The Crisis in Arms Control

There is general agreement among observers of contemporary international affairs, and national and international officials from all sides, that there is a serious crisis in arms control. As of January 1984, the Soviet Union had broken off two major arms control negotiations: the Intermediate- Range Nuclear Force Talks (INF) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). Negotiations in the United Nations Conference on Disarmament (CD) on a variety of arms control issues were stalemated. The United States was engaged in a large-scale military build up, and there was no sign that the Soviet Union would abate the extensive military programs that it had started in the 1960\u27s; indeed, its leadership had declared that the USSR would match U.S. efforts. Rhetorical exchanges between the United States and the USSR were harsh. Each side had publicly accused the other of violating existing arms control agreements. Since the signing of the limited nuclear weapon test ban treaty the prospects for arms control had never appeared bleaker

A Tribute from a Political Scientist

Political scientists who specialize in international relations knew Bill Bishop as the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law, the author of the classic text in international law, and the teacher of our former students. A fortunate few of us, at Princeton before he joined the faculty of the Michigan Law School and at Michigan after his formal retirement, knew him as a superb teacher of international law to undergraduate students in political science courses. However we knew him, we had and have immense respect, admiration, and affection for him

John H. Jackson and the University of Michigan

A Tribute to John H. Jackso

Accountability and Democracy in the Case of Using Force under International Auspices

This presentation derives from a large research project that has been more than three years in progress and reflects the work of a multinational team of lawyers, policy analysts, and political scientists. The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and will conclude at the end of 2000 with the completion of a book that will cover the experience of nine democracies in deploying their military forces under international auspices as this experience relates to two large questions. The project examines two questions: What is the interactive relationship between international commitments and national constitutional and political requirements? How does this relationship work for democracies, and does it ensure accountability, including democratic accountability for decisions made by international institutions? But why examine democracies and why examine issues of the use of military forces? Democracies, starting with the United States, are world powers that play crucial roles in maintaining international order. Democracies require some measure of popular support for actions taken by their governments. The question for this project is: What level of popular support and what level of accountability are required, and how are these achieved in democracies? These questions are fundamental to assessing the viability of any post-Cold War security system. The military action by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Kosovo added an unexpected element to the study after the project got underway, and introduced the international legal ambiguities and national questions of acting without the authorization of the UN Security Council. The Kosovo action demonstrated that the post-Cold War system as a revival of the post-World War II system was not adequate to address the conflicts of the post-Cold War period, and that the security packages represented by the United Nations and NATO needed to be reconsidered both internationally and nationally to fit the problems of today

Pathways of Understanding: the Interactions of Humanity and Global Environmental Change

How humans, interacting within social systems, affect and are affected by global change is explored. Recognizing the impact human activities have on the environment and responding to the need to document the interactions among human activities, the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) commissioned a group of 12 scientists to develop a framework illustrating the key human systems that contribute to global change. This framework, called the Social Process Diagram, will help natural and social scientists, educators, resource managers and policy makers envision and analyze how human systems interact among themselves and with the natural system. The Social Process Diagram consists of the following blocks that constitute the Diagram's structural framework: (1) fund of knowledge and experience; (2) preferences and expectations; (3) factors of production and technology; (4) population and social structure; (5) economic systems; (6) political systems and institutions; and (7) global scale environmental processes. To demonstrate potential ways the Diagram can be used, this document includes 3 hypothetical scenarios of global change issues: global warming and sea level rise; the environmental impact of human population migration; and energy and the environment. These scenarios demonstrate the Diagram's usefulness for visualizing specific processes that might be studied to evaluate a particular global change issues. The scenario also shows that interesting and unanticipated questions may emerge as links are explored between categories on the Diagram

Revolutionaries or Bargainers?: Negotiators for a New International Economic Order

This interview-based study analyzes the attitudes and negotiating behavior of 80 individuals, principally from less developed countries (LDCs), who were participants in international economic negotiations in 1976. Some of the more important findings are: (1) negotiators' views are more diverse than analyses of roll-call votes would indicate; (2) the positions that countries take appear to be firmly grounded in national political processes and in pragmatic conceptions of their national interests; (3) negotiators from LDCs with higher per capita GNP are more likely than those from LDCs with lower per capita GNP to perceive the negotiations as being polarized, to regard social issues as important elements of development strategies, and to take advantage of regional cooperation in negotiating; they are less likely to have negative views toward transnational corporation

Exploring International Law: Opportunities and Challenges for Political Science Research

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148360/1/1521-9488.00223.pd

The Deglaciation of Maine, USA

The glacial geology of Maine records the northward recession of the Late Wisconsinan Laurentide Ice Sheet, followed by development of a residual ice cap in the Maine-Québec border region due to marine transgression of the St. Lawrence Lowland in Canada. The pattern of deglaciation across southern Maine has been reconstructed from numerous end moraines, deltas and submarine fans deposited during marine transgression of the coastal lowland. Inland from the marine limit, a less-detailed sequence of deglaciation is recorded by striation patterns, meltwater channels, scattered moraines and waterlain deposits that constrain the trend of the ice margin. There is no evidence that the northern Maine ice cap extended as far south-west as the Boundary Mountains and New Hampshire border. Newly-obtained radiocarbon ages from marine and terrestrial ice-proximal environments have improved the chronology of glacial recession in Maine. Many of these ages were obtained by coring late-glacial sediments beneath ponds and lakes. Data from this study show that the state was deglaciated between about 14.5 and 11.0 ka BP (14C years). The coastal moraine belt in southern Maine was deposited by oscillatory ice-margin retreat during the cold pre-Bølling time. Rapid ice recession to northern Maine then occurred between 13 and 11 ka BP, during the warmer Bølling/Allerød chronozones. Radiocarbon-dated pond sediments in western and northern Maine show lithologic evidence of Younger Dryas climatic cooling and persistence of the northern ice cap into Younger Dryas time. A large discrepancy still exists between radiocarbon ages of deglaciation in coastal south-western Maine and the timing of ice retreat indicated by New England varve records in areas to the west. Part of this problem may stem from the uncertainty of reservoir corrections applied to the radiocarbon ages of marine organics

Using XML and XSLT for flexible elicitation of mental-health risk knowledge

Current tools for assessing risks associated with mental-health problems require assessors to make high-level judgements based on clinical experience. This paper describes how new technologies can enhance qualitative research methods to identify lower-level cues underlying these judgements, which can be collected by people without a specialist mental-health background. Methods and evolving results: Content analysis of interviews with 46 multidisciplinary mental-health experts exposed the cues and their interrelationships, which were represented by a mind map using software that stores maps as XML. All 46 mind maps were integrated into a single XML knowledge structure and analysed by a Lisp program to generate quantitative information about the numbers of experts associated with each part of it. The knowledge was refined by the experts, using software developed in Flash to record their collective views within the XML itself. These views specified how the XML should be transformed by XSLT, a technology for rendering XML, which resulted in a validated hierarchical knowledge structure associating patient cues with risks. Conclusions: Changing knowledge elicitation requirements were accommodated by flexible transformations of XML data using XSLT, which also facilitated generation of multiple data-gathering tools suiting different assessment circumstances and levels of mental-health knowledge

Content analysis of elite articulations

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67140/2/10.1177_002200276400800406.pd