Suchergebnisse

Unprotected anal sex has long been recognized as a risk factor for HIV transmission among men who have sex with men (MSM). In Africa, however, general denial of MSM existence and associated stigma discouraged research. To address this gap in the literature, partners conducted the first behavioral surveys of MSM in Kenya. The first study was to assess HIV risk among MSM in Nairobi, and the second study a pre-post intervention study of male sex workers in Mombasa. The 2004 behavioral survey of 500 men in Mombasa revealed that MSM were having multiple sexual partners and failed to access appropriate prevention counseling and care at Kenya clinics. A 2006 capture- recapture enumeration in Mombasa estimated that over 700 male sex workers were active, after which a pre-inter- vention baseline survey of 425 male sex workers was conducted. Awareness of unprotected anal sex as an HIV risk behavior and consistent condom use with clients was low, and use of oil-based lubricants high. Based on this infor- mation, peer educators were trained in HIV prevention, basic counseling skills, and distribution of condoms and lubricants. To assess impact of the interventions, a follow-up survey of 442 male sex workers was implemented in 2008. Exposure to peer educators was significantly associated with increased consistent condom use, improved HIV knowledge, and increased use of water-based lubricants. These results have provided needed information to the Government of Kenya and have informed HIV prevention interventions.

Clinical pharmacologists are the only medical specialists whose training focuses specifically on the safe, effective and cost-effective use of medicines, underpinned by an understanding of drug discovery, drug regulation, pharmacology, translational medicine and the performance of clinical trials. This unique perspective has allowed them to provide expertise and leadership in medicines regulation, medicines policy, health technology assessment and drug pricing. Clinical pharmacologists assisted in the creation of the Committee on Safety of Medicines (now the Commission on Human Medicines), the Yellow Card Scheme, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and related organizations in Scotland and Wales, and contributed to clinical guidelines (through the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network) and the British National Formulary. Their research work has contributed substantially, through translational medicine and therapeutics, to the development of new medicines and, as a result, creation of health and wealth in the UK. Their work in medicines policy has served to protect patients from harms associated with the use of medicines. A reduction in the number of able junior doctors attracted to a career in clinical pharmacology, a reduction in the number of training posts, and an ageing population of academic trainers, puts the future of the specialty, and its contribution to patient safety and UK wealth creation, at substantial risk. Urgent measures are needed to convince the NHS and government that these essential skills should be protected and nurtured.

AFD working paper ; 120, 58 p. ; The report is prepared with three main objectives: i/ Review of general information and scientific literature to be shared with members of the scientific committee and with other contributors to the seminar. ii/ Analysis of energy trends and carbon emission patterns, and identification of major issues related to low carbon scenarios analysis. iii/ Exploration of some topics for further debate and analysis : Overview on the dual climate change and development challenge, with emphasis on the scope for policy options related to the current debate on "Green Growth" ; retrospective analysis of CO2 emissions profiles in Thailand over 1990-2008 ; review of methodologies low carbon scenario The conclusion will address the rationale for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions that could be implemented in the years to come. This report is built on documents and literature published prior to December 2009 and therefore does not deal with new issues considered as in a 'post Copenhagen Conference' perspective. ; Le document propose une approche générale sur les thèmes de la croissance verte, des combinaisons de stratégies énergétiques et climatiques, en particulier pour les pays émergents et dans la région Asie. Il développe une analyse des tendances énergétiques et des émissions de CO2 en Thailande. Il détermine les profils d'émission passés et futurs, en utilisant la méthode de la décomposition. La finalité est d'éclairer les enjeux d'une croissance moins intensive en émissions et de contribuer à l'identification des politiques climatiques.

This article provides a conceptual lens for and a thick interpretation of the emergent regional constellation in the Middle East in the first decade of the 21st century. It starts out by challenging two prevalent claims about regional politics in the context of the 2006 Lebanon and 2008-09 Gaza Wars: Firstly, that regional politics is marked by a fundamental break from the 'old Middle East' and secondly, that it has become 'post-Arab' in the sense that Arab politics has ceased being distinctly Arab. Against this background, the article develops the understanding of a New Arab Cold War which accentuates the still important, but widely neglected Arab dimension in regional politics. By rediscovering the Arab Cold War of the 1950-60s and by drawing attention to the transformation of Arab nationalism and the importance of new trans-Arab media, the New Arab Cold War perspective aims at supplementing rather that supplanting the prominent moderate-radical, sectarian and Realist-Westphalian narratives. By highlighting dimensions of both continuity and change it does moreover provide some critical nuances to the frequent claims about the 'newness' of the 'New Middle East'. In addition to this more Middle East-specific contribution, the article carries lessons for a number of more general debates in International Relations theory concerning the importance of (Arab-Islamist) non-state actors and competing identities in regional politics as well as the interplay between different forms of sovereignty. Adapted from the source document.

