Islamic Morality in Late Ottoman “SECULAR” Schools

Recent scholarship has taken great strides toward integrating the history of the late Ottoman Empire into world history. By moving beyond the view that the West was the prime agent for change in the East, historians have shed new light on indigenous efforts aimed at repositioning the state, reconceptualizing knowledge, and restructuring “society.”1 A comparative perspective has helped students of the period recognize that the late Ottoman Empire shared and took action against many of the same problems confronting its contemporaries, East and West. The assertion of Ottoman agency has been critical to finishing off the stereotype of the “sick man of Europe,” but the persistent legacies of modernization theory and nationalist historiography continue to obscure our view of the period.</jats:p

Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After

This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access. This volume explores the ways childhood was experienced, lived and remembered in the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when rapid change placed unprecedented demands on the young

Every Story Has a Beginning, Middle, and an End (But Not Always in That Order): Predicting Duration Dynamics in a Unified Framework

There are three fundamental duration dynamics of civil conflicts: time until conflict onset, conflict duration, and time until conflict recurrence. Theoretical and empirical models of war usually focus on one or at most two aspects of these three important duration dynamics. We present a new split-population seemingly unrelated duration estimator that treats pre-conflict duration, conflict duration, and post-conflict duration as interdependent processes thus permitting improved predictions about the onset, duration, and recurrence of civil conflict. Our findings provide support for the more fundamental idea that prediction is dependent on a good approximation of the theoretically implied underlying data-generating process. In addition, we account for the fact that some countries might never experience these duration dynamics or become immune after experiencing them in the past

Choosing Terror: Rebels' Use of Terrorism in Civil Wars

The Ohio State University Mershon Center for International Security StudiesPage Fortna is professor of political science at Columbia University and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars, war termination, and terrorism.Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web Page, Streaming Video, Event Photo

Winning the Peace Locally: UN Peacekeeping and Local Conflict

It remains contested whether peacekeeping works. The impact of peacekeepers? actions at the local (or subnational) level for overall mission success has lately received critical attention. Local peacekeeping is expected to matter because it re-assures local actors, deters resumption of armed hostilities, coerces parties to halt fighting, and makes commitment to agreements credible. Thus peacekeepers affect the relations between central and local elites and avoid the emergence of local power vacuums and areas of lawlessness. This study uses new subnational data on the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers. It uses matching and recursive bivariate probit models with exogenous variables for temporal and spatial variation to deal with possible non-random assignment of the treatment. It is demonstrated that conflict episodes last shorter when peacekeepers are deployed to conflict-prone locations inside a country, even with comparatively modest deployment. The effect of peacekeeping on the onset of local conflict is, however, less clear-cut

Gene Duplication: The Genomic Trade in Spare Parts

The duplication of genes and their subsequent diversification has had a key role in evolution. A range of fates can befall a duplicated gen

On the Frontline Every Day? Subnational Deployment of United Nations Peacekeepers

United Nations (UN) peacekeepers tend to be deployed to ‘hard-to-resolve’ civil wars. Much less is known about where peacekeepers are deployed within a country. However, to assess peacekeepers’ contribution to peace, it matters whether they are deployed to conflict or relatively safe areas. This article examines subnational UN peacekeeping deployment, contrasting an ‘instrumental’ logic of deployment versus a logic of ‘convenience’. These logics are evaluated using geographically and temporally disaggregated data on UN peacekeepers’ deployment in eight African countries between 1989 and 2006. The analysis demonstrates that peacekeepers are deployed on the frontline: they go where conflict occurs, but there is a notable delay in their deployment. Furthermore, peacekeepers tend to be deployed near major urban areas

Do Child Soldiers Influence UN Peacekeeping?

The use of child soldiers in conflicts has received increasing academic attention in recent years. This article examines post-conflict periods to see whether the use of child soldiers mobilizes United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKO) in the aftermath of a conflict. Taking into consideration how child soldiers affect conflict and how important their reintegration is to sustainable peace and post-conflict development, we analyse whether the presence of child soldiers in a civil war increases the likelihood of the presence of a PKO. We argue that the UN deems a conflict with child soldiers as a difficult case for conflict resolution, necessitating a response from the international community. This is in line with our empirical results confirming that the use of child soldiers significantly increases the likelihood of peacekeeping

Gene Family Size Conservation Is a Good Indicator of Evolutionary Rates

The evolution of duplicate genes has been a topic of broad interest. Here, we propose that the conservation of gene family size is a good indicator of the rate of sequence evolution and some other biological properties. By comparing the human–chimpanzee–macaque orthologous gene families with and without family size conservation, we demonstrate that genes with family size conservation evolve more slowly than those without family size conservation. Our results further demonstrate that both family expansion and contraction events may accelerate gene evolution, resulting in elevated evolutionary rates in the genes without family size conservation. In addition, we show that the duplicate genes with family size conservation evolve significantly more slowly than those without family size conservation. Interestingly, the median evolutionary rate of singletons falls in between those of the above two types of duplicate gene families. Our results thus suggest that the controversy on whether duplicate genes evolve more slowly than singletons can be resolved when family size conservation is taken into consideration. Furthermore, we also observe that duplicate genes with family size conservation have the highest level of gene expression/expression breadth, the highest proportion of essential genes, and the lowest gene compactness, followed by singletons and then by duplicate genes without family size conservation. Such a trend accords well with our observations of evolutionary rates. Our results thus point to the importance of family size conservation in the evolution of duplicate genes