Children in the Levant: Insights from Belgium on the dilemmas of repatriation and the challenges of reintegration

According to intelligence estimates, there are around 1,400 European children in Syria and Iraq, many of them born there. The fate of these children confronts European governments with moral, legal, political, diplomatic and security dilemmas. Governments are divided over the issue, but almost all are reluctant to address it head-on. None have taken a proactive stance with regard to these children, creating several security voids. This policy brief looks into the fate of these European children before exploring in more detail the situation of the Belgians among them. It analyses the position of the Belgian government with regard to repatriation and reviews existing policies concerning returning children. The authors end up with a number of recommendations for Belgian and European authorities, including a plea for a more proactive response

Children in the Levant: Insights from Belgium on the dilemmas of repatriation and the challenges of reintegration. Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 98 July 2018

According to intelligence estimates, there are around 1,400 European children in Syria and Iraq, many of them born there. The fate of these children confronts European governments with moral, legal, political, diplomatic and security dilemmas. Governments are divided over the issue, but almost all are reluctant to address it head-on. None have taken a proactive stance with regard to these children, creating several security voids. This policy brief looks into the fate of these European children before exploring in more detail the situation of the Belgians among them. It analyses the position of the Belgian government with regard to repatriation and reviews existing policies concerning returning children. The authors end up with a number of recommendations for Belgian and European authorities, including a plea for a more proactive response

Women's Autonomy and Subjective Well-Being in India: How Village Norms Shape the Impact of Self-Help Groups

This paper presents quasi-experimental impact estimates of women self-help groups on subjective well-being in Orissa, India. We find that, on average, self-help group membership does not affect subjective well-being. However, our results at the same time reveal that subjective well-being sharply declines for those members whose newly gained autonomy meets with relatively conservative social gender norms among non-members. We interpret this finding as evidence for heterogeneous losses of feelings of identity for self-help group members. Identity losses loom larger when women’s enhanced autonomy implies a stronger violation of social gender norms at the community level. Social sanctioning mechanisms play an important role in the heterogeneous negative impact on subjective well-being, as evidenced by qualitative accounts of women’s empowerment trajectories in the research area.Autonomy; Subjective Well-Being; Impact Evaluation; Identity; Sanctioning; India

Патриарх горного образования Сибири

Описан жизненный путь горного инженера Д. А. Стрельникова, профессора Томского политехнического института

Educating Professionals Leveraging Diversity in Globalizing Education

This chapter is based on the premise that globalization will lead to increased cultural diversity in educational settings that can be leveraged into enhanced learning capabilities for all those involved. It also posits that leveraging diversity can and will be used by universities while competing and cooperating globally. Much of the literature on globalization warns against market values increasingly dominating academic values and basic human needs, and against ‘Americanization’ or cultural homogenization. By distinguishing five categories of globalization effects on higher education, we argue that globalization is a much broader issue that leaves ample room for individual universities, faculties, business schools, and sections to construct their own responses to globalization and, in that way, help shape its future course. The second part of the chapter illustrates how one section of one university is responding to globalizing education. It discusses the learning by sharing concept and shows how this concept was used in three recent education initiatives to leverage diversity in the classroom. These initiatives indicate how the five globalization effects on higher education can be exploited in concrete educational settings. They also demonstrate that leveraging diversity is a learning process in itself. The lesson learned from these initiatives are therefore discussed in the final section

Мировоззренческие основания экоцентризма и экомышление

Проведен сравнительный анализ экоцентристских представлений в современной науке. Определено понятие экоцентризма как нового, экологического мировоззрения. Разработаны основные мировоззренческие установки экоцентризма, являющиеся альтернативными установкам мировоззрения антропоцентризма и натурцентризма. Формирование гносеологических установок экоцентризма рассмотрено на примере экологического мышления, т.е. мышления, в котором диалектически синтезируются логика и чувства в ходе исследования отношений общества и природы

The normalized freebase distance

In this paper, we propose the Normalized Freebase Distance (NFD), a new measure for determing semantic concept relatedness that is based on similar principles as the Normalized Web Distance (NWD). We illustrate that the NFD is more effective when comparing ambiguous concepts