Armed Politics and the State in South Asia

Regimes deal with armed groups in remarkably diverse ways: in some contexts they wage total wars of annihilation, in others they cut live-and-let-live deals, and in yet others they closely ally with non-state actors. Varying topographies of armed order emerge and evolve across time and space. This project introduces an “armed politics” framework that can integrate the study of state building, civil war, and electoral violence into a unified analytical approach. It conceptualizes and measures different armed orders – limited cooperation, alliance, containment, and total war – and the pathways through which these orders end, in collapse or incorporation. The project then offers a new theory of how states evaluate armed groups, arguing that ideological perception and instrumental incentives combine to assign groups to six different political roles. These roles, ranging from mortal enemies to business partners to undesirable, determine the strategies that governments pursue and the orders they seek to construct. Political ideas about state and nation are central to political conflict. Comparative evidence from South and Southeast Asia illustrates how regimes perceive armed groups and the armed orders that emerge

Synthesis and characterisation of new complexes with soft donor hybrid ligands

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Explaining cohesion, fragmentation, and control in insurgent groups

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 658-681).The internal unity and discipline of insurgent groups helps us understand the military effectiveness of armed groups, patterns of violence against civilians, and the ability of insurgent organizations to negotiate and demobilize, but the causes of insurgent cohesion and fragmentation have not been systematically or comparatively examined. This study offers a theory to explain why some armed groups are more cohesive and controlled than others. It argues that the trajectories of insurgent organizations can be substantially explained by focusing on two variables: the structure of the social networks and institutions upon which the organization is built, and the organization's access to material resources from outside the war zone. First, the structure of the core networks upon which an organization is constructed determines the internal social environment of the group: its social base shapes its organizational form. The denser the core networks, and more tightly they pull together local communities, the more robust will be the organization that emerges. Social embeddedness can therefore be more important than mass political popularity, public goods provision, or ideology in providing the basis for enduring organizational cohesion. Organizations built around coalitions of localized pockets of collective action or leaders operating among populations with whom they lack social ties will face severe problems of internal control - regardless of organizational blueprints or ethnic and class appeals. Second, external material support from states and diasporas tends to centralize internal control and to enhance insurgent military power. Rather than encouraging looting and thuggishness, resource-wealth can fuel highly cohesive and disciplined armed organizations. The interaction of social bases and external support generates empirically distinct trajectories of organizational cohesion. Mechanisms explaining change over time are derived from the structural underpinnings of this argument. This theory is tested with a study of 26 armed groups in nine civil wars. The primary research design is a set of within-conflict comparisons of insurgent organizations in civil wars in Kashmir, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka. Within each war there is dramatic variation across groups within a shared structural context. Fieldwork, primary sources, and secondary sources are used to trace out the different trajectories of militancy and their origins. An external validity check is provided by a study of Southeast Asia, relying on a cross-national comparison of communist insurgents in Malaya, Vietnam, and the Philippines, a sub-national, cross-conflict comparison of armed groups in Aceh and East Timor, and a within-conflict comparison of separatists in the southern Philippines. These comparisons reveal strong support for the theory relative to its competitors while also uncovering new mechanisms of change and evolution.by Paul Stephen Staniland.Ph.D

Versatile routes to selenoether functionalised tertiary phosphines

New selenoether functionalised tertiary phosphines, based on aryl (2a, 2b) or alkyl (4) backbones, have been synthesised and characterised. P,Se-chelation has been achieved upon complexation to square-planar PtII (3a) or PdII (3b) metal centres. For 3a and 3b, weak non-covalent M◊ ◊ ◊ Se contacts were established using single crystal X-ray crystallography

Habitat use and spatial fidelity of male South American sea lions during the nonbreeding period

