Short term interests, long term perspectives : balancing South Africa’s peace and security approach in the EU-SA Strategic Partnership

Abstract: South Africa’s peace and security outlook in the EU-SA Strategic Partnership has been guided by the content and substance of the founding document, which incorporates an interdependent approach to development. For South Africa, engagement in the EU-SA Strategic Partnership is framed by its historical background, its identity and the content of its foreign policy. South Africa’s foreign policy in particular adopts an integrated approach to securing the state within its surrounding regional and continental geography. This article reviews South Africa’s approach to peace and security, in the context of the strategic partnership. The article argues that, overall, South Africa’s definition of peace and security is compatible with that of the EU, however, Pretoria’s vision of how it provides peace and security has naturally changed in line with the varying international circumstances in which it has found itself. While this has proved difficult at times to reconcile peace and security collaboration in the strategic partnership has managed to remain intact

El modesto principio del que la ignorancia del Derecho no excusa de su cumplimiento

Excmo. y Magfco. Sr. Rector, Sr. Presidente del Consejo Social, Sra. Secretaria General, Compañeras y compañeros de la comunidad universitaria, No sé si merezco o no merezco el honor que me han hecho al encomendarme impartir esta primera lección del curso, pero lo agradezco como si no lo mereciera y voy a cumplimentarlo con el mismo entusiasmo que si lo hubiese merecido. Dividiré esta lección en cinco partes, aunque seré razonablemente breve. En primer lugar enunciaré un principio jurídico muy elemental y no muy bien conocido; en la segunda, expondré las difi cultades, que ya son clásicas, para justifi car ese principio; en la tercera, mostraré algunos problemas que ha suscitado su aplicación; luego, trataré de deconstruirlo y concluiré, fi nalmente, justifi cándolo por su modestas pretensione

Sigma decomposition: the CP-odd Lagrangian

Journal of High Energy Physics 2016.4 (2016): 016 reproduced by permission of Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)Artículo escrito por un elevado número de autores, sólo se referencian el que aparece en primer lugar, el nombre del grupo de colaboración, si le hubiera, y los autores pertenecientes a la UAMIn Alonso et al., JHEP 12 (2014) 034, the CP-even sector of the effective chiral Lagrangian for a generic composite Higgs model with a symmetric coset has been constructed, up to four momenta. In this paper, the CP-odd couplings are studied within the same context. If only the Standard Model bosonic sources of custodial symmetry breaking are considered, then at most six independent operators form a basis. One of them is the weak-θ term linked to non-perturbative sources of CP violation, while the others describe CP-odd perturbative couplings between the Standard Model gauge bosons and an Higgs-like scalar belonging to the Goldstone boson sector. The procedure is then applied to three distinct exemplifying frameworks: the original SU (5) /SO (5) Georgi-Kaplan model, the minimal custodial-preserving SO (5) /SO (4) model and the minimal SU (3) / (SU (2) × U (1)) model, which intrinsically breaks custodial symmetry. Moreover, the projection of the high-energy electroweak effective theory to the low-energy chiral effective Lagrangian for a dynamical Higgs is performed, uncovering strong relations between the operator coefficients and pinpointing the differences with the elementary Higgs scenarioThe work of I.M.H. is supported by an ESR contract of the European Union network FP7 ITN INVISIBLES (Marie Curie Actions, PITN-GA-2011-289442). L.M. acknowledges partial support of the European Union network FP7 ITN INVISIBLES, of CiCYT through the project FPA2012- 31880, of the Spanish MINECO’s “Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa” Programme under grant SEV-2012-0249, and by a grant from the Simons Foundation. S.R. acknowledges partial support of the European Union network FP7 ITN INVISIBLES and of the COFIN program PRIN 2010. This work was partially performed at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-106629

Burrowing herbivores alter soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics in a semi-arid ecosystem, Argentina

