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In the era of 'new wars' and state-failure, the state-building paradigm have shifted from the normative policy discourse towards a more pragmatic one with alternative approaches. In this, the Western ideal of statehood and governance is compromised in state-building in order to achieve localised solutions for post-conflict societies. It was this outlook that laid the foundation of Puntland. The clan communities of Puntland opted for London School of Economics 'bottom-up' and 'building-block' approach after a series of failed 'top-down' initiatives in Somalia's reconciliation. The success of this approach was the integration of local actors and institutions in the state-building project to establish a state that is viewed legitimate by the local population. However, while some states embrace hybridity, Puntland with its mainstream perspective views it as a preliminary phase towards modern statehood in the state-building process. Despite this, for the past 20 years, Puntland has neither transitioned to democracy nor institutionalized its hybrid system. The aim of this thesis is to give an insight on Puntland's political system by exploring the informal hybrid political order. The research sheds light on the backstage dynamics between the traditional and state authorities and presents how they coproduce authority and source legitimacy. Finally, the thesis presents the paradoxes of this political system and discusses how the transitional and the informal status of the hybrid order damages the legitimacy of Puntland's state and traditional authorities. ; submittedVersion ; M-IR

In this article I wish to provide an overview of the changing priorities that successive Mexican governments have given the social development sector since the administration of President Echeverria (1970–6). This will be set against a backcloth of political reform and an opening of the political space in which parties other than the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) have been allowed to function, albeit under certain constraints. In addition I will examine important changes that have been undertaken both in the nature of social policies themselves, but also in the patterns and efficiency with which public agencies have delivered this particular social good. I argue that in Mexico, as in many advanced capitalist countries since Bismarck's Prussia during the late nineteenth century, social welfare provision is an important element in the understanding of political management and 'statecraft'.1 As well as providing a temporary palliative to offset some of the negative outcomes of rapid urbanisation and economic growth based upon low wage rates and trickle-down, social policy provides an arena through which scarce societal resources may be negotiated. As I will describe, those patterns of negotiation change for a variety of reasons: as power relations shift; as economies reflate or turn into recession; as the level of state intervention and control intensifies or slackens; as our diagnosis of specific problems and the policy instruments we develop become more sophisticated and sensitive to local needs; and last, but not least in the context of Mexico, are included changes that arise from human agency as different presidents take executive office.

On 4 May 2014, as a tumultuous general election in India drew to a close, theIndian Expressnewspaper published a column by Tavleen Singh, with the headline 'No more petitioners: no more petitioners'. The column went on to quote P. Chidambaran, the outgoing finance minister of the defeated Congress government, who diagnosed a historical shift in the mentality of the Indian electorate. 'India has moved on,' Chidambaran was reported as saying, 'from a petitioner society to an aspirational one. Treating people as petitioners is a mistake . . . even the poor demand a better life and are no longer resigned to their fate.' In India, the column argued, 'poor people' now had 'middle class aspirations', desiring 'jobs and development' rather than 'charity' and that this was a major reason for the success of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 elections. To be a 'petitioner', in this analysis, was to be ground down by poverty and resignation, and dependent on the 'charity' of others. It was a passing historical condition, a sign of underdevelopment that could be sloughed off by the sudden awakening across society of 'middle class aspirations'.

According to the author, beginning with Brazil's origins as a nation, and continuing to the present, the relationship between race and politics in that country has been a close and integral one. He explores some of these connections, especially in Sao Paulo, by examining the struggle for the final abolition of slavery in the 1880s, the rise and fall of the Frente Negra Brasileira in the 1930s, the black organisations of the Second Republic, and the most recent wave of black protest, from the mid-1970s to 1988

Abstract
Background

Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as "removed" from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge.


Methods

These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem.

Results
The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record.

Conclusions
Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs.

What is the nature and extent of corporate leader involvement in American national politics? The results of a mail survey of nearly 100 such individuals show that leaders are quite active, devoting an average of nearly 1 hour per day to national political activity. We also show that corporate leaders engage in a wide range of advocacy activities. Monetary activities loom particularly large in the political lives of American corporate leaders, as large numbers are approached by members of Congress for contributions, and many who are approached answer the call. In addition, we find that corporate leaders, unlike advocacy professionals, do a great deal of their advocacy work in private; for the most part they eschew public activities such as testifying before congressional committees. Speaking to the question of which leaders are most politically active, our data evince a strong relationship between firm political activity and firm leader political activity. In sum, politically active firms have politically active leaders. We thus contribute to the ongoing academic discussion of corporate political activity by showing that the CEO's office is an additional locus of political power within business firms, and that CEO political activity is instrumental rather than consumptive in nature.

