Fostering an EU strategy for security sector reform in the Mediterranean: learning from Turkish and Palestinian police reform experiences

In the absence of an overarching strategy, Turkey and the Palestinian territories depict how the EU has adopted different approaches to security sector reform (SSR) which have not facilitated the consolidation of a common EU foreign policy, though the situation might soon change given respective SSR-related documents from the Council and Commission. This report contributes to the security sector debate by stressing that in conflict and post-conflict scenarios endurable SSR requires fomenting synergies between the police and judicial sectors and the inclusion of DDR, in tandem with the institutional implementation of transparent, accountable and democratic oversight mechanisms. There is an adamant need for constructive consistency when applying this central facet of EU foreign policy in the Mediterranean basin and beyond. SSR is an emerging phenomenon in conflict, post-conflict and development scenarios that has acquired a prominent role within the policy agendas of key international actors. As a prelude to the two case studies, and in order to better understand the EU’s end goal, a brief analysis of the two pivotal European SSR documents is provided with particular emphasis on their contribution to develop a more coherent and effective EU presence in this field. More specific consideration is then given to the role played by SSR-related matters within the framework of two EU foreign policy mechanisms towards the Mediterranean: the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), also known as the Barcelona Process, and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). The two case studies - Turkey and the Palestinian territories - are exceptional due to the nature of their geopolitical position in regional and international politics. Both demonstrate different levels of state development and different degrees of monopoly over the legitimate use of force, which have contributed to the development of different EU approaches to SSR, tailored to the specific needs of the local context in which the Union is operating. Both cases also demonstrate how the EU emphasizes democracy or security depending on the respective circumstantial differences. Turkey exemplifies by and large the EU accession process of fulfilling democratic reform in return for EU membership. The Palestinian case illustrates how security demands precede democratic apertures. Together, both highlight the lack of a consistent and comprehensive EU SSR strategy, the lack of which continues to impede the emergence of a common EU foreign policy. This study makes a set of recommendations for the two case studies, and concludes with more general ones applicable to the broader Euro-Mediterranean area. These are mainly addressed to the European Commission, Council of the EU (and thus, Member States) and European Parliament. Moreover, the conclusions and recommendations included in this report could inspire the work of various advocacy groups in the fields of SSR, conflict resolution and democracy and human rights promotion given that, based on the “human security” logic, this report departs from the assumption that police reform encapsulates both modernising and democratising processes

Play it Again: A Genealogy for Machine Learning

Contemporary discourses accompanying the deployment of machine learning tend to fit within a meta-narrative of automation. Whether heralded as inevitable or criticized as reductive, this process of automation tends to be considered as concurrent to technology’s extension in general. By drawing on the social and technical history of machine learning, I would like to suggest that play offers at least one other way of framing machine learning’s development, one that could help foster other expectations and evaluations of machine learning performances. The genealogy of machine learning I will provide draws on certain historical tropes to problematize  contemporary debates. I will distinguish two normative paradigms: automation and play. Each one expresses differing, albeit not incompatible values, expectations and objectives when evaluating machine behaviors and their interactions with human ones. Whereas automation pushes us to consider machines as ideally working by themselves, play requires a social and affective engagement whose outcome is always partially unpredictable. It helps account for the relative open-endedness, intractability and recursiveness of machine learning systems embedded in social practices. More specifically, I underline why play provides a sweet spot for thinking about performances such as those we are increasingly seeing in machine learning systems, that combine both rule-following behaviors and forms of improvisation upon those rules. Play includes automaticity as a level of behavior among others. The more general claim I am making is that play gives us a window onto a different history of machine learning and for imagining other forms of social interaction with and through technology.&nbsp

Maximising Social Interactions and Effectiveness within Distance Learning Courses: Cases from Construction