Activities of burrowing herbivores, including movement of soil and litter and deposition of waste material, can alter the distribution of labile carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in soil, affecting spatial patterning of nutrient dynamics in ecosystems where they are abundant. Their role in ecosystem processes in surface soil has been studied extensively, but effects of burrowing species on processes in subsurface soil remain poorly known. We investigated the effects of burrowing and grazing by plains vizcachas (Lagostomus maximus, Chinchilidae), a large colonial burrowing rodent native to South America, on the distribution and dynamics of C and N in soil of a semi-arid scrub ecosystem in central Argentina. In situ N mineralization (Nmin), potential Nmin and CO2 emissions were measured in surface soil (0-10 cm) and soil at the mean depth of burrows (65 ± 10 cm; mean ± 1 SD) in five colonial burrow systems and adjacent grazed and ungrazed zones. Decomposition and N dynamics of vizcacha feces on the soil surface and in burrow soil was assessed using litterbags. Total C and N in soil in burrows were 1.6 and 5.5 times greater than in undisturbed soil at similar depths, and similar to amounts in surface soil. Inorganic N, particularly NO3-, was consistently highest in burrows, intermediate in surface soil on burrow systems, and relatively low in all other zones. Despite high C and N content in all burrows, in situ net Nmin was highly variable in burrow soil. Feces decomposed and released N more rapidly in burrow soil. Laboratory incubations indicated that soil moisture limited Nmin under conditions that typically characterize burrow microclimate, and that rates increased dramatically at soil moisture contents \u3e25% field capacity, which likely occurs during pulsed rainfall events. Thus, the high and seasonally stable NO3- content in burrow soil likely originated from the accumulation of pulsed mineralization events over time. Burrowing and waste deposition by vizcachas produced “resource islands” at the landscape scale. At a measured density of 0.3 burrow systems per hectare, colonial burrow soil contained an amount of inorganic N equal to 21% and 30% of plant-available N in surface soil and subsurface soil, respectively, in an area that represented only 0.35% of the landscape. Our study indicates that burrowing and deposition of waste results in a highly active subsurface layer in which C and N dynamics function much like surface soil when soil moisture is not limiting

Topological defects and misfit strain in magnetic stripe domains of lateral multilayers with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy

Stripe domains are studied in perpendicular magnetic anisotropy films nanostructured with a periodic thickness modulation that induces the lateral modulation of both stripe periods and inplane magnetization. The resulting system is the 2D equivalent of a strained superlattice with properties controlled by interfacial misfit strain within the magnetic stripe structure and shape anisotropy. This allows us to observe, experimentally for the first time, the continuous structural transformation of a grain boundary in this 2D magnetic crystal in the whole angular range. The magnetization reversal process can be tailored through the effect of misfit strain due to the coupling between disclinations in the magnetic stripe pattern and domain walls in the in-plane magnetization configuration

Controlled nucleation of topological defects in the stripe domain patterns of Lateral multilayers with Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy: competition between magnetostatic, exchange and misfit interactions

Magnetic lateral multilayers have been fabricated on weak perpendicular magnetic anisotropy amorphous Nd-Co films in order to perform a systematic study on the conditions for controlled nucleation of topological defects within their magnetic stripe domain pattern. A lateral thickness modulation of period $w$ is defined on the nanostructured samples that, in turn, induces a lateral modulation of both magnetic stripe domain periods $\lambda$ and average in-plane magnetization component $M_{inplane}$. Depending on lateral multilayer period and in-plane applied field, thin and thick regions switch independently during in-plane magnetization reversal and domain walls are created within the in-plane magnetization configuration coupled to variable angle grain boundaries and disclinations within the magnetic stripe domain patterns. This process is mainly driven by the competition between rotatable anisotropy (that couples the magnetic stripe pattern to in-plane magnetization) and in-plane shape anisotropy induced by the periodic thickness modulation. However, as the structural period $w$ becomes comparable to magnetic stripe period $\lambda$, the nucleation of topological defects at the interfaces between thin and thick regions is hindered by a size effect and stripe domains in the different thickness regions become strongly coupled.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Physical Review