Search

Begin New Search Topic Conflict Resolution Publication Year within 25 Years

1321. OECD Guidelines for Managing Conflict of Interest in the Public Service

Publication Date:
09-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Abstract:
Conflict of interest has become a key issue in public debate worldwide in recent years, not just in the private sector but also increasingly in the public sector. The breaking down of barriers between public and private sectors — through the privatisation of services, public/private partnerships and exchanges of personnel — has created grey zones and opportunities for corruption. For instance, conflicts between public officials' individual private interests and their public duties have multiplied due to the contracting out of government functions such as defence. Temporary public service employees could in particular use information that is not available to the public concerning defence department policies to obtain contracts with future clients.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Government, and Privatization

1322. Temporality and Intervention Effects: Trajectory Analysis of a Homeless Mental Health Program

Author:
Mary Clare Lennon, William McAllister, Li Kuang, and Daniel Herman
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University
Abstract:
Intervention analyses which incorporate temporality over a followup period typically note differences in the patterns of "single-curves" for each the experimental and control groups or differences in temporally-based taxonomies between experimentals and controls. But the former fails to allow for the possibility of subgroups of multiple trajectories and the latter collapses time (e.g., average spell durations) and arbitrarily creates cut-points to form its taxonomies. This paper investigates the utility for intervention research of using latent class growth analysis (LCGA). This method incorporates the more complete temporal information used by single-curve approaches to statistically identify the multiple subgroups at the heart of the taxonomic approach. We do this by reanalyzing a critical time intervention study (CTI) of homeless mentally ill men that used both single-curve and taxonomic approaches. By finding, among other things, differences between experimentals and controls in the number, sizes and patterns of latent subgroups than were found in the prior analysis, we suggest the utility of LCGA for assessing service interventions.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Education, and Human Welfare

1323. Natural Resources and Contemporary Conflicts

Author:
Jean-François Gagné
Publication Date:
09-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Raoul Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal
Abstract:
Natural resources are frequently associated with violence or at least with tensions: 85% of countries where wars (in most cases, civil wars) were under way in 2003 possessed abundant natural resources. While there are no precise figures on low-intensity conflicts, we do know that many ad hoc armed interventions, popular uprisings and other destabilizing events that have the potential to lead to larger flare-ups are also concentrated in resource-rich countries.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Development, Economics, and War

1324. Expansionary Fiscal Shocks and the Trade Deficit

Author:
Luca Guerrieri, Christopher Gust, and Christopher Erceg
Publication Date:
01-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
In this paper, we use an open economy DGE model (SIGMA) to assess the quantitative effects of fiscal shocks on the trade balance in the United States. We examine the effects of two alternative fiscal shocks: a rise in government consumption, and a reduction in the labor income tax rate. Our salient finding is that a fiscal deficit has a relatively small effect on the U.S. trade balance, irrespective of whether the source is a spending increase or tax cut. In our benchmark calibration, we find that a rise in the fiscal deficit of one percentage point of GDP induces the trade balance to deteriorate by less than 0.2 percentage point of GDP. Noticeably larger effects are only likely to be elicited under implausibly high values of the short-run trade price elasticity.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

1325. Global and National Trends Affecting the Protection of Human Rights: Discussion Document

Publication Date:
05-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Carter Center
Abstract:
This represents a summary of major issues discussed by participants in the Human Rights Defender Policy Forum organized by The Carter Center and Human Rights First in Atlanta. It is not an exhaustive review of the discussions, nor does it necessarily represent the views of any of the individual participants in the meeting or the organizations they represent. A full report of the meeting will be issued later this year.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Globalization, and Human Rights

1326. The Powers and Pathologies of Military Networks: Insights from the Political Cybernetics of Karl W. Deutsch and Norbert Wiener

