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"A former Harvard professor of decision science and game theory draws on those disciplines in this review of controversial strategic and tactical decisions of World War II. Allied leadership-although outstanding in many ways-sometimes botched what now is termed meta-decision making or deciding how to decide. Operation Jubilee, a single-division amphibious raid on Dieppe in August 1942, illustrates the pitfalls of groupthink. Prior to the invasion of North Africa in November, American and British leaders fell victim to the planning fallacy, going in with rosy expectations for easily achievable objectives. In the conquest of Sicily, they violated the millennia-old principle of command unity-now re-endorsed and elaborated on by modern theorists. Had Allied tacticians understood the game-theoretic significance of the terrain and conditions for success at Anzio, they might well not have and landed two-plus divisions there to fight a months-long stalemate in the first half of 1944."

"The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to early modern European expansion? The Company Fortress takes on this question by studying the system of fortifications built and maintained by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day India and Sri Lanka. It uncovers the stories of the forts and their designers, arguing that many of these engineers were in fact amateurs and their creations contained serious flaws. Subsequent engineers were hampered by their disagreement over fortification design: there proved not to be a single 'European school' of fortification design. The study questions the importance of fortification design for European expansion, shows the relationship between siege and naval warfare, and highlights changing perceptions by the VOC of the capabilities of new polities in India in the late eighteenth century." --

This book argues that development strategies have thus far failed in Western Africa because the many challenges afflicting the area have yet to be explored and understood from the perspective of institutional resources. With a particular focus on three countries on the bend of the Upper West African coast - Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - this book offers a theory to account for the nature of these institutional elements, to test deductions against evidence, and finally to propose a reset for rural development policy to make fuller use of local institutional resources. Based on quantitative analysis and eight years of multidisciplinary field research, this volume features several large-scale RCTs in the domain of rural development, local governance, and nature conservation. The authors address one of the biggest topics in agricultural and development economics today: the structural transformation of poor, agrarian economies, and they do so through the important and unique lens of institutions.--

How should the international community react when a government transgresses humanitarian norms and violates the human rights of its own nationals? And where does the responsibility lie to protect people from such acts of violation? In a profound new study, Fabian Klose unites a team of leading scholars to investigate some of the most complex and controversial debates regarding the legitimacy of protecting humanitarian norms and universal human rights by non-violent and violent means. Charting the development of humanitarian intervention from its origins in the nineteenth century through to the present day, the book surveys the philosophical and legal rationales of enforcing humanitarian norms by military means, and how attitudes to military intervention on humanitarian grounds have changed over the course of three centuries. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, the authors lend a fresh perspective to contemporary dilemmas using case studies from Europe, the United States, Africa and Asia

For the last two decades, child domestic work carried out in Nigeria as well as in other countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, has been given increasing attention by international policy makers and scientists. Yet, the research mainly focuses on the living and working conditions of these children, which also forms part of this book. However, in addition, political and pedagogical measures of intervention employed on international, national and local levels on child domestic work are also at the centre of analysis. Against the background of post-colonial theory the author studies the effects of social modernisation in Nigeria as a rapidly growing national economy on child domestic work and historically retraces the origins of this form of child work back to indigenous modes of socialisation and social security within the (pre-colonial) Nigerian extended family network. The research is based on field work in Nigeria, including interviews and documentary analysis.

Niche Tourism examines one of the fastest growing areas within the tourism sector. This book provides an integrated picture of speciality/niche tourism as a whole looking at both the 'macro' and 'micro' niche area. It has a comprehensive theoretical framework, and discusses initiatives, policies and strategies adopted internationally. With an emphasis on linking theory to practice, it is underpinned by up-to-date international case studies from around the world. Divided into 3 parts, it covers a variety of aspects under the headings of special interest tourism, tradition and culture base tourism and activity-based tourism. * The only book to provide an integrated picture of speciality/niche tourism as a whole * Examines one of the fastest growing areas of the tourism sector * Looks at a vast array of aspects of tourism from dark tourism, looking at 'ground zero' in the US, gastronomic tourism in the Yarra Valley Australia, to tribal tourism in Africa

The legitimate use of force is generally presumed to be the realm of the state. However, the flourishing role of the private sector in security over the last twenty years has brought this into question. In this book Deborah Avant examines the privatization of security and its impact on the control of force. She describes the growth of private security companies, explains how the industry works, and describes its range of customers – including states, non-government organisations and commercial transnational corporations. She charts the inevitable trade-offs that the market for force imposes on the states, firms and people wishing to control it, suggests a new way to think about the control of force, and offers a model of institutional analysis that draws on both economic and sociological reasoning. The book contains case studies drawn from the US and Europe as well as Africa and the Middle East

Abstract
The Nigerian civil war (1967–1970) was one of the post-independence conflicts in Africa that called for the separation of children from their mothers for treatment and rehabilitation outside their home country. Using archival data, the article investigates the workability of the inter-African Refugee Network System and international humanitarian organisations in the evacuation of Biafran children for recuperation and rehabilitation. The article argues that it was through a collaborative network involving the Catholic Church, the World Council of Churches and the International Committee of the Red Cross, that thousands of Biafran children were transported to other African countries such as Gabon, the Ivory Coast and the Island of Sao Tomé for treatment. It concludes that such a collaboration goes a long way to prove that Africans do not just feed the Global North with refugees but can host their own refugees, though not without the help of international humanitarian organisations.

