Beyond Frozen Conflict Scenarios for the Separatist Disputes of Eastern Europe. CEPS Paperback

This book forms part of a wider project on the relations between the European Union and Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, and in particular the Association Agreements and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs) between these three states and the European Union. The wider project was begun in 2015 in the aftermath of the Maidan uprising at the beginning of 2014, which had been provoked when President Yanukovich reneged over the signing of Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the EU. Following Yanukovich’s flight to Russia, the Association Agreement was duly signed later in 2014. The agreements with Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine have a substantial common content, while differing in various details. Overall, they provide an association model of unprecedented extent and depth. Democratic political values are at the heart of the agreements, while the economic content goes far beyond classic free trade agreements to include a wholesale approximation of EU internal market regulatory law. The purpose of our wider project was first of all to explain the complex content of the Association Agreements and DCFTAs, which was achieved in a series of comprehensive handbooks published at www.3dcftas.eu. However, the agreements contain only short and simple articles on conflict prevention and management, without meaningful operational content. This was notwithstanding the fact that the EU considers itself, for its own historical reasons, to have a special vocation in conflict prevention and resolution. In addition, Georgia and Moldova were already the sites of unresolved separatist conflicts originating around the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, namely Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transdniestria in Moldova, to which we have added the case of the Nagorny Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan. On top of this legacy, the Maidan uprising led to the Russian annexation of Crimea and its hybrid war in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of the Donbas. The Donbas thus joined the old ‘frozen conflicts’. In the light of the above, CEPS took the initiative to examine all five unresolved conflicts, to assess where these disputes seem to be heading, and what different scenarios could be imagined for their future, including how the European Union might become more engaged. Indeed, while none of the conflicts are resolved, none are for that matter ‘frozen’. Our first practical priority was to find an author to undertake a comprehensive study of the Donbas, since conditions there make it practically impossible for any analysts from the government-controlled part of Ukraine or from Europe to safely enter these territories for research purposes. We were therefore very fortunate to find Nikolaus von Twickel who had recently been travelling in the Donbas as part of the OSCE Mission there, and is now an independent analyst. For the other four ‘old’ conflicts we were also most fortunate to bring in Thomas de Waal, who has been a leading scholar of the region for some decades, and was willing to bring the stories of these conflicts up to date. The two authors were able to address the complete set of conflicts with a consistent analytical approach, as will be evident from reading the sets of scenarios. We express our warm appreciation towards Sweden and the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) for their support to the entire project. This volume looks at future prospects for the string of unresolved conflicts that continue to plague the post-Soviet world. Four of them date back to the period when the USSR began to break up in the late 1980s. A new conflict, with many different elements and some similarities, was added to the list in 2014: the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. The open confrontation between Russia and Ukraine over the Donbas and Crimea not only destroyed relations between Moscow and Kyiv but changed politics across the region, shaking up the dynamics of the four existing protracted territorial conflicts over Abkhazia, Nagorny Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transdniestria. The five post-Soviet conflicts are often called ‘frozen’, but this is a misnomer. Although the peace processes around them often look frozen, the situations themselves are anything but frozen and are constantly changing. Two of them, over the Donbas and Nagorny Karabakh, are either ongoing or close to violence. Each dispute has its own history, character and context, which has grown more distinctive over time and has been further shaped by the confrontation over Ukraine. Each continues to evolve. Here we chart scenarios for how these conflicts may develop further with the aim of focusing policymakers’ thinking on which tendencies are dangerous and which ones can be encouraged. There are many moving parts to these situations and complacency is not an option

