The failed liberalisation of Algeria and the international context: a legacy of stable authoritarianism

The paper attempts to challenge the somewhat marginal role of international factors in the study of transitions to democracy. Theoretical and practical difficulties in proving causal mechanisms between international variables and domestic outcomes can be overcome by defining the international dimension in terms of Western dominance of world politics and by identifying Western actions towards democratising countries. The paper focuses on the case of Algeria, where international factors are key in explaining the initial process of democratisation and its following demise. In particular, the paper argues that direct Western policies, the pressures of the international system and external shocks influence the internal distribution of power and resources, which underpins the different strategies of all domestic actors. The paper concludes that analysis based purely on domestic factors cannot explain the process of democratisation and that international variables must be taken into more serious account and much more detailed

Curia Eclesiastica, para secretarios de prelados, iuezes eclesiasticos, ordinarios, y apostolicos, y visitadores, y notarios ordinarios apostolicos, y de visita

Obra perteneciente al Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la USA

The overstated merits of proportional representation. The Republic of Macedonia as a natural experiment for assessing the impact of electoral systems on descriptive representation

For the comparative study of the effects of electoral systems on the descriptive representation of ethnic minorities in parliament, Macedonia is a highly interesting case because the country had several elections under majoritarian as well as under proportional systems. Whereas most observers claim that ethnic Albanians have benefitted from the introduction of proportional representation, the article argues that the merits of PR have been overstated. First, scholars have often only reported members of political parties but not independent candidates in parliament. Second, when comparing the share of seats before and after the introduction of PR, the growing share of the Albanians in the population is usually ignored. © 2014 The Editor of Ethnopolitics

Comprehensive Evaluation of AES Dual Ciphers as a Side-Channel Countermeasure

Abstract. Because of the isomorphisms in GF(2 8) there exist 240 different non-trivial dual ciphers of AES. While keeping the in- and outputs of a dual cipher equal to the original AES, all the intermediate values and operations can be different from that of the original one. A comprehensive list of these dual ciphers is given by an article presented at ASIACRYPT 2002, where it is mentioned that they might be used as a kind of side-channel attack countermeasure if the dual cipher is randomly selected. Later, in a couple of works performance figures and overhead penalty of hardware implementations of this scheme is reported. However, the suitability of using randomly selected dual ciphers as a power analysis countermeasure has never been thoroughly evaluated in practice. In this work we address the pitfalls and flaws of this scheme when used as a side-channel countermeasure. As evidence of our claims, we provide practical evaluation results based on a Virtex-5 FPGA platform. We realized a design which randomly selects between the 240 different dual ciphers at each AES computation. We also examined the side-channel leakage of the design under an information theoretic metric as well as its vulnerability to different attack models. As a result, we show that the protection provided by the scheme is negligible considering the increased costs in term of area and lower throughput.