AbstractIn this special issue, we seek explanations for international- and local-level variations in policy approaches to 'irregularized humanitarian migrants', who left their country of citizenship in hopes of finding protection abroad but do not, or no longer, hold a permanent legal status. We shed light on different policy responses and experiences across Europe, Africa, and the wider Middle East by drawing on a wide array of political systems and migration patterns and different groups of humanitarian migrants. We explore to what extent the outcomes of various policies and practices can be regarded as better and more durable solutions, defined as increasingly taking into account the interests of migrants and the communities they live in. Ultimately, we stress the importance of gaining deeper and more comprehensive understandings of the historically informed context-specific circumstances that irregularized humanitarian migrants find themselves in, as well as the patterns that we see emerging in the comparison of these cases.

What are the effects of religious participation on collective action such as protests? Until recently, conflict scholars have focused on the macro-level characteristics of religion, while assuming, but rarely analyzing, individual-level mechanisms. I fill in this gap by incorporating insights from the field of American Politics, which has long emphasized the roles of individual-level mechanisms such as attendance at religious gatherings. I hypothesize that attendance at religious gatherings can address problems of collective action and thus lead to protests. I test these hypotheses by exploiting exogenous variation in the attendance at Islamic religious gatherings: rain on the day of Friday Prayer. I apply the design both to macro-level event data and an individual-level survey. The analyses indicate that rainy Fridays decrease the frequency of Muslim religious attendance and lower the likelihood of Muslim protests in Africa. These results imply a core role of communal gatherings in religious mobilization.

Abstract
This paper discusses the macroeconomic and environmental conditions for the spread of insurance in three non-Western world regions (China, Middle East and sub-Sahara Africa). Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it examines the patterns of economic development relevant for the growth of insurance in these regions, and compares these against standard economic models of insurance diffusion. The paper argues that the growth of insurance must be explained by more than a simple linear relationship with the growth of per capita incomes. As well as income levels, other factors affecting insurance development include urbanization, taxation, savings rates, legal compulsion to insure, state provision of social security, state-owned insurance bodies and the presence of large infrastructural projects. The second part of the paper focuses on environmental conditions in these regions that drove insurance growth, including climate and geography, demography, drought and disease, building materials and risk-reduction technologies.

Abstract
Since the 1960s when the majority of African countries acceded to independence, the continent is still without its own political formula that can reconcile and accommodate the claims of ethnic identity on the one hand, and party politics, democracy and patriotism on the other. This is because the majority of the continent is made up of a conglomeration of ethnic groups and cultural traditions that lay primary claim to the loyalty, sense of belonging and identity of their peoples. Africa needs a political model rooted in traditional reality that can check and curb rivalries among communities based on ethnic and party lines. The old traditions of governance can provide such a political formula for democratically choosing leaders and organizing governance that overrides the influence of ethnicity and political parties; a formula based on societal interests and concerns and promoted by non-governmental organizations, trade unions and professional associations.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is often described as the cradle of the three Abrahamic faiths and Iraq as a land "where faith was born." But the past two decades have dealt a severe, possibly fatal blow to religious communities that were once vibrant and integral parts of Iraq's social fabric—and perhaps to the very idea of pluralism in the region. Ensuring the continued presence of religious minority communities is vital to preserving Iraq's social diversity and nurturing a culture of pluralism. Iraq's best hope to save its vanishing minorities from extinction and revive religious pluralism lies in the Iraqi Region of Kurdistan (IRK). Fully incorporating displaced non-Muslim components of Iraqi society into host communities in the IRK while preserving their distinctive collective identity would advance the prospects for the survival of religious minorities and the future of pluralism in the IRK, the country at large, and the wider region.

AbstractWithin humanitarian systems and refugee spaces, energy technologies are often invisible and unrecognized. Beyond basic UN and emergency interventions to supply solar lanterns, lie vibrant systems of connection underpinning refugee electricity and cooking access: a world of energy needs and provision exist within refugee camps in East Africa. The article frames energy within forced migration debates on technology: contributing to the social anthropology and migration studies literature by exploring the material culture of energy in humanitarian contexts. The article argues that some forms of energy are highly visible—for example, solar lanterns and cookstoves—while others remain invisible. Certain objects are in danger of becoming fetishized by the humanitarian system while others are neglected and ignored. Analysis for this article reveals the invisibility of energy as a marginalized topic, highlights the methodological challenges of revealing the energy needs of displaced people, and explores institutional ignorance on the importance of energy.

This paper empirically investigates the effects of governance quality on the num‑ ber of African asylum seekers in Europe over the period 1996–2018 and evaluates the extent to which official development aid acts as a catalyst. With this purpose in mind, different gravity model specifications and estimation approaches have been employed. The obtained results suggest that the asylum flows are strongly deter‑ mined by governance quality in the country of origin and that this effect does depend on the amount of foreign aid received from developed countries. Moreover, it is also found that development aid is only effective in reducing asylum applications com‑ ing from countries with good governance. Moreover, we find no differences in the estimated elasticity of foreign aid on asylum claims for the beneficiaries of the Euro‑ pean Union Emergency Trust Fund (EUTF) for Africa, the main aim of which has been to improve living conditions of potential migrants in their countries of origin.