In a recent editorial of one of the legal periodicals, the author quotes Alexander Hamilton's statement in the Federalist, that "it is essential to the idea of law that it be attended with a sanction, or in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience," and from this premise draws the following conclusion: "The law of nations, so-called, is a mere empty term or phrase, a high resounding name for something in and of itself vain and impotent."To most authorities and students of international law, the author's conclusion is somewhat astounding, but the fact that the statement could be made by a prominent legal editor, illustrates the extent of the present popular distrust of the science.
Informed consent is universally recognized as a central component of ethical conduct in scientific research. Investigators working with diverse populations throughout the world face myriad challenges. The application of standards for informed consent can be daunting for researchers when they face the pragmatic constraints of the field and the reality of cultural beliefs about consent that may be in direct conflict with regulatory requirements. This paper explores cultural and social factors underlying informed consent for health research with diverse populations in international settings. Sociocultural influences on comprehension of information, perceptions of risk, and beliefs regarding decisional authority are reviewed. The implications of power inequities between study sponsors, researchers and participants are also considered. Issues associated with the development and preparation of consent forms, including translation and documentation are highlighted. Recommendations for good practices are outlined and future directions for research are explored.
This report provides an analysis of the international education strategies of Canada, Singapore, and the UK and compares them to the education initiatives of Australia. This research was undertaken in response to the release of the Draft National Strategy for International Education and as a basis for a submission to the Department of Education and Training (DET). The method of comparative analysis will be employed to determine the effectiveness of the different strategies in terms of mobility, transnational education and partnerships, quality assurance, branding, and target markets. The results of the data show that Australia is performing well in mobility, transnational education and partnerships. Though Australia still performs well in quality assurance and branding, there are still improvements that can be made in terms of the overseas portrayal of Australian education. Australia would also benefit from identifying common target markets for government and institutions to work on together. This report finds that Australia is performing well in international education in comparison to Canada, the UK, and Singapore. However, in order to maintain competitive performance in the international education sector, there are areas Australia can work on. Australia will need to focus on exchanges, internships, and the perception of quality in Australian education through encouraging the use of Australia's education brands overseas. The most important aspect of each of these factors is increasing the cooperation between government and the sector. Some of the results of the investigation into the education strategies of other countries were surprising, particularly Singapore's change of direction in its education policy and the subsequent emergence of Singapore as less of a competitor in international education than the report originally foresaw. The report has been limited to six different factors involved in the education strategies, however there are many more issues that can be examined in international education. In this way, this report concludes that Australia is performing well in international education. However, there are areas in which Australia can improve to remain a world-class education destination.
Change in political, cultural and financial dimensions of international population agenda over the last half century is considered. Cross-country comparisons reveal path dependence phenomenon. France, where "Malthusian spirit" was long castigated, contributed a lower share of its GDP to international family planning programs than did the US and UK, where Malthusianism always found political support. The controversies over the usage of Kemp–Kasten amendment influenced the structure of the US international population assistance rather than its total volume. Religious NGOs went on international population arena in the 2000s and polarized its non-governmental segment. These NGOs defend the traditional family and declare full respect for national religious and ethical values; their position has some coincidence points with Russia's standpoint in the UN population debates. The reasons for increasing disagreements between Russia and the West over the key items of both international and Russian domestic population agenda are reviewed. At least 80 per cent of Russians, as the surveys show, believe that the government must strive for fertility growth. Russia's state-run demographic policy, underlain by this vox populi and aimed at fertility increase, discords with the Western international agenda, which prioritizes the global governance, sexual rights and sexual education of youth. Despite the gloomy UN projection (the 2000 Revision) which predicted shrinking of Russia's population size to 133.0 million in 2015, it achieved 146.3 Million (including 2.3 Million in Crimea). Nevertheless, most of Western experts argue that the "wrong" Russian demographic policy cannot give positive effect. Given this values' divide, it would be reasonable to intensify coordination between Russia and other BRICS countries in international population debates and to move cooperation with the West to the issues which are not overloaded by the conflicts of values.
This book constitutes an up-to-date methodology reference work for International Relations (IR) scholars and students. The study of IR calls for the use of multiple and various tools to try and describe international phenomena, analyze and understand them, compare them, interpret them, and try to offer theoretical approaches. In a nutshell, doing research in IR requires both tools and methods--from the use of archives to the translation of results through mapping, from conducting interviews to analyzing quantitative data, from constituting a corpus to the always touchy interpretation of images and discourses. This volume assembles twenty young researchers and professors in the field of IR and political science to discuss numerous rich and thoroughly explained case studies. Merging traditional political science approaches with methods borrowed from sociology and history, it offers a clear and instructive synthesis of the main resources and applied methods to study International Relations.