Indexical Objects, Syntax, and Language or How to Tell a Story Without Words

Language—often said to set human beings apart from other animals—has resisted explanation in terms of evolution. Language has—among others—two fundamental and distinctive features: syntax and the ability to express non-present actions and events. We suggest that the relation between this representation (of non-present action) and syntax can be analyzed as a relation between a function and a structure to fulfill this function. The strategy of the paper is to ask if there is any evidence of pre-linguistic communication that fulfills the function of communicating an absent action. We identify a structural similarity between understanding indexes of past actions of conspecifics (who did what to whom) and one of the simplest and most paradigmatic linguistic syntactic patterns – that of the simple transitive sentence. When a human being infers past events from an index (i.e., a trace, the conditions of a conspecifics or an animal, a constellation or an object) the interpreters’ comprehension must rely on concepts similar in structure and function to the ‘thematic roles’ believed to underpin the comprehension of linguistic syntax: in his or her mind the idea of a past action or event emerges along with thematic role-like concepts; in the case of the presentation of, e.g., a hunting trophy, the presenter could be understood to be an agent (subject) and the trophy a patient (direct object), while the past action killed is implied by the condition of the object and its possession by the presenter. We discuss whether both the presentation of a trophy and linguistic syntax might have emerged independently while having the same function (to represent a past action) or whether the presentation of an index of a deed could constitute a precursor of language. Both possibilities shed new light on early, and maybe first, language use

How Language and Human Altruism Evolved Hand in Hand — The Backchannel Hypothesis

This paper contributes to two debates: the debate about language evolution and the debate about the foundations of human collaboration. While both cooperation and language may give the impression of being adaptations that evolved for the “good of the group,” it is well established that the evolution of complex traits cannot be a direct result of group selection. In this paper I suggest how this tension can be solved: both language and cooperation evolved in a unique two-level evolutionary system which was triggered by a well-documented geological event—the drying out of the climate—in East Africa, which subsequently reduced the intermating between groups and thus made it possible that the mechanism that produced differences between groups (including social forms of selection such as female choice) could be the target of natural selection on the group level. If a social form of selection (e.g., sexual selection) produced differences in fitness between groups, the displacement process between groups would indirectly select those forms of social selection that produce groups that would displace all others. The main hypothesis presented in this paper is that, in this situation, a backchannel between the two levels of selection naturally evolves. A backchannel between the two levels would, for example, emerge when sexual selection (or any other form of social selection) was sensitive to the individual’s contribution to the group. Examples of systems utilizing a backchannel are nerve cells being better nourished when used more frequently, enabling them to be conducive to the survival of the whole organism, or a law firm in which all employees get paid to the extent that they contribute to the survival and success of the firm. In both cases, the selection on the higher level informs the selection on the lower level. The aim of the paper is to illuminate these rather opaque claims, to which the reader probably has many objections in this abridged form.Peer Reviewe

How language evolved as a backchannel between two feedback loops

Language is what makes us human. It is the basis of human knowledge, culture, and society. Despite its importance, how language evolved is still a mystery. Various recent studies suggest that humans developed through a "super-fast" evolutionary process found nowhere else within the animal kingdom. This suggests a discontinuity in the evolutionary process itself. We propose the following model: Humans evolved in a unique evolutionary system consisting of two feedback loops, there being a backchannel between them; the lower loop producing the variations needed for selection in the upper loop to take place. What is meant by the "backchannel" here is a structure enabling the selection of the lower loop to "anticipate" the selection of the upper one. The content of this backchannel is displaced action encoded in narration. We show that not only the human brain and language but also most of the unique human faculties (including theory of mind, episodic memory and the unique human altruism) are adapted almost exclusively to developing the functioning of the backchannel (narration) at a super-fast evolutionary pace

