Integrating religious engagement into diplomacy: challenges and opportunities

The last few years have witnessed a flurry of interest and activity around religion and religious engagement in diplomatic circles on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2013, the US State Department established a new Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives as part of a broader national strategy on religious leadership and faith community engagement led by the White House’s National Security Council. Within the same year, the European Union issued new guidelines on the promotion and protection of freedom of religion or belief; the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development opened a new office focused on similar issues; and the French Foreign Ministry sponsored a major conference on the question of religion and foreign policy with a keynote address delivered by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius

Digital Islam: Changing the Boundaries of Religious Knowledge?

The phenomenal popularization and transnational propagation of communications and information technologies (hereafter referred to as IT) in recent years has generated a wide range of important questions in the context of Islam’s sociology of knowledge. How have these technologies transformed Muslim concepts of what Islam is and who possesses the authority to speak on its behalf? Moreover, how are they changing the ways in which Muslims imagine the boundaries of the umma

Finding turning-points in ultra-high-resolution animal movement data

1. Recent advances in biologging have resulted in animal location data at unprecedentedly high temporal resolutions, sometimes many times per second. However, many current methods for analysing animal movement (e.g. step selection analysis or state-space modelling) were developed with lower-resolution data in mind. To make such methods usable with high-resolution data, we require techniques to identify features within the trajectory where movement deviates from a straight line. 2. We propose that the intricacies of movement paths, and particularly turns, reflect decisions made by animals so that turn points are particularly relevant for behavioural ecologists. As such, we introduce a fast, accurate algorithm for inferring turning-points in high-resolution data. For analysing big data, speed and scalability are vitally important. We test our algorithm on simulated data, where varying amounts of noise were added to paths of straight-line segments interspersed with turns. We also demonstrate our algorithm on data of free-ranging oryx (Oryx leucoryx). We compare our algorithm to existing statistical techniques for break-point inference. 3. The algorithm scales linearly and can analyse several hundred-thousand data-points in a few seconds on a mid-range desktop computer. It identified turnpoints in simulated data with complete accuracy when the noise in the headings had a standard deviation of 8 degrees, well within the tolerance of many modern biologgers. It has comparable accuracy to the existing algorithms tested, and is up to three orders of magnitude faster. 4. Our algorithm, freely available in R and Python, serves as an initial step in processing ultra high-resolution animal movement data, resulting in a rarefied path that can be used as an input into many existing step-and-turn methods of analysis. The resulting path consists of points where the animal makes a clear turn, and thereby provides valuable data on decisions underlying movement patterns. As such, it provides an important breakthrough required as a starting point for analysing sub-second resolution data

Telling the collective story? Moroccan-Dutch young adults’ negotiation of a collective identity through storytelling

Researchers taking a social constructionist perspective on identity agree that identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. However, empirical studies in this field are often based on interviewer–interviewee interaction or focus on interactions with members of a socially dominant out-group. How identities are negotiated in interaction with in-group members remains understudied. In this article we use a narrative approach to study identity negotiation among Moroccan-Dutch young adults, who constitute both an ethnic and a religious (Muslim) minority in the Netherlands. Our analysis focuses on the topics that appear in focus group participants’ stories and on participants’ responses to each other’s stories. We find that Moroccan-Dutch young adults collectively narrate their experiences in Dutch society in terms of discrimination and injustice. Firmly grounded in media discourse and popular wisdom, a collective narrative of a disadvantaged minority identity emerges. However, we also find that this identity is not uncontested. We use the concept of second stories to explain how participants negotiate their collective identity by alternating stories in which the collective experience of deprivation is reaffirmed with stories in which challenging or new evaluations of the collective experience are offered. In particular, participants narrate their personal experiences to challenge recurring evaluations of discrimination and injustice. A new collective narrative emerges from this work of joint storytelling

The greening of Arabia: multiple opportunities for human occupation of the Arabian peninsula during the Late Pleistocene inferred from an ensemble of climate model simulations

Climate models are potentially useful tools for addressing human dispersals and demographic change. The Arabian Peninsula is becoming increasingly significant in the story of human dispersals out of Africa during the Late Pleistocene. Although characterised largely by arid environments today, emerging climate records indicate that the peninsula was wetter many times in the past, suggesting that the region may have been inhabited considerably more than hitherto thought. Explaining the origins and spatial distribution of increased rainfall is challenging because palaeoenvironmental research in the region is in an early developmental stage. We address environmental oscillations by assembling and analysing an ensemble of five global climate models (CCSM3, COSMOS, HadCM3, KCM, and NorESM). We focus on precipitation, as the variable is key for the development of lakes, rivers and savannas. The climate models generated here were compared with published palaeoenvironmental data such as palaeolakes, speleothems and alluvial fan records as a means of validation. All five models showed, to varying degrees, that the Arabia Peninsula was significantly wetter than today during the Last Interglacial (130 ka and 126/125 ka timeslices), and that the main source of increased rainfall was from the North African summer monsoon rather than the Indian Ocean monsoon or from Mediterranean climate patterns. Where available, 104 ka (MIS 5c), 56 ka (early MIS 3) and 21 ka (LGM) timeslices showed rainfall was present but not as extensive as during the Last Interglacial. The results favour the hypothesis that humans potentially moved out of Africa and into Arabia on multiple occasions during pluvial phases of the Late Pleistocene