Why do insurgencies erupt in some places and not in others? This article exploits an original violent event database of 274,428 municipality-month observations in Colombia to determine the conditions favoring organized violence at the subnational level. The data cast doubt on the conventional correlates of war: poverty, rough terrain, lootable natural resources, and large, sparsely distributed populations. The evidence suggests that rebellions begin not in localities that afford sanctuaries, impoverished recruits, and abundant finances, but instead in regions providing receptacles of collective action: the organizational legacies of war. Specifically, the data indicate that regions affected by past mobilization are six times more likely to experience rebellion than those without a tradition of armed organized action. The significant correlation between prior and future mobilization is robust across different measurements of the concepts, levels of aggregations of the data, units of analysis, and specifications of the model. These include rare events and spatial lag analyses. These results highlight the need for micro conflict data, theory disentangling the causes of war onset from those of war recurrence, and a reorientation away from physical geography and back to the human and social geography that determines if rebellion is organizationally feasible. The findings suggest new avenues of research on the post-war trajectories of armed organizations, the causes of repeated war, and the micro-foundations of rebellion.

The main purpose of the article is to deal with the structurally restrictive factors of the conflict regarding the dominion over islands in Northeast Asia in the post-Cold War era. The maritime boundary delimitation problem, the unique-territory theory vs. the effective-governance dispute, and the nationalistic modern vs. postmodern conflict will be analyzed. The resolution of the territorial disputes of this region is becoming more difficult as the national benefits and nationalism of the concerned nations affect the delimitation of territories and the setting of boundaries. The territorial disputes of this region are generally expressed as potential factors of conflict. Disputes over island regions instead of the mainland make it difficult to promote territorial sovereignty. The countries directly concerned in the territorial disputes display postmodern nationalistic tendencies that are becoming realistic political and diplomatic problems. These are focused on the national benefit of the homeland as well as the economic, military, and political power and public opinion of the right-wing conservatives. In this context, the territorial disputes in Northeast Asia are becoming more heated. Politicians use the disputed areas and the historically established nationalistic emotions for political purposes. The leaders of each country are displaying strong nationalistic tendencies related to the territorial disputes, thereby increasing the tendency to use this as a type of plan to gather political support. Adapted from the source document.

The theme of nihilism offers fertile avenues for exploring the antinomies of classical liberalism. In its instantiation as violence, nihilism challenges classical liberalism and its recognised political settlement, notably received arrangements harnessed to cultivate uncontrolled passions or religious fervour. In its affinity to Islam, nihilism defies the secular settlement through its appeals to transcendence. By seeking legitimacy in the sacred, nihilism disrupts established boundaries between the religious and the secular. Nihilism exposes the difficulty of forging worlds of transcendence on the modern register of immanence. Transcendence affords the possibility of escape, immanence closure. The two can be reversed in politics, as the experience in several Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) suggests. Appeals to transcendence seek to reorganise the social world in the name of escaping it. Immanence, on the other hand, can rework notions of redemption and salvation into secular stories of progress. This paper explores how the presumed nihilistic tendency appearing in the ICZs destabilises the liberal settlement, not in the conventional sense of presenting a religious counterpoint, but in reworking religious themes into secularity. Nihilism illustrates both the contradictory character of modernity and modernity's potential to generate varied societal projects, including those informed by the sacred. The recognition that modernity can spawn discordant impulses in reconciling religion and politics helps rethink post-secular lives under the long shadow of disenchantment. Adapted from the source document.

We have witnessed the emergence of a growing literature in the sociology of international relations (IR) which shows how IR produces its knowledge about the world, what its modes of inclusion and exclusion consist of, how newness emerges, and how contingencies are produced and its scientific vocabulary given meaning. While many of these contributions reconstruct the sociology of IR by examining syllabi, books, journals, the geography of authorships, and/or conference participations, ours points to the organizational and quotidian dimensions of IR: practices of IR, from everyday work done in front of some screen to the publication of new articles and books, are continuously reproduced by people in organizations like universities, scholarly associations, conferences, publishers, state bureaucracies, ministries, and research funding institutions. How can we account for the fact that practitioners and organizations are not disembodied vectors of the scientific endeavor but its agents? To pursue these questions, we first briefly review the link between post-positivist thought and sociology of IR, show how the current literature in the sociology of IR is structured, and point to organizations and people as a possible locus to understand IR better as an academic field. The second part looks deeper into the sociology of organizations. The third part tries to outline how the effects of organizations can be made visible by reconstructing everyday practices. Adapted from the source document.

