Security sector reform and statebuilding: lessons learned

Research shows that the number of wars and their lethality have been declining since 1992, and over the same time the worst conflicts declined by over 80 per cent.1 However, research also shows that the improvements result from more wars ending: the onset of new wars, regrettably, remains\ud constant.2 ‘Failed’, ‘weak’ or ‘fragile’ states, home to the poorest billion of people living in fewer than 60 countries, 70 per cent of which are located in Africa,3 are still most at risk of falling into conflict

Politics, religion and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda

This paper outlines the current situation in Northern Uganda and examines whether conventional approaches to conflict analysis produce a convincing diagnosis of the causes of the protracted conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). It concludes that the reasons for the war are multifaceted and do not neatly fit within any contemporary conflict theory\ud without leaving significant gaps in the analysis. The paper highlights one of those gaps, the role of religion.\ud The paper draws on a variety of secondary sources and the author’s extensive work in Africa, including Uganda, between 1996 and 2008. The history of the conflict in northern Uganda and the evolution of the LRA are outlined. With no access to significant economic resources such as\ud diamonds or oil, no environmental driver, and no clash of civilizations, the war in northern Uganda appears to confound much conventional analysis of the rationality of violence in Africa. Clearly the key initial actors felt that they had lost out under the new regime and feared that Museveni would seek vengeance for the violence perpetrated by an Acholi-dominated military. However over time, those\ud involved with the initial drivers have become fewer, as the ranks of the LRA have become filled with younger fighters, frequently abducted and then initiated

Search for R-parity violating supersymmetry with the ATLAS detector

R-parity violation in supersymmetry gives rise to many unique experimental signatures. We describe searches with the ATLAS detector for supersymmetry with R-parity violating decays. Examples include searches for resonant sneutrino decays to an electron and a muon, and displaced vertices arising from the late decays of heavy objects with a muon in the final state. The most recent results on these channels are presented based on data recorded with the ATLAS detector in 7TeV proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2010 and 2011.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, submitted to the proceedings of the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS 2011), Grenoble, Franc

SSR and post-conflict Reconstruction: armed wing of state-building?\ud

This paper directly challenges some of the popular Security Sector Reform (SSR) mythology that has grown around the UK’s involvement in Sierra Leone and the subsequent policy developments associated with SSR. It raises questions about the underlying political assumptions of the SSR process and contemporary SSR material, much of which lacks analysis of underlying theories of SSR relating to broader state-building and construction of a liberal peace. \ud \ud Using a case taken from the reconstruction of Sierra Leone, this paper outlines some of the key issues emerging after ten years of reconstruction efforts. Sierra Leone is usually over-cited, but given its importance to any orthodoxy that may be said to exist, it is relevant here. Fundamentally, Sierra Leone remains a relatively small state in West Africa and the fact a viable state remains elusive, challenges assumptions about time taken in reconstructing socio-political norms and structures, and also questions state-building as a post-conflict approach. \ud \ud This paper will argue that SSR in Sierra Leone was never a developed strategy but came to represent a series of policies that evolved on the ground largely as the result of the interaction of individuals and groups engaged in those early decisions, sometimes against the wishes of Whitehall, but always sharing a “direction of travel.” This is an important point in terms of how SSR policy was actually developed and also how approaches come to be seen as being far smoother and well planned with hindsight, but also in terms of how policy-makers and academics can learn about social, governance and security processes. \u

Sparticles in Motion - getting to the line in compressed scenarios with the Recursive Jigsaw Reconstruction

The observation of light super-partners from a supersymmetric extension to the Standard Model is an intensely sought-after experimental outcome, providing an explanation for the stabilization of the electroweak scale and indicating the existence of new particles which could be consistent with dark matter phenomenology. For compressed scenarios, where sparticle spectra mass-splittings are small and decay products carry low momenta, dedicated techniques are required in all searches for supersymmetry. In this paper we suggest an approach for these analyses based on the concept of Recursive Jigsaw Reconstruction, decomposing each event into a basis of complementary observables, for cases where strong initial state radiation has sufficient transverse momentum to elicit the recoil of any final state sparticles. We introduce a collection of kinematic observables which can be used to probe compressed scenarios, in particular exploiting the correlation between missing momentum and that of radiative jets. As an example, we study squark and gluino production, focusing on mass-splittings between parent super-particles and their lightest decay products between 25 and 200 GeV, in hadronic final states where there is an ambiguity in the provenance of reconstructed jets

Managing value creation in knowledge intensive business services organisations

Value creation is essential in the Knowledge Intensive Business Service (KIBS) industry, due to its problem-solving nature. KIBS organisations need to understand their internal value creation processes as well as the complexity in the environment in order to survive and thrive. This paper investigates how value creation is managed in KIBS organisation through a case study. It then goes on to adopt Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) to propose an organisational design, namely the Value Integration Office (VIO). The VIO focuses on the 5 functions/systems defined by VSM in the meta-system and operation of an organisation in order to manage value creation. This design is implemented in a case study organisation with the aim to adopt a holistic view on value creation within the organisation as well as facilitate future planning function. The implementation and impact of the proposed organisational design are reported in this paper

Forensic science evidence in question

How should forensic scientists and other expert witnesses present their evidence in court? What kinds and quality of data can experts properly draw on in formulating their conclusions? In an important recent decision in R. v T1 the Court of Appeal revisited these perennial questions, with the complicating twist that the evidence in question incorporated quantified probabilities, not all of which were based on statistical data. Recalling the sceptical tenor of previous judgments addressing the role of probability in the evaluation of scientific evidence,2 the Court of Appeal in R. v T condemned the expert’s methodology and served notice that it should not be repeated in future, a ruling which rapidly reverberated around the forensic science community causing consternation, and even dismay, amongst many seasoned practitioners.3 At such moments of perceived crisis it is essential to retain a sense of perspective. There is, in fact, much to welcome in the Court of Appeal’s judgment in R. v T, starting with the court’s commendable determination to subject the quality of expert evidence adduced in criminal litigation to searching scrutiny. English courts have not consistently risen to this challenge, sometimes accepting rather too easily the validity of questionable scientific techniques.4 However, the Court of Appeal’s reasoning in R. v T is not always easy to follow, and there are certain passages in the judgment which, taken out of context, might even appear to confirm forensic scientists’ worst fears. This article offers a constructive reading of R. v T, emphasising its positive features whilst rejecting interpretations which threaten, despite the Court of Appeal’s best intentions, to diminish the integrity of scientific evidence adduced in English criminal trials and distort its probative value