Modeling spatio-temporal enhancer expression in Drosophila segmentation

Thermodynamic models are a key tool to investigate transcription control in the segmentation of Drosophila. By modeling the binding of transcription factors to DNA sequences and their effect on transcription initiation, thermodynamic models predict expression patterns directly from the enhancer sequence, given the binding motifs and concentrations of all relevant transcription factors (TFs). However, many parameters of the model are impossible to measure, e.g. the interaction strength between the TFs and the core promoter. Hence, it is necessary to estimate these parameters by training the thermodynamic model on known data, i.e. to fit the model predictions to already measured expression patterns of known enhancers. The quality of the parameter training result, evaluated on independent test data, indicates how well the model recapitulates the biological measurements, which can help us to improve our understanding of the underlaying mechanisms of transcription control. Therefore, proper parameter training is a crucial step for the construction of thermodynamic models. In this thesis, I develop a thorough parameter training setup that uses the limited amount of available training data efficiently and reduces parameter overfitting significantly. This optimized training setup applies a global parameter training algorithm, a method to artificially increase the amount of training data, called data augmentation, and parameter penalties, which is a technique to limit overfitting. I apply the novel training setup to expand the scope of thermodynamic models of Drosophila segmentation considerably by incorporating additional TFs into the model, and to investigate many aspects of transcription control in greater detail than it was possible before. Among these topics are the specificity of TF binding motifs, the nature of TF cooperativity and DNA accessibility. With the help of the here developed impact score, I assess the influence of all relevant TFs in silico, delineate the cooperativity range of the key TF bcd, and determine the importance of weak binding sites. Finally, I develop and discuss two alternative models of transcription control that lack the prediction quality of thermodynamic models, but, nevertheless, give valuable insights into the architectural principles of enhancers. This project is part of a larger effort to advance our current understanding of transcription regulation by reconstructing the segmentation network of Drosophila in silico. The results of this thesis facilitate future modeling efforts by optimally leveraging the available data as well as by improving our understanding of thermodynamic models

Green Fingers for Climate-Resilient Cities – Connecting Processes of Landscape Planning and Designing with Co-Creation

Taking the transdisciplinary research study “Green fingers for a climate resilient city”, funded by the German Ministry of education and research (BMBF), as an example, this paper follows the hypothesis that processes of landscape planning and designing multifunctional green spaces and processes of co-creation need to be combined to stimulate climate resilient city transformation. The findings are that efforts to combine these processes benefit from making complex climate-resilient city planning accessible for people of different professional backgrounds. The paper showcases how storytelling (Schmidt 2019), mapping (Langner 2009) and guided walks (Schultz 2019) are means to mutually engage with, perceive and understand multifunctional green spaces, inspire ownership, and build capacity for the city’s climate-resilient transformation

Finding commercially attractive user innovations: A test of lead user theory

Firms and governments are increasingly interested in learning to exploit the value of lead user innovations for commercial advantage. Improvements to lead user theory are needed to inform and guide these efforts. In this paper we empirically test and confirm the basic tenants of lead user theory. We also discover some new refinements and related practical applications. Using a sample of users and user-innovators drawn from the extreme sport of kite surfing, we analyze the relationship between the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users and the intensity of the lead user characteristics those users display. We provide a first empirical analysis of the independent effects of its two key component variables. In our empirical study of user modifications to kite surfing equipment, we find that both components independently contribute to identifying commercially attractive user innovations. Component 1 (the "high expected benefits" dimension) predicts innovation likelihood, and component 2 (the "ahead of the trend" dimension) predicts both the commercial attractiveness of a given set of user-developed innovations and innovation likelihood due to a newly-proposed innovation supply side effect. We conclude that the component variables in the lead user definition are indeed independent dimensions and so neither can be dropped without loss of information - an important matter for lead user theory. We also find that adding measures of users' local resources can improve the ability of the lead user construct to identify commercially-attractive innovations under some conditions. The findings we report have practical as well as theoretical import. Product modification and development has been found to be a relatively common user behavior in many fields. Thus, from 10% to nearly 40% of users report having modified or developed a product for in-house use in the case of industrial products, or for personal use in the case of consumer products, in fields sampled to date. As a practical matter, therefore, it is important to find ways to selectively identify the user innovations that manufacturers will find to be the basis for commercially attractive products in the collectivity of user-developed innovations. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and also for practical applications of the lead user construct, i.e. how variables used in lead user studies can profitably be adapted to fit specific study contexts and purposes