Power and danger in the third decade of women, peace and security

A decade ago, Dianne Otto identified the trouble at the heart of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda: the collision between the power of feminist ideas and the danger of cooptation and tokenism. The ‘power’ was not just that of an “imperial and hegemonic” Security Council which might act on behalf of a global women’s movement, but also of feminists themselves using the machinery of state. The ‘danger’ lay in those same institutions, where feminist ideas would likely be curtailed and distorted, the more radical elements jettisoned in favour of a veneer of legitimacy for the superpowers and the perpetuation of structures feminists otherwise criticised

The United Nations

This chapter examines diplomacy at the UN. Set up after the Second World War, the UN emerged as a central stage (and actor) for mitigating international conflict and managing international cooperation, thus facilitating diplomatic efforts in multiple ways

Supplier ratings and dynamic sourcing strategies to mitigate supply disruption risks

The selection of a sourcing strategy plays a vital role in managing supply disruptions. The choice regarding the number of suppliers is one of the most important decisions in mitigating supply side risks. In this paper, we analyze single versus dual sourcing strategies of a buying organization in a multi-period setting where the low-cost supplier is exposed to disruption risks. We incorporate supplier ratings based on the performance of the suppliers in a dynamic setting and use them in the sourcing decisions. We develop a stochastic dynamic programming model to formulate the dual-sourcing problem. Our results show that dual sourcing provides maximum cost–benefit under high probability of supply disruption and high-cost differential between the reliable and the unreliable suppliers. The findings of this paper will help supply chain managers formulate optimal sourcing strategies when exposed to supply disruption risks by integrating performance metrics of the suppliers dynamically