Theorising homophobic hate crime in Northern Ireland

Homophobic violence in Northern Ireland is an area which has come underthe spotlight in the wake of the ongoing, successful, peace process. Tosome degree the peace process itself has been accused of facilitating andoverlooking homophobic violence. This paper invokes a culturally relativeperspective in order to assess whether there are different dynamics whichay be impacting on the effectiveness of challenges and responses toomophobiamh and violence in Northern Ireland

On Ignoring Risk

This paper explores the political impact of protest actions that explicitly make use of performance practices in their execution, and takes the activist work of Margaretta D’Arcy as the central object of analysis. Concentrating on D’Arcy’s protest actions at Shannon Airport and her subsequent trial(s), the paper examines the ways in which Ireland’s ‘Guantanamo Granny’ tries to engage the Irish state in a ‘meaningful’ public debate about its ‘complicity’ in the global ‘war on terror’, despite a stated position of neutrality. This debate, the essay argues, is facilitated in part by D’Arcy’s capacity to turn the legal and disciplinary systems of the state back on themselves, so to speak. The contention is that by ‘ignoring’ risk, both physical and legal, and leveraging a lifetime’s experience and understanding of theatre and performance as a mechanism of protest, D’Arcy’s performative activist actions render the state ‘ridiculous’ socially, politically and legally

Uncovered Sets

This paper covers the theory of the uncovered set used in the literatures on tournaments and spatial voting. I discern three main extant definitions, and I introduce two new concepts that bound exist- ing sets from above and below: the deep uncovered set and the shallow uncovered set. In a general topological setting, I provide relationships to other solutions and give results on existence and external stability for all of the covering concepts, and I establish continuity properties of the two new uncovered sets. Of note, I characterize each of the uncovered sets in terms of a decomposition into choices from externally stable sets; I define the minimal generalized covering solution, a nonempty refinement of the deep uncovered set that employs both of the new relations; and I define the acyclic Banks set, a nonempty generalization of the Banks set.

Assessment of the water quality of ten Waikato lakes based on zooplankton community composition. CBER Contract Report No. 60

Zooplankton communities were documented from ten Waikato lakes from net haul samples collected in late 2006 and from species hatched from diapausing eggs in sediments collected in early 2007. Lake trophic state was inferred based on the rotifer assemblages observed, and these inferred values were compared with predetermined water quality gradients assessed based on a limited dataset by Environment Waikato

Noisy Stochastic Games

This paper establishes existence of a stationary Markov perfect equilibrium in general stochastic games with noise a component of the state that is nonatomically distributed and not directly affected by the previous periods state and actions. Noise may be simply a payoff irrelevant public randomization device, delivering known results on existence of correlated equilibrium as a special case. More generally, noise can take the form of shocks that enter into players stage payoffs and the transition probability on states. The existence result is applied to a model of industry dynamics and to a model of dynamic partisan electoral competition.

Coalitional Bargaining Equilibria

This paper takes up the foundational issue of existence of stationary subgame perfect equi- libria in a general class of coalitional bargaining games that includes many known bargaining models and models of coalition formation. General sufficient conditions for existence of equilib- ria are currently lacking in many interesting environments: bargaining models with non-concave stage utility functions, models with a Pareto optimal status quo alternative and heterogeneous discount factors, and models of coalition formation in public good economies with consumption lower bounds. This paper establishes existence of stationary equilibrium under compactness and continuity conditions, without the structure of convexity or comprehensiveness used in the extant literature. The proof requires a precise selection of voting equilibria following different proposals. The result is applied to obtain equilibria in models of bargaining over taxes, coalition formation in NTU environments, and collective dynamic programming problems.