State Failure - A Rationale for EU Foreign Policy?

'Estats fallits' ha arribat a ser un lema popular per als acadèmics i els polítics per igual. En opinió dels governs occidentals i les institucions internacionals, els estats fallits no compleixen amb les condicions necessàries per assolir el desenvolupament econòmic i social i alhora proporcionar un terreny fèrtil per als actors violents conflictes i no estatals que participen en la delinqüència internacional. La Unió Europea té una relació de llarga data amb els països de l'Àfrica subsahariana, molts dels quals es caracteritzen per ser fallat. En aquest treball es pretén analitzar si el compromís retòric de la UE per fer front a la insuficiència de l'Estat es tradueix en un enfocament coherent davant les causes profundes de la fragilitat de l'Estat i pregunta pels factors que expliquen el compromís de la UE amb els problemes que enfronten aquests estats. Mitjançant la comparació de les polítiques europees cap a la República Democràtica del Congo, Sierra Leone i la República Centreafricana, s'argumenta que la resposta de la UE als Estats fallits es desenvolupa d'una manera incoherent esbiaixada cap a les situacions de conflicte en lloc de ser guiat per una preocupació més general per fragilitat . L'anàlisi suggereix que la participació de la UE es deu principalment a interessos coincidents en els Estats membres i de la UE.'Failed states' have come to be a popular catchword for academics and policy-makers alike. In the view of Western governments and international institutions, failed states do not meet the conditions for achieving economic and social development and at the same time provide fertile grounds for violent conflict and non-state actors involved in international crime. The European Union has a long-standing relation with the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, many of which are characterised as failed. This paper seeks to analyze whether the EU's rhetorical commitment to tackle state failure translates into a coherent approach dealing with the root causes of state fragility and asks for the factors explaining the EU's engagement with the problems facing such states. By comparison of European policies towards the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic, it is argued that the EU's response to state failure evolves in an incoherent manner biased towards conflict situations rather than being guided by a more general concern for fragility. The analysis suggests that EU involvement is mainly driven by coinciding interests at member state and EU level

Die p24-Proteinfamilie : Lokalisation, Oligomerisierung und Konzentration im frühen sekretorischen Weg

Die p24-Familie ist eine hochkonservierte Proteinfamilie von Typ I Transmembranproteinen, deren Mitglieder im frühen sekretorischen Weg zyklisieren. Obwohl allgemein anerkannt ist, daß diese Proteinfamilie eine Rolle bei den Transportprozessen zwischen ER, IC und Golgi spielt, ist eine genaue Funktion bis heute immer noch unklar. Sie werden als Coatrezeptoren und Transportrezeptoren oder –adaptoren gehandelt, aber es wird ihnen auch eine Funktion in der Qualitätskontrolle im ER und bei der Vesikelbiogenese zugeschrieben. Eine herausragende Eigenschaft der p24-Proteine ist die Ausbildung von Heterooligomeren. Da die p24-Mitglieder sowohl in der Lokalisation als auch der Biosynthese voneinander abhängig sind, muß auch der Schlüssel zu ihrer Funktion in der Ausbildung dieser Oligomere liegen. Daher wurde in dieser Arbeit die Ausbildung, und dabei vor allem die Komplexgröße der p24-Mitglieder in ER, IC und Golgi analysiert. Das Verhältnis von Monomer zu Dimer ist, je nach p24-Protein und Organell, unterschiedlich, und zwei Mitglieder der p26-Subfamilie (p26 und tp24) liegen immer nur als Dimer bzw. als Monomer vor. Durch eine Westernblotanalyse wurden die Konzentrationen der p24-Proteine in den Organellen des frühen sekretorischen Weges bestimmt. Überraschenderweise liegen sie jedoch in sehr unterschiedlichen Konzentrationen vor. Zwei Mitglieder der p26-Subfamilie, p26 und tp24, zeichnen sich zusätzlich durch eine ungleich höhere bzw. niedrigere Konzentration aus. Um das dynamische Zusammenspiel der p24-Proteine zu analysieren, wurde biochemisch und über Immunfluoreszenz die Umverteilung der p24-Mitglieder bei einem 15°C-Block und dessen Auflösung analysiert. Sowohl in der Immunfluoreszenz, als auch biochemisch, konnte gezeigt werden, daß ein p24-Protein in jeder Organelle mit einem anderen p24-Protein umverteilt wird, was auf einen ständigen Wechsel der Interaktionspartner bei jedem Transportschritt hindeutet