This article relies on data from the 2005-09 World Values Survey to examine individual and cross-national variation in perception of the seriousness of global warming. The data show that a large majority of the public in all countries are concerned about the problem of global warming and that this assessment is part of a broader concern for global environmental issues. The widespread concern implies that global warming has the potential to generate mass political participation and demand for political action. Motivated by a value-based approach to the study of public opinion, the article shows that perception of the seriousness of the problem is positively correlated with high education, post-materialism, and a leftist position on the left-right scale. In addition, religious beliefs are important, suggesting that there is some diversity in the value basis for the issue and that it is not only linked to the 'new-politics' perspective. Variation across nations in wealth and CO2 emissions is not significantly related to the publics' assessments of the problem, and, somewhat counterintuitively, people from countries relatively more exposed to climate-related natural disasters are less concerned about global warming. We suggest possible explanations for the latter finding and discuss our results in relation to the broader literature on environmental change, insecurity, and the potential for conflict. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious infringement of law carried out to express opposition to law and policy. The normative literature provides thorough treatments of several key issues related to the post-arrest treatment of civilly disobedient citizens, such as the propriety of imposing various types of legal sanction. An important issue that has received rather less consideration, though, is the matter of how police forces should react to civil disobedience prior to and during its commission. This article aims to encourage reflection on this issue by sketching a normative framework to orientate moral evaluation of the ways in which liberal democratic societies police civilly disobedient protest. The central argument is that the police should, wherever possible, adopt a strategy of 'negotiated accommodation' towards civil disobedience. The core requirement of this strategy is that police officers should attempt to engage in dialogue with protest groups before or during their civil disobedience actions. This dialogue must be underpinned by a conscientious and sincere commitment on the part of officers to balance the traditional goals of public order policing with the good of accommodating civil disobedience. The article contrasts the idea of negotiated accommodation with alternative strategies for policing civil disobedience, illustrates its practical implications through considering various examples, and defends it against important objections.

There is a lot of attention being given these days to remediation in higher education. "Failure to Launch," reads one representative headline, "Community College Students Can't Meet Higher Goals." The numbers vary but, on average, suggest that about 35 percent to 40 percent of students in state colleges and universities are held for one or more basic skills courses. The numbers increase in the community college, typically 60 percent and higher. So, roughly half of post-secondary students in the United States need some assistance to do college-level work. These numbers are alarming; however, some form of remediation has existed in American higher education for a very long time, and, by some estimates, the numbers have remained modestly stable. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, more than 40 percent of entering students were involved in a preparatory program. In the 1970s, Berkeley was holding about 50 percent of its students for remedial English. On some campuses, the numbers are going up, and that increase can be accounted for by the declining conditions of some K-12 districts but, also, by an increase in the number of people attending college: people who, a generation or two ago, would not have thought college possible or economically necessary. Over the last thirty years, the percentage of people over age forty attending college has more than doubled. Adapted from the source document.

This research note focuses on the far-flung Burmese overseas communities, situating them into the wider diaspora literature. Drawing on extant scholarship on refugees, migrants and exiled dissidents of Burmese origin, it presents an original cartography of Burmese diasporic groups dispersed throughout Asia. It explores their migration patterns and tentatively maps out their transnational networks. It seeks to comparatively examine the relationships these polymorphous exiled groups have developed with the homeland. Two research questions have been identified and need further exploration in the context of the post-junta opening that has been observed since 2011: First, what comprises the contribution of the Burmese diaspora to political change and homeland democratization? This has been widely debated over the years. Despite a dynamic transnational activism, there is still little evidence that overseas Burmese have influenced recent domestic political developments. Second and subsequently, how can the Burmese diaspora effectively generate social and economic change back home: by "remitting" or by "returning"? This note argues that Burmese migrant social and financial remittances might prove a more viable instrument to foster development and democratization inside Myanmar in the short term than a mere homecoming of exiles and skilled migrants. This is a preliminary analysis that hopes to encourage further research on Burmese diasporic politics and their potential leverage as "agents of change". (JCSA/GIGA)