Tese de Mestrado "Master of Military Operational Art and Science", Air Command And Staff College, Air University Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama ; Globalization, the technological interconnectedness of societies, and America's military prowess have created the opportunity and motive for future peer competitors to exploit Unrestricted Warfare (URW) strategies. This holistic approach to warfare employs coherent and integrated multidimensional actions, synchronized in time and space, combining all available means, including military and civilian, violent and non-lethal force, targeting adversary's wide-spectrum domains, aiming to affect opponent's will and capabilities during times of real or perceived conflict. Shifting the emphasis from military to political, economic, information, and cultural engagements, future peer competitors will aim to constrain the US's response within a regional or global sphere of interest, degrading its combat effectiveness, by collapsing government organizations, and disrupting the normal flow of society. Such perspective produces several strategic implications, exposing legal and moral dilemmas, the increasing civilianization of war, and risk society challenges. The fact that warfare is expanding beyond the military domain continues to constrain Western thought, challenging military and political decision-makers. Therefore, it demands a shift of mindset in order to understand that the main strategic differences towards warfare are cultural, and that warfare should be viewed as a holistic endeavor. Hence, the importance of a coherent integration of US's national security strategy. This involves a three step approach based on renewed strategic thought, the purposeful adaptation leading to a holistic-agency approach, and a people-centric perspective enhancing the education of the national security practitioners.

Global Instability: Uncertainty and New Visions in Political Economy presents a series of papers that address the political consequences of globalization for states and their populations, while exploring the issue of alternatives to the model of globalization we are presently experiencing. The focus moves from the world of international agreements to the national and sub-national dilemmas that are posed by attempting to manage a set of global developments within a given territory. The initial chapter, by Daniel Drache, explores a still-born post-war international organization, the International Trade Organization, that offers a different vision of how a globally integrated economy might operate. A number of papers then explore the challenges posed by today's globalization, including currency instability in an environment of financial deregulation, the rights conferred on investors by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the progressive liberalization of trade in services built into the General Agreement on Trade in Services

Background:
Strategies to help researchers use the research evidence they (co)produce to inform policy should be tailored to the context. Yet there is little guidance on research-policy engagement activities in nursing and health sciences disciplines.
Aims and objectives:
We explored the experiences and perspectives of nursing and health sciences researchers at different career stages, regarding research-policy engagement activities and their impacts on policy. We also explored researchers' understanding of terminology and theory regarding research-policy engagement.
Methods:
We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 17 researchers, at various career stages, and conducted content and thematic analysis of the data.
Findings:
'Disseminating and communicating research', and 'building professional partnerships' were the most common types of activity, with senior researchers favouring the latter. Early and mid-career researchers favoured the former, citing the need to build credibility and track record before engaging with policy actors. We identified individual and contextual factors that influence policy impact and researchers' capacity to engage in such activities. Researchers' conceptions and understanding regarding evidence-informed policymaking theory and process varied. Terminology also varied, with 'knowledge translation' the most common term.
Discussion and conclusions:
Despite evidence indicating the limited effectiveness of dissemination activities on policy, researchers pursue such efforts, to enable the formation of relationships with influential policy actors and policy impact in the longer term, and because of academia's drive for research outputs. Researchers would benefit from supportive organisational contexts and greater knowledge of research-policy engagement theory, evidence and practice, through tailored workshops addressing relational and political considerations, as well as structured mentoring.

Résumé : Sur quels modèles théoriques une approche communicationnelle en sciences sociales peut-elle s'appuyer ? Ce texte vise deux objectifs. Tout d'abord, s'appuyer sur les travaux de Louis Quéré pour révéler les forces et les faiblesses des deux modèles dominants : un modèle épistémologique s'inscrivant dans le sillage de la théorie de l'information et de la cybernétique dans une visée instrumentale ; un modèle politique qui vise l'intercompréhension au service de l'autodétermination des citoyens dans l'élaboration des normes qui les gouvernent. Par ailleurs, nous souhaitons ajouter à cette revue deux modèles qui permettent de dépasser les limites des deux premières approches : un modèle praxéologique qui s'appuie sur la praxis comme activité organisante de perspectives partagées ; un modèle de l'incommunication qui fait de l'impossibilité d'aboutir à l'intercompréhension la norme des relations sociales. Mots-clés : modèles, communication, épistémologie***Abstract: How to theorize communication in social sciences? This text has two goals. First, to rely on the work of Louis Quéré, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of the two dominant models of two dominant models: an epistemological model enrolling the theory of information and cybernetics in an instrumental aim; a political model that aims at inter-understanding at the service of self-determination of the citizens in the elaboration of norms that govern them. Moreover, we wish to add to this review, two models which go beyond the limits of the first two approaches: a praxeological model that relies on praxis as an organizing activity of shared perspectives; a model of incommunication that reverses the situation and makes the impossibility of achieving intercomprehension the norm. Keywords: theoretical study, communication, epistemology

Undergraduate social science research methods courses tend to have higher than average rates of failure and withdrawal. Lack of success in these courses impedes students' progression through their degree programs and negatively impacts institutional retention and graduation rates. Grounded in adult learning theory, this mixed methods study examines the factors that influence student achievement in these courses among a sample of 724 social science students. Quantitative results indicate math self-concept, the belief that being good at math is necessary for success in the course; anxiety; attributions of course utility; learning approach; and GPA predict perceived learning. Qualitative results suggest students' research self-concepts shape whether they take a deep learning approach (leaning in) or a surface learning approach (resistance) to the course. Course instructors also impact students' perceptions of learning.