The lessons of Northern Ireland: counterterrorism and conflict resolution in Northern Ireland

The results of the recent election to the Northern Ireland Assembly and the first visit in 100 years by a British monarch to what is now the Republic of Ireland represent a consolidation of what has been achieved by the peace process. The Unionist community emphatically endorsed the leadership of Peter Robinson and the DUP and the political arrangement that they manage, with Robinson extraordinarily invoking the spirit of murdered PSNI constable Ronan Kerr in his victory comments. If Sinn Féin is losing its hold in Republican areas, as dissidents claim, there was little sign of it in election results, with the gain of one seat, including the win of five out of six seats in West Belfast with two-thirds of the vote, despite the departure south to the Dáil by Gerry Adams. As was realized up to 30 years ago, political harmony in Northern Ireland has to be embedded in a strong and positive British-Irish relationship, underlined by last week’s visit of British Queen and Prime Minister. Traditional hesitations meant that the visit was not rushed into, but nor, 13 years after the Good Friday Agreement, could it have been indefinitely deferred

The Value of Cost Benefit Analysis of Road Projects. Quarterly Economic Commentary Special Article, April 1985

The Government announced in the National Plan, and is now implementing, a major increase in road expenditure. One reason why this has happened is because cost benefit studies have suggested that such an increase could be justified in economic terms. The argument that cost benefit studies in some sense "justify" additional road investment has been accepted rather uncritically in recent years, and in view of its practical consequences requires closer examination. In discussing this argument I shall refer to Sean D. Barrett and David Mooney's recent cost benefit analysis of the Naas bypass, as a good recent example of such studies. There are two basic grounds for concern at the use of cost benefit analysis to support increases in road expenditure now. First, the type of justification for road investment which cost benefit analysis is able to provide is a rather specialised one. The fact that a project shows a high rate of return on a cost benefit study does not mean that our debt problems are unlikely to be made more acute by carrying out the project, or that the effect on permanent employment will necessarily be favourable, or that many other forms of public expenditure might not perform as well or better on both counts. It is doubtful whether an expansion of road investment represents an appropriate use of the very limited funds which can be assembled for expanding publicly funded activities, and we are only going to find out whether it is or not if we can develop techniques which will indicate what the likely effects of particular types of public expenditure on employment and the public finances are going to be

Something went missing : cessation of traditional owner land management and rapid mammalian population collapses in the semi-arid region of the murray‒darling basin, southeastern Australia

The nineteenth century mass mammal extinctions in the semi-arid zone of the Murray‒Darling basin, southeastern Australia, are examined in the context of prior traditional land management. A model of grassland dynamics reveals a multi-trophic level productive pulse one to five years post-fire, followed by senescence and increasing flammability. Traditional Owner patch burning of grassland optimized human and mammalian food (including tubers, seeds and fungi) and decreased fire risk. Over at least 40 000 years, the persistence and abundance of fauna responded to this energetically closed self-reinforcing management. In 1830, depopulation (disease, massacres and displacement) effectively ended traditional management, an ecologically traumatic event that extinguished these productivity pulses. Associated mammal populations of c. 20 species collapsed, and all eco-engineering and mycophagous species, such as bilbies, bettongs and bandicoots, rapidly disappeared. Traditional land management increased productivity, habitat heterogeneity and reduced wildfire risk, underpinning mammal abundance. This has remained unrecognized by most mammalogists and land managers. Blaming extinctions predominantly on the additions by Europeans (introduction of ungulates, feral grazers and predators etc.), disastrous as they were, fails to acknowledge the initial cause of rarity, i.e. loss of productivity, habitat and niches when traditional management was subtracted from country. As ecosystems continue to degrade, understanding the primary cause is fundamental to improved management. Although too late for extinct species, respect for, and inclusion of, traditional land management knowledge provides a direction for future land management. © 2022 Royal Society of Victoria. All rights reserved

Drug Use as Boundary Play: A Qualitative Exploration of Gay Circuit Parties

Research findings have revealed that gay circuit parties may be locations that are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of many STIs/HIV among gay/bisexual men. Theories have been put forth that this may be the case because circuit parties are locales of prevalent drug use and unsafe sex. To explore the relationship between these two phenomena, in-depth qualitative interviews were undertaken with 17 men who (1) have sex with other men, (2) attended gay circuit parties in Montréal, Canada, in 2007. These revealed that drugs (including alcohol) were used intentionally to engage in unsafe sex, and then to justify this behavior after the fact. This process we called boundary play

