Post-conflict Statebuilding and State Legitimacy: From Negative to Positive Peace?

This version of this article has the following title: Statebuilding 3.0: building local legitimacy, essential security and global governance. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: ROBERTS, D., 2008. Post-conflict statebuilding and state legitimacy: from negative to positive peace? Development and Change, 39 (4), pp. 537-555, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2008.00495.x. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.This article is concerned with the potential that statebuilding interventions have to institutionalize social justice, in addition to their more immediate 'negative' peace mandates, and the impact this might have, both on local state legitimacy and the character of the 'peace' that might follow. Much recent scholarship has stressed the legitimacy of a state's behaviour in relation to conformity to global governance norms or democratic 'best practice'. Less evident is a discussion of the extent to which post-conflict polities are able to engender the societal legitimacy central to political stability. As long as this level of legitimacy is absent (and it is hard to generate), civil society is likely to remain distant from the state, and peace and stability may remain elusive. A solution to this may be to apply existing international legislation centred in the UN and the ILO to compel international organizations and national states to deliver basic needs security through their institutions. This has the effect of stimulating local-level state legitimacy while simultaneously formalizing social justice and positive peacebuilding

Audio source separation into the wild

International audienceThis review chapter is dedicated to multichannel audio source separation in real-life environment. We explore some of the major achievements in the field and discuss some of the remaining challenges. We will explore several important practical scenarios, e.g. moving sources and/or microphones, varying number of sources and sensors, high reverberation levels, spatially diffuse sources, and synchronization problems. Several applications such as smart assistants, cellular phones, hearing aids and robots, will be discussed. Our perspectives on the future of the field will be given as concluding remarks of this chapter

Burning flint: An experimental approach to study the effect of fire on flint tools

Burnt lithic artefacts are regularly discarded from microwear analyses, causing a bias in the functional interpretation of prehistoric sites. This is especially true when burnt lithics are numerous as is typically the case on Mesolithic sites in Northern Belgium. Burnt stone artefacts potentially hold information regarding the functional, spatial, and social organisation of the site. Therefore, investigating the impact of burning on lithic tools, and especially on the preservation of microwear traces is crucial. In this paper, we present the experimental approach developed to tackle this problem. Flint tool replicas were burnt in several open fire experiments, organised to reproduce conditions that were realistic to those of the original prehistoric contexts. This way, we could evaluate the impact of different fuel types on the longevity and intensity of the fire. These experiments provide essential information on the effects of heat on the physical aspects of flint artefacts. Therefore, the relation between raw material characteristics and the degree of burning is studied as well. In addition, the results of the open fire experiments could be related to the spatial distribution of burnt flints in surface hearths. The findings are interpreted on a socio-economical level in order to better understand how and why lithics could have ended up in fire