Diversity, distribution and conservation of the terrestrial reptiles of Oman (Sauropsida, Squamata)

All authors: Salvador Carranza , Meritxell Xipell, Pedro Tarroso, Andrew Gardner, Edwin Nicholas Arnold, Michael D. Robinson, Marc Simó-Riudalbas, Raquel Vasconcelos, Philip de Pous, Fèlix Amat, Jiří Šmíd, Roberto Sindaco, Margarita Metallinou †, Johannes Els, Juan Manuel Pleguezuelos, Luis Machado, David Donaire, Gabriel Martínez, Joan Garcia-Porta, Tomáš Mazuch, Thomas Wilms, Jürgen Gebhart, Javier Aznar, Javier Gallego, Bernd-Michael Zwanzig, Daniel Fernández-Guiberteau, Theodore Papenfuss, Saleh Al Saadi, Ali Alghafri, Sultan Khalifa, Hamed Al Farqani, Salim Bait Bilal, Iman Sulaiman Alazri, Aziza Saud Al Adhoobi, Zeyana Salim Al Omairi, Mohammed Al Shariani, Ali Al Kiyumi, Thuraya Al Sariri, Ahmed Said Al Shukaili, Suleiman Nasser Al Akhzami.In the present work, we use an exceptional database including 5,359 records of 101 species of Oman’s terrestrial reptiles together with spatial tools to infer the spatial patterns of species richness and endemicity, to infer the habitat preference of each species and to better define conservation priorities, with especial focus on the effectiveness of the protected areas in preserving this unique arid fauna. Our results indicate that the sampling effort is not only remarkable from a taxonomic point of view, with multiple observations for most species, but also for the spatial coverage achieved. The observations are distributed almost continuously across the two-dimensional climatic space of Oman defined by the mean annual temperature and the total annual precipitation and across the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the multivariate climatic space and are well represented within 17 out of the 20 climatic clusters grouping 10% of the explained climatic variance defined by PC1 and PC2. Species richness is highest in the Hajar and Dhofar Mountains, two of the most biodiverse areas of the Arabian Peninsula, and endemic species richness is greatest in the Jebel Akhdar, the highest part of the Hajar Mountains. Oman’s 22 protected areas cover only 3.91% of the country, including within their limits 63.37% of terrestrial reptiles and 50% of all endemics. Our analyses show that large areas of the climatic space of Oman lie outside protected areas and that seven of the 20 climatic clusters are not protected at all. The results of the gap analysis indicate that most of the species are below the conservation target of 17% or even the less restrictive 12% of their total area within a protected area in order to be considered adequately protected. Therefore, an evaluation of the coverage of the current network of protected areas and the identification of priority protected areas for reptiles using reserve design algorithms are urgently needed. Our study also shows that more than half of the species are still pending of a definitive evaluation by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).This work was funded by grants CGL2012-36970, CGL2015-70390-P from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain (cofunded by FEDER) to SC, the project Field study for the conservation of reptiles in Oman, Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs, Oman (Ref: 22412027) to SC and grant 2014-SGR-1532 from the Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca del Departament d'Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya to SC. MSR is funded by a FPI grant from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain (BES-2013-064248); RV, PT and LM were funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) through post-doc grants (SFRH/BPD/79913/2011) to RV, (SFRH/BPD/93473/2013) to PT and PhD grant (SFRH/BD/89820/2012) to LM, financed by Programa Operacional Potencial Humano (POPH) – Quadro de Referência Estrategico Nacional (QREN) from the European Social Fund and Portuguese Ministerio da Educação e Ciência

Digital Islam: Changing the Boundaries of Religious Knowledge?

The phenomenal popularization and transnational propagation of communications and information technologies (hereafter referred to as IT) in recent years has generated a wide range of important questions in the context of Islam’s sociology of knowledge. How have these technologies transformed Muslim concepts of what Islam is and who possesses the authority to speak on its behalf? Moreover, how are they changing the ways in which Muslims imagine the boundaries of the umma