Spartan Daily, September 7, 1983

Volume 81, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7056/thumbnail.jp

Finishing the job: How American presidents justify exit strategies in humanitarian interventions

Humanitarian interventions to stop mass atrocities are among America's most controversial uses of military force overseas since the end of the Cold War. While there is much research analysing justifications for and conduct of humanitarian interventions, there is very little scholarly investigation of how and why interventions end. Indeed, successive US presidents have struggled to implement exit strategies from humanitarian interventions with the outcome often dismissed as 'mission creep'. In this thesis, I use US presidential rhetoric as a way to understand exit strategy dynamics in humanitarian interventions. In particular, I explore how American presidents publicly justified their exit strategies in four interventions from 1991--2011---northern Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo and Libya. My normative concepts analysis of more than 700 texts shows how presidents craft exit strategies through practices of public justification and legitimation to their domestic audience. I argue a president's discursive engagement is constrained by three groups of normative expectations shaping the realm of imagined possibilities for how America should use force when responding to humanitarian crises; specifically the US should: (1) fulfil its moral responsibility to stop atrocities, fight evil and promote political transformation; (2) win its military engagements; and (3) avoid quagmires. These expectations frame justifiable uses of military force, but also exist in tension with one another, and are in turn affected by changing battlefield conditions, past intervention experiences, domestic and international pressures, and personal preferences. How presidents navigate these tensions affects their exit decisions, including failures to implement exit strategies. My thesis is the first comparative analysis of America's exit strategies in four of the most significant humanitarian interventions of the post-Cold War era. By using public justification analysis to illuminate decision-making dynamics, I overcome the shortcomings of applying extant victory, war termination and end state planning theories to humanitarian interventions. By identifying the normative constraints on exit strategy decision-making, I demonstrate how and why mission creep occurs. My thesis provides evidence for military planners and policy advisers, having decided to use force to stop a mass atrocity, to take normative expectations seriously in considering when and how troops will withdraw

Flexibility in Data Management

With the ongoing expansion of information technology, new fields of application requiring data management emerge virtually every day. In our knowledge culture increasing amounts of data and work force organized in more creativity-oriented ways also radically change traditional fields of application and question established assumptions about data management. For instance, investigative analytics and agile software development move towards a very agile and flexible handling of data. As the primary facilitators of data management, database systems have to reflect and support these developments. However, traditional database management technology, in particular relational database systems, is built on assumptions of relatively stable application domains. The need to model all data up front in a prescriptive database schema earned relational database management systems the reputation among developers of being inflexible, dated, and cumbersome to work with. Nevertheless, relational systems still dominate the database market. They are a proven, standardized, and interoperable technology, well-known in IT departments with a work force of experienced and trained developers and administrators. This thesis aims at resolving the growing contradiction between the popularity and omnipresence of relational systems in companies and their increasingly bad reputation among developers. It adapts relational database technology towards more agility and flexibility. We envision a descriptive schema-comes-second relational database system, which is entity-oriented instead of schema-oriented; descriptive rather than prescriptive. The thesis provides four main contributions: (1)~a flexible relational data model, which frees relational data management from having a prescriptive schema; (2)~autonomous physical entity domains, which partition self-descriptive data according to their schema properties for better query performance; (3)~a freely adjustable storage engine, which allows adapting the physical data layout used to properties of the data and of the workload; and (4)~a self-managed indexing infrastructure, which autonomously collects and adapts index information under the presence of dynamic workloads and evolving schemas. The flexible relational data model is the thesis\' central contribution. It describes the functional appearance of the descriptive schema-comes-second relational database system. The other three contributions improve components in the architecture of database management systems to increase the query performance and the manageability of descriptive schema-comes-second relational database systems. We are confident that these four contributions can help paving the way to a more flexible future for relational database management technology

Information technologies as instruments of social transformation : the computerization of classical scholarship

Computer-based technologies are often seen as instruments that effect radical transformation within workplaces; these transformations are expressed through utopian or dystopian visions of empowered knowledge workers or electronic sweatshops. Visions, however, do little to examine the evidence for and the nature of such transformations. In what ways do new computer-based technologies re-form and reshape the nature, stucture, and organization of work? In particular, how do these technologies affect a domain of work which is abstract in nature and consists of the evaluation and amalgamation of many diverse information sources?This dissertation reports on an empirical study of the impact of information technologies on a specific class of knowledge workers, classical scholars. My goal is to understand the phenomenon of change due to increased use of information technologies from the point of view of the members of this social world. In order to do this, I will follow the procedures for data collection and analysis of the grounded theory approach as developed by Anselm Strauss and his associates. I employ the social worlds perspective as an organizing framework.In subsequent chapters, I consider the diffusion of a particular set of computer-based research tools within the discipline and subsequent changes to individuals' work patterns, task definition and interactions within and without the discipline. I further evaluate changes in the accessibility of information and the attendent impact on social and organizational, structures. Finally, I describe the emergence of electronic communities and new domains of work as information and communication technologies become more prevalent