Managing Territorial Disputes in Southeast Asia: Is There More than the South China Sea?

The conflicts in the South China Sea have come to dominate debates on Southeast Asian security and specifically on how boundary disputes have been managed within the region. Yet, the case is not necessarily exemplary for the way Southeast Asian countries have dealt with territorial disputes generally. The article gathers three common perceptions about conflict management that are strongly informed by the South China Sea case, but have lesser relevance when looking at other territorial conflicts in the region. I offer a critical reading of the who, why, and how of territorial conflict management and provide tentative guidelines on what to expect in the future

Latin American declaratory regionalism : an analysis of presidential discourse (1994-2014)

If the idea of an integrated Latin America goes back to the early post-colonial days, the story of political and economic integration in Latin America is relatively quickly told. The attempts have been numerous, but in terms of policy outcomes and deep integration for the benefit of a regional public good, regionalism in Latin America has not lived up to the stated aims of its governments. The present paper takes a first step to examine the practice of referring to Latin America in the political discourse, a phenomenon that we term declaratory regionalism to denote its independence from substantial forms of regionalism. We analyse the use of declarationism in presidential speeches delivered on an annual basis to the UN General Assembly in two steps. First, we discuss a series of descriptive illustrations in light of existing scholarship on Latin American international relations. Subsequently, several hypotheses for why governments keep referring to the region while not necessarily privileging it in their foreign policy strategies are put to a test. While not offering a conclusive explanation, the results point to leftist ideology as a crucial factor in explaining the persistence of discursive regionalism at the UN General Assembly. The paper posits that future research is likely to benefit from conceiving Latin Americanism as a characteristic of leftist ideology

Filling the void: The Asia-Pacific problem of order and emerging Indo-Pacific regional multilateralism

Thirty years after the downfall of the Soviet-led communist bloc, the United States-led liberal international order is seen as coming to an end. Policymakers have converged on the need to safeguard the "rules-based order" across the newly coined "Indo-Pacific" region. However, policy and scholarly debates lack clarity about what exactly is to be preserved, and why the terms of the "rules-based order" and the "Indo-Pacific" have rapidly found their way into policy debates despite their contested meaning. Analyzing developments in regional multilateralism, we find that mainstream discourses purport static conceptions of order, which are often conflated with United States-centered trans-Pacific alliance relationships. The ensuing problem of order stems in large part from the fact that multilateral projects for building alternate orders, undertaken since the early 1990s, have remained far below their potential. We conclude that emerging forms of multilateral cooperation across the enlarged "Indo-Pacific" region have partially filled this void

Getting Prepared to Be Prepared: How Interpersonal Skills Aid Fieldwork in Challenging Contexts

This article deals with fieldwork in challenging research contexts that make preparation for field research particularly difficult. Challenging contexts include generally insecure places, politicized contexts, and unknown settings. Drawing on our experience in the field, we discuss four challenges that are common across these contexts: access, positionality, researcher well-being, and research design and data collection. Bringing together insights from fieldwork with urban elites and in the countryside, this paper describes problems that occurred in both settings and identifies a set of interpersonal skills that helped the authors to tackle the challenges of the field and seize the opportunities it offered. This article posits that recognizing the importance of certain interpersonal skills, namely: openness, empathy, humility, and flexibility, precedes the identification of practical tools. Interpersonal skills, instead, focus on a general attitude that underlies researchers’ capacity to make informed choices about specific courses of actions, preparing fieldworkers to be prepared to confront problems once they arise