Awareness and willingness to use HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis amongst gay and bisexual men in Scotland: implications for biomedical HIV prevention

Objectives:<p></p> To investigate the awareness of, and willingness to use, HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), and willingness to take part in a PrEP study among gay and bisexual men in Scotland.<p></p> Methods:<p></p> Cross-sectional survey of 17 gay commercial venues in Glasgow and Edinburgh in May 2011 (N = 1515, 65.2% response rate); 1393 are included in the analyses.<p></p> Results:<p></p> Just under one-third of participants had heard of PrEP (n = 434; 31.2%), with awareness associated with being aged older than 35 years, talking to UAI partners about HIV, and with having had an HIV or STI test in the previous 12 months. Around half were willing to take part in a PrEP study (n = 695; 49.9%) or to take PrEP on a daily basis (n = 756; 54.3%). In multivariate analysis, willingness to take PrEP was associated with lower levels of education, regular gay scene attendance, ‘high-risk’ unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) and testing for HIV or STI in the previous 12 months. Reasons for not wanting to participate in a PrEP study or take PrEP included perceptions of low personal risk of HIV and concerns with using medication as an HIV prevention method.<p></p> Conclusions:<p></p> There is a willingness to engage in new forms of HIV prevention and research amongst a significant number of gay and bisexual men in Scotland. Future biomedical HIV interventions need to consider the links between sexual risk behaviour, testing, and potential PrEP use

Deep-time biodiversity patterns and the dinosaurian fossil record of the Late Cretaceous Western Interior, North America

In order for palaeontological data to be informative to ecologists seeking to understand the causes of today's diversity patterns, palaeontologists must demonstrate that actual biodiversity patterns are preserved in our reconstructions of past ecosystems. During the Late Cretaceous, North America was divided into two landmasses, Laramidia and Appalachia. Previous work has suggested strong faunal provinciality on Laramidia at this time, but these arguments are almost entirely qualitative. We quantitatively investigated faunal provinciality in ceratopsid and hadrosaurid dinosaurs using a biogeographic network approach and investigated sampling biases by examining correlations between dinosaur occurrences and collections. We carried out a model-fitting approach using generalized least-squares regression to investigate the sources of sampling bias we identified. We find that while the raw data strongly support faunal provinciality, this result is driven by sampling bias. The data quality of ceratopsids and hadrosaurids is currently too poor to enable fair tests of provincialism, even in this intensively sampled region, which probably represents the best-known Late Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. To accurately reconstruct biodiversity patterns in deep time, future work should focus on smaller scale, higher resolution case studies in which the effects of sampling bias can be better controlled.Copyright © 2021, The Authors. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. You are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it

The Politics of Commerce : The Congress of Chambers of Commerce of the Empire, 1886-1914

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947-1965

Border studies in South Asia privilege everyday experiences, and the constructed nature of borders and state sovereignty. This article argues that state elites in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the 1950s and 1960s actively pursued territorial sovereignty through border policy, having inherited ambiguous colonial-era frontiers. By comparing security and development activities along the Durand Line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the better-known case of India and Pakistan's ceasefire line in Kashmir, this article demonstrates that the exercise of sovereignty required a bounded space that only borders could provide and a rejection of competing border zone authorities. The local specificity of each border, however, created the historical conditions in which political elites acted. Combining an archival history methodology with conceptual insights from political geography and critical international relations, this article uses an original integration of two important Asian border spaces into one analysis to highlight tensions between sovereignty's theory and practice

How acceptable are antiretrovirals for the prevention of sexually transmitted HIV? A review of research on the acceptability of oral pre-exposure prophylaxis and treatment as prevention

Recent research has demonstrated how antiretrovirals (ARVs) could be effective in the prevention of sexually transmitted HIV. We review research on the acceptability of oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and treatment as prevention (TasP) for HIV prevention amongst potential users. We consider with whom, where and in what context this research has been conducted, how acceptability has been approached, and what research gaps remain. Findings from 33 studies show a lack of TasP research, PrEP studies which have focused largely on men who have sex with men (MSM) in a US context, and varied measures of acceptability. In order to identify when, where and for whom PrEP and TasP would be most appropriate and effective, research is needed in five areas: acceptability of TasP to people living with HIV; motivation for PrEP use and adherence; current perceptions and management of risk; the impact of broader social and structural factors; and consistent definition and operationalisation of acceptability which moves beyond adherence