After the cold war : security for development

If the Cold War is ending, the paradigm that has framed national security agendas for forty plus years must change. Threats to the environment, instant global communications, access to changing science and technology, and deepening economic interdependence are rapidly eroding national sovereignity and blurring foreign and domestic policy. How the multilateral financial institutions decide to respond to forces for economic reform in Eastern Europe and to advance peace processes underway or imminent in Africa, Asia and Central America, could be as important to the advancement of world order as support for reconstruction and development was for Europe 40 years ago. Multilateral finance and development institutions can ease the transition to a new post bipolar global security regime beneficial to developing countries. They can : 1) prepare briefs on regional and civil conflicts to aid long range planning and assistance for peacekeeping; 2) promote greater regional cooperation in trade, environmental management, communications, and education; 3) integrate the democratizing nations of Eastern Europe into the world economy; and 4) design long range approaches to involve developing countries in international efforts to deal with the degradation of the world's vital atmospheric, marine tropical, water, and biological resources.International Affairs,Post Conflict Reconstruction,Post Conflict Reconstruction,Governance Indicators,Children and Youth

Deaf Students in Mainstreamed College Composition Courses Culture and Pedagogy.

Composition theorists have already considered the effect of cultural constructs on writing students and have modified pedagogical practices to meet the needs of diverse students. However, disability has remained an almost invisible category in composition studies. This is unfortunate because our society has historically limited the access of the disabled into society, including the academy. Composition teachers need to understand deafness because poor English literacy skills are one culturally constructed attribute associated with hearing loss. The need is especially great now that legal and social developments are encouraging more deaf students to enroll in hearing majority colleges. Also, high-level literacy is even more important for the deaf than for hearing people, because written English is a channel of communication unaffected by hearing loss. This study examines the problem through personal experience, classroom observation, and review of relevant research. Elements of both hearing culture and deaf culture combine to give the average deaf high school graduate fourth-grade literacy skills. Most deaf children fall behind in language learning not because they are cognitively deficient but because they do not receive enough meaningful linguistic input. Schooling and hearing culture contribute to their literacy deficit by not meeting the developmental needs of deaf children. The written English problems of deaf students resemble those of ESL students. The deaf writer\u27s lack of meaningful use of English, coupled with a related poverty of content knowledge, explains the low literacy achievement of the average deaf high school graduate; deaf students with more language exposure have more advanced literacy skills. This study also suggests pedagogy to help composition teachers modify classroom culture to integrate deaf students. Since deaf students depend on vision for receiving information, teachers should use all opportunities to provide information visually and cooperate with any support services the student uses. Teacher should facilitate interaction between deaf and hearing students and make sure assignments and class activities are accessible to deaf students. If the course readings are chosen to represent a diversity, the teacher can include readings on deafness and other disabilities. Integration of deaf students into our composition classes should enrich the experience for everyone

Media, Elections and Political Violence in Eastern Africa: Towards a Comparative Framework

The problem of post-election violence seems to be ever-more present as complexities of nation-building and democratic development arise. This report deals with some relevant questions. It is based on the outcome of discussions at a December 2008 workshop organized in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford, the Center for Global Communications Studies at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania and the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research. Our objective was to examine the role of the media in the aftermath of competitive elections. The workshop provided the opportunity to explore the election experiences of Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Somaliland, Tanzania and Sudan in a comparative framework. The focus was on understanding why election violence occurred after some elections, what the role of the media was in either exacerbating or resolving disputes, and what this suggests about the broader political project and the state of the media in the countries under examination. This report is only an introduction to the subject. Additional structured research will be important in furthering our understanding of these important issues, but we hope that this provides a starting point from which to launch deeper studies. As a way of furthering research in this area, this report suggests three ways of analyzing the role of the media can play in post-election violence: 1) as an amplifier, facilitating and accelerating the spread of messages that both encourage violence or appeal for peaceful resolutions; 2) as a mirror, offering either an accurate or somewhat distorted reflection of the state and nation-building process; and 3) as an enabler, contributing to the process of nation-building. We conclude by offering media policy recommendations

Public Opinion Research in a Conflict Zone: Grassroots Diplomacy in Darfur

This paper outlines a research framework to assess attitudes towards peace and conflict and support a form of “grassroots diplomacy” in conflict and post-conflict societies. Based on research in Darfur conducted in 2007-2008, a combination of methods that can be effective tools for addressing this challenge is detailed. The intent is to provide a framework that others interested in research in conflict areas can implement in different scenarios

Inequalities and content moderation

As the harms of hate speech, mis/disinformation and incitement to violence on social media have become increasingly apparent, calls for regulation have accelerated. Most of these debates have centred around the needs and concerns of large markets such as the EU and the United States, or the aggressive approach countries such as Russia and China adopt to regulate online content. Our focus in this article is with the rest, the smaller markets at the periphery of the advertising industry, and the deep inequalities that current approaches to content moderation perpetuate. We outline the depth of the unequal practice of moderation, particularly across Africa, and explore the underlying political and economic factors driving this gap. While recognizing content moderation has many limitations, we conclude by underlining potential approaches to increase oversight in content moderation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

China in Africa: A New Approach to Media Development?

This report is based on the outcomes of the workshop organized by the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP) at the University of Oxford and the Stanhope Centre for communications Policy Research. The workshop reflected on China’s growing influence in Africa’s communications sector and on the implications this has on the prevailing local and Western approaches to media assistance and media development in Africa and beyond. It brought together researchers from Africa, China, and Europe to build a common research agenda and to develop an innovative and multi-actor approach to studying the transformations experienced by media systems in an increasingly multi-polar world

Online speech and offline violence: Reflections on the current violence in Ethiopia

Drawing on the author’s keynote at the Forum Media and Development (fome) in 2021, this article explores some of the assumptions between social media content and offline violence, particularly in Africa, and with special reference to the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia. As with previous studies on radio and violence, much of the current debate about social media has been driven by simplistic models of behaviour that attribute little or no agency to the communities and individuals involved, and minimize the contexts, including the history, in which the violence is occurring. While there are very real concerns about the failure of BigTech to moderate online content particularly in African markets which are peripheral to their profit models, there is an urgent need for a more nuanced approach to understanding the significant variance as to how communities interpret and respond to information they receive from different actors, and on very different mediums, in situations of violent conflict