingly, the habitat requirements of juvenile demersal fishes in shallow littoral zones are often defined by their associations with distinct benthic microhabitats, such as densely vegetated substrates. However, an array of ecologically-important juvenile fishes also associate with topographically-homogeneous, sparsely-vegetated substrata. Absent the benefits offered by structural refugia, such fishes may be more affected by environmental variability and may have evolved distinct strategies for coping with stressors. I examined this hypothesis by assessing the factors shaping juvenile fish assemblages across the littoral zones of a subtropical island, where I predicted that flow-related stress and positive social interactions would be influential in governing the distributions of species occupying open, unstructured habitats. Spatio-temporal variability in the strength of wave-and tide-driven water movement were among the principal drivers of habitat use for a variety of juvenile fishes, exerting the most pronounced effects on species with an aversion to dense benthic vegetation (i.e., Bothus spp., and Albula vulpes), with little impact on species inhabiting seagrass (Haemulon spp. and Halichoeres bivittatus). Spatial segregation between A. vulpes and its cryptic congener Albula goreensis was unrelated to benthic habitat characteristics but well-explained by differential relationships with wave exposure, suggesting that niche partitioning between these functionally-indistinct species was mediated by flow. After accounting for phenotypic clustering caused by an extensive suite of environmental filters, residual correlations in species abundance were dominated by strongly- asymmetric positive associations, primarily between soft-bottom benthivores and Eucinostomus spp. Interspecific relationships were weak among seagrass-associated taxa. Disparities in the foraging behaviors and putative vigilance-keeping abilities of Eucinostomus spp. and its associate A. vulpes implied that the large organizational influence of eucinostomids could be explained by their capacity for producing risk-related information, which more vulnerable species exploited. Collectively, these findings support the hypothesis that fishes using unstructured habitats are more exposed to flow-related stress than those occupying complex habitats, and likewise that they employ alternative antipredator strategies, relying on social mechanisms to reduce predation risk

Integrating Environmental Protection into ASEAN Trading System

Integrating environmental protection into ASEAN trading system is pivotal for ensuring long-term economic development and environmental sustainability. Due to its resource-based economy, ASEAN\u27s economic performance highly depends on the sustainable condition of the environment. The ASEAN approach prioritizing economic growth without environmental consideration leads to environmental degradation and economic loss. Many transboundary environmental problems in ASEAN result from unsustainable production methods aiming to maximize advantages in trade competition. There are growing international efforts in addressing production and process methods as a part of the sustainable development goal. Major trading partners of ASEAN increasingly employ unilateral environmental trade measures and environmental provisions in trade agreements to induce sustainable production in exporting countries. Despite its trade-restrictive characteristic and extraterritorial effects, the environmental trade measure can be justified on the environmental ground according to the WTO/GATT rules. Although ASEAN should integrate environmental protection for its own interest, the actual implementation depends on member states as ASEAN is a state-centric regional organization. The political regimes of member states prioritize economic growth over environmental protection, suppress civil participation, disregard human rights to the healthy environment, and insist on a strict application of the ASEAN Way, refusing any intervention in all internal affairs. The lack of democratic norms and human rights assimilation intensify the rule of non-intervention. As a result, ASEAN environmental governance remains weak without effective engagement. Therefore, to integrate environmental protection in trade, ASEAN needs to unlock the ASEAN Way impasse and become more people-centered by having ASEAN representatives democratically elected, enhancing participation from non-state actors, particularly environmental groups, and strengthening a linkage between environmental protection and economic development