Conditions experienced during the nonbreeding period have profound long-term effects on individual fitness and survival. Therefore, knowledge of habitat use during the nonbreeding period can provide insights into processes that regulate populations. At the Falkland Islands, the habitat use of South American sea lions (Otaria flavescens) during the nonbreeding period is of particular interest because the population is yet to recover from a catastrophic decline between the mid-1930s and 1965, and nonbreeding movements are poorly understood. Here, we assessed the habitat use of adult male (n = 13) and juvenile male (n = 6) South American sea lions at the Falkland Islands using satellite tags and stable isotope analysis of vibrissae. Male South American sea lions behaved like central place foragers. Foraging trips were restricted to the Patagonian Shelf and were typically short in distance and duration (127 ± 66 km and 4.1 ± 2.0 days, respectively). Individual male foraging trips were also typically characterized by a high degree of foraging site fidelity. However, the isotopic niche of adult males was smaller than juvenile males, which suggested that adult males were more consistent in their use of foraging habitats and prey over time. Our findings differ from male South American sea lions in Chile and Argentina, which undertake extended movements during the nonbreeding period. Hence, throughout their breeding range, male South American sea lions have diverse movement patterns during the nonbreeding period that intuitively reflects differences in the predictability or accessibility of preferred prey. Our findings challenge the long-standing notion that South American sea lions undertake a winter migration away from the Falkland Islands. Therefore, impediments to South American sea lion population recovery likely originate locally and conservation measures at a national level are likely to be effective in addressing the decline and the failure of the population to recover

Direct iminization of PEEK

Semi-crystalline poly(ether ketone)s are important high-temperature engineering thermoplastics, but are difficult to characterize at the molecular level because of their insolubility in conventional organic solvents. Here we report that polymers of this type, including PEEK, react cleanly at high temperatures with low-volatility aralkyl amines to afford stable, noncrystalline poly(ether-imine)s, which are readily soluble in solvents such as chloroform, THF and DMF and so characterizable by conventional size-exclusion chromatography

Towards a typology of non-state actors in ‘hybrid warfare’: proxy, auxiliary, surrogate and affiliated forces

This article presents a typology of armed non-state actors in hybrid warfare: proxy, auxiliary, surrogate and affiliated forces. By focusing on the kinetic domain of hybrid warfare, the article offers a corrective to a debate that has so far ignored variation in roles and functions of non-state actors and their relationships with states and their regular forces. As a denominator, ‘hybrid’ identifies a combination of battlespaces, types of operations—military or non-kinetic—and a blurring of actors with the scope of achieving strategic objectives by creating exploitable ambiguity. However, there has been a disproportionate focus on what hybrid war supposedly combines across battlespaces and domains (socio-political, economic, informational), at the expense of who and how. Using the Ukrainian crisis as a theory-building exercise, the article suggests a four-category schema that identifies non-state actor functions as a tool to better represent the complex franchise of violence that is found nested next to non-military operations in hybrid activity. In so doing, the article speaks to a call for better conceptualization the role of non-state violent actors in civil war, in general, and in hybrid warfare, in particular

Shearwater Foraging in the Southern Ocean: The Roles of Prey Availability and Winds

Background Sooty (Puffinus griseus) and short-tailed (P. tenuirostris) shearwaters are abundant seabirds that range widely across global oceans. Understanding the foraging ecology of these species in the Southern Ocean is important for monitoring and ecosystem conservation and management. Methodology/Principal Findings Tracking data from sooty and short-tailed shearwaters from three regions of New Zealand and Australia were combined with at-sea observations of shearwaters in the Southern Ocean, physical oceanography, near-surface copepod distributions, pelagic trawl data, and synoptic near-surface winds. Shearwaters from all three regions foraged in the Polar Front zone, and showed particular overlap in the region around 140°E. Short-tailed shearwaters from South Australia also foraged in Antarctic waters south of the Polar Front. The spatial distribution of shearwater foraging effort in the Polar Front zone was matched by patterns in large-scale upwelling, primary production, and abundances of copepods and myctophid fish. Oceanic winds were found to be broad determinants of foraging distribution, and of the flight paths taken by the birds on long foraging trips to Antarctic waters. Conclusions/Significance The shearwaters displayed foraging site fidelity and overlap of foraging habitat between species and populations that may enhance their utility as indicators of Southern Ocean ecosystems. The results highlight the importance of upwellings due to interactions of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current with large-scale bottom topography, and the corresponding localised increases in the productivity of the Polar Front ecosystem

(Re-)Emergent Orders: Understanding the Negotiation(s) of Rebel Governance

The concept of order is often neglected in the study of conflict – seemingly such a ‘disordering’ process. With the recent increase in the examination of rebel governance however, bringing order back into our understanding of rebel and insurgent groups has much to offer in exploring the everyday politics which connect authorities, rebel movements and the population itself, in a complex mass of intersubjective and power-based interactions and negotiations. Rebels both shape and are shaped by existing forms of order in complex and ongoing ways. This article explores how varying elements interact in the negotiation, framing and enforcement of order and develops an original analytical framework to examine the perpetual negotiations of rebel movements in their attempts to cement their control