Author:
Hayward R. Alker
Publication Date:
04-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Probably best known nowadays as a distinguished political scientist, a scholar of nations, nationalism and the formation of international security communities, Karl W. Deutsch also wrote a lot about networks before they were popular subjects for strategic analysis Indeed, Deutsch's title for The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control explicitly parallels Norbert Wiener's specificational subtitle of his subject-defining book on cybernetics: Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. One of Deutsch's greatest passions was the development and application of cybernetic theories to the “nerves” or “neural networks” of social, including governmental and inter-governmental, entities and processes, including the development and disintegration of nations and international communities. So conceived, they can have important human-like capacities. For example, “will may be defined in any sufficiently complex net, nervous system or social group [e.g. a nation] as the set of … internally labeled decisions and anticipated results, proposed by the application of results from the system's past and by the blocking of incompatible impulses or data from the system's present or future.” Indeed, Deutsch defined a nation as a special kind of people -- “a large, general-purpose communication net of human beings.” Like some states, pluralistic, multi-national security communities -- whose prevalence in the modern North Atlantic Area is perhaps the most often noted discovery of Deutsch's collaborative work on international community formation -- develop in adaptive, feedback-governed “learning nets,” “networks” or in part anticpatory “communication grids” with multiple, interdependent nodes. Perhaps, he argues in rather cybernetic language, such developments require “the development and practice of habits and skills of mutual attention, communication, and responsiveness, so as to make possible the preservation of the autonomy and substantial sovereignty of the participating units, and the preservation of stable expectations of peace and peaceful change among them”, all processes taking place within networks of human social communication.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Organization, Politics, and War

1327. Peacekeeping and the Peackept: Where Peacekeepers Go

Author:
Virginia Page Fortna
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Because peacekeeping is not distributed to conflicts at random, to understand its effects, we need to understand where it tends to be used. This chapter investigates the question of where peacekeepers get sent – what distinguishes conflicts that receive international peacekeeping from those that do not? Why were peacekeepers sent to El Salvador and Namibia but not to the Philippines or Palestine? Why no peacekeeping in Northern Ireland, monitors to South Africa, traditional peacekeepers to Papua New Guinea, a multidimensional mission to Cambodia, and an enforcement mission to Liberia? Why peacekeeping in Mozambique and, eventually in Sierra Leone, but not in Bangladesh? What explains this variation across civil war cases?
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Organization, Politics, and War
Political Geography:
Bangladesh, South Africa, Philippines, Palestine, Cambodia, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Ireland, and Papua

1328. Two-Level Theories and Fuzzy-Set Analysis

Author:
Gary Goertz and James Mahoney
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Two-level theories explain outcomes with causal variables at two levels of analysis that are systematically related to one another. Although many prominent scholars in the field of comparative analysis have developed two-level theories, the empirical and methodological issues that these theories raise have yet to be investigated. In this article, we explore different structures of two-level theories and consider the issues involved in testing these theories with fuzzy-set methods. We show that grasping the overall structure of two-level theories requires both specifying the particular type of relationship (i.e., causal, ontological, or substitutable) that exists between and within levels of analysis and specifying the logical linkages between levels in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. We argue that for the purposes of testing these theories, fuzzy-set analysis provides a powerful set of tools. However, to realize this potential, investigators using fuzzy-set methods must be clear about the two-level structure of their theories from the onset. We illustrate these points through an empirical, fuzzy-set test of Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Political Economy, Politics, and War

1329. The Dilemma of the Prisoners' Dilemmas

Author:
Daniel G. Arce M. and Todd Sandler
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
In a variety of social, economic, and political situations, the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) game is the most studied of the 78 distinct binary games. When characterizing Olson's (1965) analysis of collective action, Russell Hardin (1982, Chapter 2) goes so far as equating all collective action problems to Prisoners' Dilemmas. Although a variety of game forms are now associated with collective action problems (Sandler 1992), there is no question that the PD game occupies a central place in the analysis of diverse social science phenomena. PD games are used to investigate arms races, treaty adherence, the tragedy of the commons, counterterrorism, logrolling, public good provision, altruism, boycotts, and many other issues.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Political Economy, Politics, and War

1330. Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy

Author:
Stacie Goddard
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Indivisible territory is all too frequent in international politics. In Jerusalem, many Israelis “insist that a united Jerusalem will be the eternal capital of the Jewish state,” whereas Palestinians contend that any deal excluding sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock is “an unacceptable compromise…[that] will make their blood boil.” India and Pakistan's inability to compromise over Kashmir has increased tensions between these nuclear powers, and well before the age of nationalism Maria-Thérèse refused to negotiate with Frederick the Great over the territory of Silesia.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Foreign Policy, and Politics
Political Geography:
Pakistan, India, Israel, Kashmir, and Palestine