Gender in the crisis and remaking of Europe: re-gendering subsidiarity

This article analyses the gender dimension of the European Commission’s proposals to revise the governance of the European Union in response to the crisis by increasing the powers of the European Union level. The proposed change in the location of the subsidiarity boundary has significant gender implications: subsidiarity is gendered. The alternative strategies for economic growth and security have implications for democracy and gender equality. The concepts of ’gender regime’ (and its social-democratic and neoliberal varieties) and ’project’ are developed and applied. The possibility of the embedding of the gender-equality project in the new institutions proposed by the Commission is discussed

Institutions for Economic and Financial Integration in Asia: Trends and Prospects

Asian economic regionalism has emerged from a bottom-up process, driven by market forces in the absence of a grand plan for regional integration. While the financial crisis of 1997–98 triggered new regional cooperation initiatives, more recently several Asian political leaders have formulated proposals for the creation of a regional economic community, suggesting the possible start of a top-down approach. Based on the results of a survey of Asia’s opinion leaders conducted by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 2010, this paper discusses how Asia’s institutional architecture for economic and financial integration is taking shape, suggesting the need to strengthen existing institutions that promote Asian regionalism and to create new ones.chiang mai initiative; economic cooperation; regional integration

Peacebuilding: A broad review of approaches, policies and practices

This background paper has been produced for a workshop on “Civil society views on next generation peacebuilding and conflict prevention policy and programming issues and responses”, convened by Peacebuild in Ottawa on March 14, 2011 with the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade

International financial regulation: A role for the Eurozone? EU Diplomacy Paper 08/2012, October 2012

The deepest financial crisis to strike the global economy since the Great Depression has unceremoniously called into question the very foundations of the Western economic model. The liberalisation of capital flows and the growing internationalisation of financial markets outpaced global regulatory and supervisory efforts. The repercussions of the financial crisis have given new dynamism to the reform of financial regulation both globally and within the European Union (EU). The Eurozone, by way of its own failings, has emerged as a stronger conceptual and legitimate entity since the onset of the crisis, but to what extent does this equate to a greater external role, in particular in the reform of international financial regulation? This paper argues that the Eurozone is currently not in a position to play an important role in the reform of international financial regulation, as it is a weak actor in the context of the EU financial architecture, which is still largely characterised by differing national regimes, a prevailing influence from the UK and fragmented external representation. The key finding from this study is that internal tensions in the EU are at the very heart of the Eurozone’s difficulties in playing a role in the reform of international financial regulation. Surmounting these tensions is a pre-requisite for the Eurozone if it is to overcome its structural weakness in international financial politics. However, the implications of such evolutions to the Eurozone, as an entity, and to European integration are far-reaching

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Security for Grid Services

Grid computing is concerned with the sharing and coordinated use of diverse resources in distributed "virtual organizations." The dynamic and multi-institutional nature of these environments introduces challenging security issues that demand new technical approaches. In particular, one must deal with diverse local mechanisms, support dynamic creation of services, and enable dynamic creation of trust domains. We describe how these issues are addressed in two generations of the Globus Toolkit. First, we review the Globus Toolkit version 2 (GT2) approach; then, we describe new approaches developed to support the Globus Toolkit version 3 (GT3) implementation of the Open Grid Services Architecture, an initiative that is recasting Grid concepts within a service oriented framework based on Web services. GT3's security implementation uses Web services security mechanisms for credential exchange and other purposes, and introduces a tight least-privilege model that avoids the need for any privileged network service.Comment: 10 pages; 4 figure

Open Source Architecture: Redefining Residential Architecture in Islamabad

Islamabad, a planned city, has grown rapidly since its conception in the 1960’s but it has not followed its predetermined fate but rather grown haphazardly due to the lack of infrastructure available to implement Doxiadis’s master plan. The city was unable to meet the housing requirements of the people causing them to build gated communities on the outskirts of Islamabad and its sister city, Rawalpindi. The market demands caused city prices to rise exponentially, increasing the economic divide between the social classes. The city which was once supposed to reflect diversity of social classes became home to the elite and the privileged. To heal these woes, the government needs to rethink the by-laws to echo the changes in the economy and society of Islamabad. Today, the city is facing multiple issues politically, economically and socially. The energy crisis is opening up the need for people to find alternative energy solutions. By defining a set of principles which reflect the teachings of vernacular architecture and employing renewable energy techniques, this thesis envisions a matrix of solutions tackling these issues. An open source platform would provide a data base of options for the 4 different types of dwellings defined by the housing authority. This would engage the city in an architectural discourse that does not currently exist, it would invite the layperson to understand and build awareness in the general population from architect to owner to builder