La crisi de la identitat cultural

Els canvis produïts en la identitat nord-americana al llarg de les darreres dècades són objecte d’anàlisi en aquest primer capítol de l’últim llibre Qui som? Els desafiaments a la identitat nacional nord-americana. L’autor repassa les diferents articulacions d’aquesta identitat al llarg dels quatre segles d’història nord-americana a la vegada que apunta a una crisi generalitzada i global de la identitat nacional a tot arreu davant de l’augment d’identitats alternatives nascudes de la mundialització econòmica i tecnològica. Finalment, planteja quatre possibles escenaris per a la nova identitat sorgida als Estats Units després de l’11-S

¿Xoc de civilitzacions?

Les diferències entre civilitzacions existeixen realment, i la consciència d’aquest fet està creixent. La fricció entre les civilitzacions suplantarà el conflicte ideològic com a forma mundial dominant de confrontació. Les relacions internacionals s’aniran desoccidentalitzant cada vegada més i entraran en un esquema en el què les civilitzacions no occidentals seran actors i no merament subjectes passius. Els conflictes entre grups de diferents civilitzacions esdevindran més freqüents, més prolongats i més violents que no pas els conflictes entre grups de la mateixa civilització; de fet, són la font més probable i més perillosa d’extensió bèl·lica

Writ(h)ing Images: Imagination, the Human Form, and the Divine in William Blake, Salman Rushdie, and Simon Louvish

In this paper, we address issues in segmentation Of remotely sensed LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) data. The LIDAR data, which were captured by airborne laser scanner, contain 2.5 dimensional (2.5D) terrain surface height information, e.g. houses, vegetation, flat field, river, basin, etc. Our aim in this paper is to segment ground (flat field)from non-ground (houses and high vegetation) in hilly urban areas. By projecting the 2.5D data onto a surface, we obtain a texture map as a grey-level image. Based on the image, Gabor wavelet filters are applied to generate Gabor wavelet features. These features are then grouped into various windows. Among these windows, a combination of their first and second order of statistics is used as a measure to determine the surface properties. The test results have shown that ground areas can successfully be segmented from LIDAR data. Most buildings and high vegetation can be detected. In addition, Gabor wavelet transform can partially remove hill or slope effects in the original data by tuning Gabor parameters

How lunch breaks reduce transparency and help EU leaders reach agreement

Lunch breaks during meetings have become an increasingly important setting for confidential discussions between EU leaders, write Mareike Kleine and Samuel Huntington. But while these discussions make it easier to reach agreements, they raise critical questions about the trade-off between transparency and confidentiality in EU and global governance

Explaining Myanmar's Regime Transition: The Periphery is Central

In 2010, Myanmar (Burma) held its first elections after 22 years of direct military rule. Few compelling explanations for this regime transition have emerged. This article critiques popular accounts and potential explanations generated by theories of authoritarian ‘regime breakdown’ and ‘regime maintenance’. It returns instead to the classical literature on military intervention and withdrawal. Military regimes, when not terminated by internal factionalism or external unrest, typically liberalise once they feel they have sufficiently addressed the crises that prompted their seizure of power. This was the case in Myanmar. The military intervened for fear that political unrest and ethnic-minority separatist insurgencies would destroy Myanmar’s always-fragile territorial integrity and sovereignty. Far from suddenly liberalising in 2010, the regime sought to create a ‘disciplined democracy’ to safeguard its preferred social and political order twice before, but was thwarted by societal opposition. Its success in 2010 stemmed from a strategy of coercive state-building and economic incorporation via ‘ceasefire capitalism’, which weakened and co-opted much of the opposition. Having altered the balance of forces in its favour, the regime felt sufficiently confident to impose its preferred settlement. However, the transition neither reflected total ‘victory’ for the military nor secured a genuine or lasting peace

Swings and roundabouts: the vagaries of democratic consolidation and ‘electoral rituals’ in Sierra Leone

YesThe history of the electoral process in Sierra Leone is at the same time tortuous and substantial. From relatively open competitive multi-party politics in the 1960s, which led to the first turnover of power at the ballot box, through the de facto and de jure one-party era, which nonetheless had elements of electoral competition, and finally to contemporary post-conflict times, which has seen three elections and a second electoral turnover in 2007, one can discern evolving patterns. Evidence from the latest local and national elections in 2012 suggests that there is some democratic consolidation, at least in an electoral sense. However, one might also see simultaneous steps forward and backward – What you gain on the swings, you may lose on the roundabouts. This is particularly so in terms of institutional capacities, fraud and violence, and one would need to enquire of the precise ingredients – in terms of political culture or in other words the attitudes and motivations of electors and the elected – of this evolving Sierra Leonean, rather than specifically liberal type, of democracy. Equally, the development of ‘electoral rituals’, whether peculiar to Sierra Leone or not and whether deemed consolidatory or not, has something to say as part of an investigation into the electoral element of democratic consolidation.1 The literature on elections in Africa most often depicts a number of broad features, such as patronage, ethno-regionalism, fraud and violence, and it is the intention of this article to locate contemporary Sierra Leone, as precisely as possible, within the various strands of this discourse