Ajara: A New Russian Option in Georgia?; Strategic Insights, v. 8, issue 1(January 2009)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.8, issue 1(January 2009)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Negotiating the Future: NLRA Paradigm and the Prospects for Labor Law Reform

Japan\u27s rising economic prowess in the 1980\u27s and its penetration of the North American automobile marketplace produced a major economic restructuring. Seven Asian automobile assembly plants, along with four Japanese-Big Three joint ventures, and GM\u27s Saturn were built across the industrial heartland of the United States and Canada.\u27 This common experience, accompanied by a transformation in industrial production methods and the reorganization of work defined in terms of Japanese lean production techniques and cooperative labor relations, created a crisis for the Fordist regime of industrial production, its system of labor-management relations, and organized labor. Lean production has also created a crisis for the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) paradigm. The NLRA, the legal foundation for United States and Canadian labor-management relations, carves out a limited right for labor to organize, to negotiate with management over wages, hours, and working conditions, and to take concerted action, but which otherwise gives labor and management a considerable freedom to privately determine the substance of their collectively bargained contracts

The Historic Russian Drive for a Warm Water Port: Anatomy of a Geopolitical Myth

It is common wisdom that Russia has exhibited a historic drive for warm water ports. This view is widely held in the English-speaking world and is frequently used whenever tensions are high as an explanation for Russian foreign policy and behavior

The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in theSoviet-Afghan War

What could be both more poignant and ludicrous than Commander Abdul Baqi Balots’s account of his survival of a firefight in which his closest friend was killed? “I saw a lot of Soviets coming at me and they were all firing (they put ten bullet holes through my baggy trousers).... Habib Noor told me that, un- less we crossed the stream to the north, we would not be able to engage the Soviets. . . . I ran across and jumped but landed directly into the stream. ‘Oh, Al- lah,’ I cried, ‘you have killed me without dignity.’ Then I made a big jump, I don’t know how since even a tank can’t clear it, but I did and got out of the stream.

South Texas Garden at old Fort Brown

Discusses the establishment of the South Texas Garden at Fort Brown, as well as the first telegraph in America. Includes images of the South Texas Garden before and after plowing it.https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/gulfcoastmag/1034/thumbnail.jp