Ruling Violently

This article analyzes the criminal governance exercised by the Mexican criminal organ­ization Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), contributing to the scarce information available on this topic. Specifically, we ask how the CJNG has exercised territorial control to ensure the operation of its businesses, mostly concentrated in the production and sale of illegal drugs. Based on a small number of existing studies and publicly available information, we argue that the CJNG relies on a dual system of territorial control consisting of the prioritization of violent coercion vis-à-vis its opponents together with a discourse of protecting Mexicans sustained by selected initiatives to provide security and other basic services to the population to gain legitimacy. This combination has allowed the cartel to grow and expand rapidly over the last decade

Nul op de meter:hoe verder met energierenovatie

Afsluitende brochure van het RAAK-project Op naar beter, nul op de meter! Verschillende auteurs uit het werkveld hebben een bijdrage geleverd. Met een voorwoord van gedeputeerde Nienke Homan

The Allelic Landscape of Human Blood Cell Trait Variation and Links to Common Complex Disease

Many common variants have been associated with hematological traits, but identification of causal genes and pathways has proven challenging. We performed a genome-wide association analysis in the UK Biobank and INTERVAL studies, testing 29.5 million genetic variants for association with 36 red cell, white cell, and platelet properties in 173,480 European-ancestry participants. This effort yielded hundreds of low frequency (<5%) and rare (<1%) variants with a strong impact on blood cell phenotypes. Our data highlight general properties of the allelic architecture of complex traits, including the proportion of the heritable component of each blood trait explained by the polygenic signal across different genome regulatory domains. Finally, through Mendelian randomization, we provide evidence of shared genetic pathways linking blood cell indices with complex pathologies, including autoimmune diseases, schizophrenia, and coronary heart disease and evidence suggesting previously reported population associations between blood cell indices and cardiovascular disease may be non-causal.We thank members of the Cambridge BioResource Scientific Advisory Board and Management Committee for their support of our study and the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre for funding. K.D. is funded as a HSST trainee by NHS Health Education England. M.F. is funded from the BLUEPRINT Grant Code HEALTH-F5-2011-282510 and the BHF Cambridge Centre of Excellence [RE/13/6/30180]. J.R.S. is funded by a MRC CASE Industrial studentship, co-funded by Pfizer. J.D. is a British Heart Foundation Professor, European Research Council Senior Investigator, and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator. S.M., S.T, M.H, K.M. and L.D. are supported by the NIHR BioResource-Rare Diseases, which is funded by NIHR. Research in the Ouwehand laboratory is supported by program grants from the NIHR to W.H.O., the European Commission (HEALTH-F2-2012-279233), the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to W.J.A. and D.R. under numbers RP-PG-0310-1002 and RG/09/12/28096 and Bristol Myers-Squibb; the laboratory also receives funding from NHSBT. W.H.O is a NIHR Senior Investigator. The INTERVAL academic coordinating centre receives core support from the UK Medical Research Council (G0800270), the BHF (SP/09/002), the NIHR and Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, as well as grants from the European Research Council (268834), the European Commission Framework Programme 7 (HEALTH-F2-2012-279233), Merck and Pfizer. DJR and DA were supported by the NIHR Programme ‘Erythropoiesis in Health and Disease’ (Ref. NIHR-RP-PG-0310-1004). N.S. is supported by the Wellcome Trust (Grant Codes WT098051 and WT091310), the EU FP7 (EPIGENESYS Grant Code 257082 and BLUEPRINT Grant Code HEALTH-F5-2011-282510). The INTERVAL study is funded by NHSBT and has been supported by the NIHR-BTRU in Donor Health and Genomics at the University of Cambridge in partnership with NHSBT. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, the Department of Health of England or NHSBT. D.G. is supported by a “la Caixa”-Severo Ochoa pre-doctoral fellowship