UN Mediation in the Syrian Crisis

Thinking About Mediation UN mediation in Syria for the decade of the 2010s since the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011 has failed because the conflict was not ripe. To arrive at that evaluation, one has to understand the basic challenges a mediator faces and the paths followed by the three UN mediators, Kofi Anan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Stafan de Mistura.2 Five basic challenges— agency, entry, strategy, leverage, inclusivity—confront a mediator on the pursuit of his/her efforts, and will be used as the framework for the following analysis. These challenges have been identified because they encompass the major parameters of the mediation process. They correspond to several headings emphasized in the UN Guidance for Effective Mediation3 and highlight principal obstacles in the cardinal variables— actors (agency, inclusivity), structure (entry), process (leverage), strategy, and outcome—used in negotiation analysis.

Case Study: Intervention in Sierra Leone

Case Study Prepared for Intervention in Internal ConflictSierra Leone is a case of state collapse, in which the conflicts of the 1990s were not an independent event but merely the work of the maggots on a dead body. Thus no intervention could have done anything more, at best, than removing the momentary parasites taking advantage of the situation. It would require a longer, deeper, and more sustained effort of the Sierra Leoneans, necessarily with help from the international community, to restore a functioning political, economic and social structure necessary to prevent a recurrence of conflict. At the same time, it is noteworthy that this internal conflict was not an ethnic conflict, despite some secondary ethnic ramifications. The collapse of the Sierra Leonean state, already a weak creation of colonization and decolonization, took place under the long reign of Siaka Stevens (1968-85) and his All Peoples Congress (APC) drawing primarily on the interior Temne and Limba people from the northern part of the country, reacting against the previous predominance of the coastal Mende people from the south and east. Collapse was consummated under Stevens" handpicked, ineptsuccessor, Gen. Joseph Momoh, overthrown by dissatisfied junior officers led by Capt Valentine Strasser in April 1992. The main rebel groups operated under the name of the Revolutionary United Force (RUF), led by ex-cpl Foday Sankoh and Samuel Bokarie and operating with the active support of the rebel movement and then the government of Liberia under Charles Taylor. The rebellion expanded into neighboring countries and then wore down under the falling away of external and internal support

Heat transfer from acoustically resonating gas flames in a cylindrical burner

Heat transfer from premixed propane-air flames to the cooled wall of a 5-in. I.D. ramjet type of burner was studied with and without flame-generated, sonic oscillations. Frequency and amplitude measurements revealed that both transverse and longitudinal waves were resonant. The heat flux to the wall was increased significantly by the oscillations, but the gas temperature profile was changed very little. The local heat transfer coefficient was found to be a linear function of the sound pressure amplitude and independent of the mode and frequency of the resonant oscillations.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/37318/1/690070412_ftp.pd