Lost in transition: linking war, war economy and post-war crime in Sri Lanka

Scholars continue to draw attention to the link between the war economy and post-war crime. The majority of these studies are about cases of civil war that ended with peace agreements. Sri Lanka’s civil war ended with a military victory for the state armed forces; thus, it can help shed new light on the above link. Situated in the war economy perspective, this article investigates the dominant types of crimes reported from post-war Sri Lanka and the mechanisms linking them with the war economy. The culture of impunity, continued militarisation and enduring corruption are identified as key mechanisms through which the war economy and post-war bodily and material crime are linked. It suggests, although the ‘victors’ peace’ achieved by state armed forces was able to successfully dismantle the extra-legal war economy run by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, it was responsible for promoting criminality in the post-war period. Overall, this points to the urgency of breaking away from legacies of the state war economy in the post-war period, before introducing programs of longer term political and economic reform

Contested world order: The delegitimation of international governance

This article argues that the chief challenge to international governance is an emerging political cleavage, which pits nationalists against immigration, free trade, and international authority. While those on the radical left contest international governance for its limits, nationalists reject it in principle. A wide-ranging cultural and economic reaction has reshaped political conflict in Europe and the United States and is putting into question the legitimacy of the rule of law among states

SIMULATING YARN-BASED CLOTH

Cloth is an important material to model and simulate correctly, both in computer graphics and other industrial applications. The commonly used models for cloth in computer graphics typically approximate the cloth as an elastic sheet with linear isotropic behavior inspired by the construction of woven fabrics. However, they do a poor job of predicting the behavior of knits, which are driven by the complex interactions of yarn loops pulled through each other. This thesis presents a yarn-based model for cloth where yarns in the fabric are explicitly modeled as inextensible but flexible spline curves. Yarn dynamics are dictated by both energy terms and hard constraints, while friction interactions, a critical component of correct yarn behavior, are approximated using a velocity filter that penalizes locally non-rigid motion. Qualitative comparison of the model to observed deformations of hand-knitted samples in the laboratory showed that the model predicts key mechanical properties of different knits. Since this model is slower than sheet-based approaches, further work looked at accelerating the model through both localized rigidification and adaptive contac

Simulating Knitted Cloth at the Yarn Level

Figure 1: Yarn-level cloth: Three knitting patterns relaxed to rest in our simulator. Each starts from a flat input configuration like at left; they differ only in their interlocking patterns. Characteristic shapes and textures of each knit emerge from our yarn-level physical model. Knitted fabric is widely used in clothing because of its unique and stretchy behavior, which is fundamentally different from the behavior of woven cloth. The properties of knits come from the nonlinear, three-dimensional kinematics of long, inter-looping yarns, and despite significant advances in cloth animation we still do not know how to simulate knitted fabric faithfully. Existing cloth simulators mainly adopt elastic-sheet mechanical models inspired by woven materials, focusing less on the model itself than on important simulation challenges such as efficiency, stability, and robustness. We define a new computational model for knits in terms of the motion of yarns, rather than the motion of a sheet. Each yarn is modeled as an inextensible, yet otherwise flexible, B-spline tube. To simulate complex knitted garments, we propose an implicit-explicit integrator, with yarn inextensibility constraints imposed using efficient projections. Friction among yarns is approximated using rigid-body velocity filters, and key yarn-yarn interactions are mediated by stiff penalty forces. Our results show that this simple model predicts the key mechanical properties of different knits, as demonstrated by qualitative comparisons to observed deformations of actual samples in the laboratory, and that the simulator can scale up to substantial animations with complex dynamic motion