Global distribution and drivers of language extinction risk

Many of the world's languages face serious risk of extinction. Efforts to prevent this cultural loss are severely constrained by a poor understanding of the geographical patterns and drivers of extinction risk. We quantify the global distribution of language extinction risk—represented by small range and speaker population sizes and rapid declines in the number of speakers—and identify the underlying environmental and socioeconomic drivers. We show that both small range and speaker population sizes are associated with rapid declines in speaker numbers, causing 25% of existing languages to be threatened based on criteria used for species. Language range and population sizes are small in tropical and arctic regions, particularly in areas with high rainfall, high topographic heterogeneity and/or rapidly growing human populations. By contrast, recent speaker declines have mainly occurred at high latitudes and are strongly linked to high economic growth. Threatened languages are numerous in the tropics, the Himalayas and northwestern North America. These results indicate that small-population languages remaining in economically developed regions are seriously threatened by continued speaker declines. However, risks of future language losses are especially high in the tropics and in the Himalayas, as these regions harbour many small-population languages and are undergoing rapid economic growth

The prospects of the East Asian integration process and of its supranational institutions in light of the experience of the European regional integration

The purpose of this article is to examine to what extent the European integration experience is relevant for the construction of a future regional supranational institutional framework monitoring and regulating the regional integration process currently taking place in East Asia. The following analysis will highlight three fundamental differences between the two regional integration processes. The first one lays in their main underlying microeconomic dynamics, their different sequence in time and how they shape regional institutions. The second is the level of symmetry and homogeneity within the groups of economies involved in their respective regional integration processes, in terms of economic size, technological capabilities and political weight. This paper will demonstrate that these macroeconomic and macro-political configurations can create more or less fertile conditions for the emergence of regional supranational institutions. The last difference is the geopolitical context and particularly the existence of a third party able to foster the construction of regional supranational institutions. The analysis of these differences and how they affect the institutions of a region will underline why the East Asian integration process is unlikely to reproduce the European supranational institutional development model, hence disregarding purely cultural integration factors

Roads to Rule, Roads to Rebel: Relational State Capacity and Conflict in Africa

Weak state capacity is one of the most important explanations of civil conflict. Yet, current conceptualizations of state capacity typically focus only on the state while ignoring the relational nature of armed conflict. We argue that opportunities for conflict arise where relational state capacity is low, that is, where the state has less control over its subjects than its potential challengers. This occurs in ethnic groups that are poorly accessible from the state capital, but are internally highly interconnected. To test this argument, we digitize detailed African road maps and convert them into a road atlas akin to Google Maps. We measure the accessibility and internal connectedness of groups via travel times obtained from this atlas and simulate road networks for an instrumental variable design. Our findings suggest that low relational state capacity increases the risk of armed conflict in Africa

Integrating geo-referenced multiscale and multidisciplinary data for the management of biodiversity in livestock genetic resources

In livestock genetic resource conservation, decision making about conservation priorities is based on the simultaneous analysis of several different criteria that may contribute to long-term sustainable breeding conditions, such as genetic and demographic characteristics, environmental conditions, and role of the breed in the local or regional economy. Here we address methods to integrate different data sets and highlight problems related to interdisciplinary comparisons. Data integration is based on the use of geographic coordinates and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In addition to technical problems related to projection systems, GIS have to face the challenging issue of the non homogeneous scale of their data sets. We give examples of the successful use of GIS for data integration and examine the risk of obtaining biased results when integrating datasets that have been captured at different scales