What Is It Like To Be a Non-Permanent Member of The UN Security Council? Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 96 May 2018

The UN Security Council undoubtedly is the most prominent body of the world organization’s institutional machinery. Through its key executive decisionmaking powers it addresses conflicts and crises which constitute threats to international peace and security. Its decisions are binding on the entire membership. While the five permanent members of the Security Council have a pretty clear view on their role in the Council (permanence indeed helps), that is less so for the non-permanent members (potentially the bulk of the remaining 188 UN members) who only intermittently experience the Council, if at all. This paper addresses the question of ‘what is it like’ to be a non-permanent member of the Security Council in a straightforward way. No grand theories or speculative flights are involved. Just sound common sense. But common sense, as some of us know, can be a scarce resource

Geoweb 2.0 for Participatory Urban Design: Affordances and Critical Success Factors

In this paper, we discuss the affordances of open-source Geoweb 2.0 platforms to support the participatory design of urban projects in real-world practices.We first introduce the two open-source platforms used in our study for testing purposes. Then, based on evidence from five different field studies we identify five affordances of these platforms: conversations on alternative urban projects, citizen consultation, design empowerment, design studio learning and design research. We elaborate on these in detail and identify a key set of success factors for the facilitation of better practices in the future

A world in flux. Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 92 November 2017

Scholars and pundits alike have been qualifying our times as of “transition and turbulence”, “disorder” and “strategic unease”. Other concepts that recur in discussions on the present state of the world are ‘uncertainty’ and ‘unpredictability’. They all seem to point to a world in flux. Let’s see what that means

Solutions for a single carrier 40 Gbit/s downstream long-reach passive optical network

This paper presents a single carrier 40 Gbit/s downstream long-reach passive optical network (LR-PON) topology as candidate for upgrading cur rent f ber infrastructure towards higher data rates. A 100 km LR-PON network was investigated and 2 solutions to overcome chromatic dispersion were proposed. Firstly, a dispersion compensated element is added to compensate the mean length of the feeder f ber. Secondly, an advanced modulation scheme, i.e. 3-level electrical duo-binary is introduced. This scheme has the advantage of allowing lower bandwidth APDs and requires only limited additional electronics. Furthermore, to overcome the inherent discrepancy between aggregated line rate and user rate, and hence the reduced power effciency, the BiPON protocol is added to minimize signal processing at the high line rates

Fast determination of instability in a nonlinear Clock and Data Recovery circuit

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