Advanced Internet technologies have revolutionised the delivery of distance learning education. As a result, the physical proximity between learners and the learning providers has become less important. However, whilst the pervasiveness of these technological developments has reached unprecedented levels, critics argue that the student learning experience is still not as effective as conventional face-to-face delivery. In this regard, surveys of distance learning courses reveal that there is often a lack of social interaction attributed to this method of delivery, which tends to leave learners feeling isolated due to a lack of engagement, direction, guidance and support by the tutor. This paper defines and conceptualises this phenomenon by investigating the extent to which distance-learning programmes provide the social interactions of an equivalent traditional classroom setting. In this respect, two distance learning case studies were investigated, covering the UK and Slovenian markets respectively. Research findings identified that delivery success is strongly dependent on the particular context to which the specific distance learning course is designed, structured and augmented. It is therefore recommended that designers of distance learning courses should balance the tensions and nuances associated with commercial viability and pedagogic effectiveness

Aliénation, travail et culture technique chez Simondon

L’article cherche à problématiser l’articulation du travail, de l’aliénation et de la culture technique dans la philosophie de Gilbert Simondon et ce à partir de l’enjeu contemporain du machine learning et à travers une confrontation avec Marx

CourseEditor: A course planning tool compatible with IMS-LD

For the successful adoption of Computer Based Learning (CBL), it is necessary to provide teachers with user-friendly authoring tools that guide them in the process of planning a course. It is important that the documents generated by these tools are compliant with CBL standards to ensure that the instructional designs made by the teachers remain valid regardless of the Learning Management System (LMS) used to deliver the course. IMS-Learning Design (IMS-LD) is one of the most accepted specifications by the educational community for modeling of learning processes. There are some authoring-tools that allow export learning designs in IMS-LD but they are not course-planning oriented. In addition, a big challenge is how to improve the user interfaces of these tools in order to be easier to use for regular teachers. This paper presents CourseEditor, a course planning authoring tool that allows a teacher to describe the complete planning of a course (objectives, contents, methodology, and evaluation) and export the results in an IMS-LD compatible format. The paper provides a novel modeling of course planning that takes into account ideas from different instructional theories. CourseEditor combines power and flexibility, with the simplicity of an interface that can be used by teachers with no technical background. The paper illustrates the use of the tool creating a course on Telematic Services in the context of a Telecommunications Engineering degree. In addition, the relationships of course planning and IMS-LD are presented, showing which information of course planning can be represented in IMS-LD and which not. (c) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 421-431, 2013This research has been partially funded by the following projects: project "Learn3: Towards Learning of the Third Kind" funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant No. TIN2008-05163/TSI and project E_MADRID: "Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías para el e-Learning en la Comunidad de Madrid" funded by the Madrid Regional Government under grant No. S2009/TIC-1650.Publicad

Europe’s Lopsided Foreign Policy Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinians

Working Paper Series #

Germany's contribution to Lebanese sovereignty: the Maritime Task Force, Coastal Radar System and Border Pilot Project

"Seit dem Ende des Israel-Libanon-Krieges im Sommer 2006 leistet Deutschland nicht nur als Führungsnation des maritimen Einsatzverbandes der UNIFIL-II-Schutztruppe der Vereinten Nationen einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Konsolidierung des Libanon. Im Rahmen der bilateralen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit baut die Bundesrepublik auch das Küstenradar der libanesischen Marine wieder auf, im Norden des Landes entlang der Grenze zu Syrien werden libanesische Soldaten, Polizisten, Zoll- und Grenzbeamte in einem Pilotprojekt an Verfahren des integrierten Grenzmanagements herangeführt und ausgebildet. Auch wenn – oder gerade weil – diese Aktivitäten weniger im öffentlichen Rampenlicht zu stehen scheinen, sind sie umso mehr geeignet, den Libanesen die Souveränität über ihr eigenes Land und dessen Grenzen zurückzugeben, und sollten daher in bewährter, zurückhaltender Weise fortgeführt werden. Die in Brüssel diskutierte Überführung erfolgreicher Pilotprojekte in eine EU-Mission könnte dagegen kontraproduktiv wirken." (Autorenreferat