Imperial Reputations: How Sovereignty and Self-Determination Norms Have Altered the Politics of Empire

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Mark Beissinger is professor of politics at Princeton University. His main fields of interest include nationalism, state-building, imperialism, and social movements, with special reference to the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states. In addition to writing numerous articles and book chapters, Beissinger has published four books. He is author of Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge University Press, 2002). This book won the 2003 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, presented by the American Political Science Association for the best book published in the United States in any field of government, politics, or international affairs. This book was also awarded the 2003 Mattei Dogan Award, presented by the Society for Comparative Research for the best book published in the field of comparative research. Beissinger received his B.A. from Duke University in 1976 and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982. From 1992-98 he was the founding Director of Wisconsin's Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, and from 2001-04 was Chair of Wisconsin’s Political Science Department. He has also held a faculty position at Harvard University. He served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and as Vice-Chair of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. His research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Wissenshaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute for Peace, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Olin Foundations. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Imperial Reputation: The Politics of Empire in a World of Nation-States.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, streaming video, event photo

Testing a Mahalanobis Distance Model of Black Bear Habitat Use in the Ouachita Mountains of Oklahoma

Regional wildlife–habitat models are commonly developed but rarely tested with truly independent data. We tested a published habitat model for black bears (Ursus americanus) with new data collected in a different site in the same ecological region (i.e., Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas and Oklahoma, USA). We used a Mahalanobis distance model developed from relocations of black bears in Arkansas to produce a map layer of Mahalanobis distances on a study area in neighboring Oklahoma. We tested this modeled map layer with relocations of black bears on the Oklahoma area. The distributions of relocations of female black bears were consistent with model predictions. We conclude that this modeling approach can be used to predict regional suitability for a species of interest

State-society relations in contemporary Russia: New forms of political and social contention

Much existing analysis of Russian state–society relations focuses on public, active forms of contention such as the “opposition” and protest movements. There is need for a more holistic perspective which adds study of a range of overt, “co-opted”, and hidden forms of interaction to this focus on public contention. A theoretical and empirical basis for understanding state–society relations in today's Russia involves broadening the concept of “contentious politics” to include models of “consentful” as well as “dissentful” contention. A diffused model of contentious politics can situate claim-making along the axes of consentful and dissentful motivations, and compliant and contentious behaviours

Adaptive responses of animals to climate change are most likely insufficient

Biological responses to climate change have been widely documented across taxa and regions, but it remains unclear whether species are maintaining a good match between phenotype and environment, i.e. whether observed trait changes are adaptive. Here we reviewed 10,090 abstracts and extracted data from 71 studies reported in 58 relevant publications, to assess quantitatively whether phenotypic trait changes associated with climate change are adaptive in animals. A meta-analysis focussing on birds, the taxon best represented in our dataset, suggests that global warming has not systematically affected morphological traits, but has advanced phenological traits. We demonstrate that these advances are adaptive for some species, but imperfect as evidenced by the observed consistent selection for earlier timing. Application of a theoretical model indicates that the evolutionary load imposed by incomplete adaptive responses to ongoing climate change may already be threatening the persistence of species. © 2019, The Author(s)

DNA methylation levels in candidate genes associated with chronological age in mammals are not conserved in a long-lived seabird

© 2017 De Paoli-Iseppi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Most seabirds do not have any outward identifiers of their chronological age, so estimation of seabird population age structure generally requires expensive, long-term banding studies. We investigated the potential to use a molecular age biomarker to estimate age in short-tailed shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostris). We quantified DNA methylation in several A. tenuirostris genes that have shown age-related methylation changes in mammals. In birds ranging from chicks to 21 years of age, bisulphite treated blood and feather DNA was sequenced and methylation levels analysed in 67 CpG sites in 13 target gene regions. From blood samples, five of the top relationships with age were identified in KCNC3 loci (CpG66: R2 = 0.325, p = 0.019). In feather samples ELOVL2 (CpG42: R2 = 0.285, p = 0.00048) and EDARADD (CpG46: R2 = 0.168, p = 0.0067) were also weakly correlated with age. However, the majority of markers had no clear association with age (of 131 comparisons only 12 had a p-value < 0.05) and statistical analysis using a penalised lasso approach did not produce an accurate ageing model. Our data indicate that some age-related signatures identified in orthologous mammalian genes are not conserved in the long-lived short tailed shearwater. Alternative molecular approaches will be required to identify a reliable biomarker of chronological age in these seabirds

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors