Reconstructing World Politics: Norms, Discourse, and Community

This Article argues that the conventional (rationalist) approach to world politics characterized by political bargain cannot fully capture the new social reality under the contemporary global ambience where ideational factors such as ideas, values, culture, and norms have become more salient and influential not only in explaining but also in prescribing state behaviors. After bringing rationalism’s paradigmatic limitations into relief, the Article offers a sociological framework that highlights a reflective, intersubjective communication among states and consequent norm-building process. Under this new paradigm, one can understand an international organization as a “community” (Gemeinschaft), not as a mere contractual instrument of its contracting parties (Gesellschaft). The Article applies the new paradigm to the World Trade Organization (WTO) as it describes the WTO’s institutional evolution from a power-oriented, tariff-reducing contract to a norm-oriented world trade community

Achieving Bangladesh's Tourism Potential: Linkages to Export Diversification, Employment Generation and the 'Green Economy'

Bangladesh's international image is not as a popular tourism destination, and many people might be surprised to learn it has three World Heritage sites, including the Sundarbans tiger reserves. Moreover, it is part of important travel circuits for cultural and religious tourism, and has demonstrated potential for sports tourism. The objective of this working paper is to critically test the assertion that pro-poor "green" tourism is one of the best development options for the majority of least developed countries (LDCs) - a challenging task in Bangladesh in the face of the country's success as an exporter of readymade garments - by comparing tourism to the available alternatives with regard to the crucial government priorities of export diversification, employment generation and the "green economy". It is well-known that Bangladesh is under strong pressure to diversify its exports, to generate new employment (especially in rural areas), and to respond to critical environmental issues. The government has identified over 30 "thrust sectors" (including tourism) to help address these challenges, but otherwise tourism is rarely mentioned as a major trade and development option for Bangladesh. Within the limitations of data availability, this working paper reaches the conclusion that greater efforts to develop "green" tourism would be highly beneficial for facilitating rural development, environmental and cultural protection, gender equality, and export diversification in services. The most obvious current impediments are inadequate infrastructure, lack of investment and (typically election year) political conflict, but behind these factors appear to be a serious lack of stakeholder coordination, insufficient regulatory and administrative transparency and coherence, as well as some government reluctance to relinquish greater commercial autonomy in tourism to the private sector. This paper offers extensive analysis and some suggestions to help address the impediments, including the recommendation to create a Bangladesh Tourism Stakeholders Forum

Validating a Cloth Simulator . . .

Tight-fit cloth pressure provides important clue on how well a cloth fits to a body and thus on how comfortable the wearer feels with the cloth. Traditionally-used pressure sensor devices are expensive, sensitive to the experimental environment, and difficult to reproduce. In this paper, a physically-based cloth simulator has been tested for its usability as to measuring the cloth pressure, in order to replace physical measurement of cloth pressure that requires careful operation of pressure sensors. We use existing cloth simulator based on a particle system and measure spring forces exerted on each particle along its normal direction, divided by the summed area of triangles adjacent to that particle. To quantitatively validate the pressure values from the simulator, we have conducted comparative analysis on a set of thin-shell cylindrical tubes − clothing pressure values have been measured by theoretical estimation and physical experiments using pressure sensors, and compared with those measured by the simulation. While their absolute pressure values differ from each other they exhibit a consistent tendency. From these comparative studies we concluded that cloth simulator can actually be used to measure tight-fit cloth pressure, and further conducted the clothing pressure measure on 3D human body models using the simulator