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THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES THE PROPAGANDA ADVANTAGES THAT THE PROVISIONAL IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY (PIRA) IS ABLE TO GENERATE FROM SOME OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT RESPONSES TO IT. LIKE ALL AUTHORITIES FACING A SUSTAINED TERRORIST PROBLEM, THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT HAS MADE CHANGES IN ITS LEGISLATION. THIS ARTICLE FOCUSES ON HOW THE PIRA IS ABLE TO USE THIS LEGISLATION TO ATTACH CREDIBILITY TO ITS CAUSE. TWO FURTHER AREAS OF BRITISH GOVERNMENT POLICY THAT THE PIRA IS ABLE TO EXPLOIT ARE ATTEMPTS TO CRIMINALIZE CONVICTED PIRA MEMBERS AND THE SYSTEM USED TO CONVICT THEM, AND THE USE OF THE RUC IN THE PRIMARY COUNTER-TERRORISM ROLE. THE FORMER POLICY LACKS WIDESPREAD COMMUNITY LEGITIMACY. THE LATTER REVEALS SEVERAL CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THE BRITISH CIVILIAN POLICE MODEL AND THE COUNTER-TERRORISM FUNCTION, ESPECIALLY IN THE AREAS OF COVERT INTELLIGENCE AND REACTING TO BREAKDOWNS IN PUBLIC ORDER.

The paper deals with the use and diffusion of the geographical indication in the European Union countries, having as objective the protection of the products' names, which are registered as Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) and Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) labels. The reason for treating this theme started from the fact that the level of knowledge of the system and its symbols by the consumers is very low. In the introductory part, specification of surveyed topic is given and importance of consumer education and information is highlighted. Empirical research is based on two approaches. First, 1114 product names from DOOR database (Database for agricultural products and foodstuffs in EU countries) were analysed in order to investigate the frequency of labels utilization by country and product classes, cluster analysis was applied to show the labels distribution by countries. Dominant countries in number of labels are Italy, France and Spain having registered over 50 % of all products. The most frequent product class is Fruits, vegetables and cereals for PGI and Cheeses for PDO. The second approach reflects consumer view on the issue; survey of 250 consumers in the Czech Republic was carried out with the purpose to identify awareness and perceived credibility of labels. Findings reveal a low awareness of labels, credibility of labels is influenced by their low familiarity. The main problem is lack of information. Respondents show interest in getting information regarding this topic. Quality labels have potential to communicate with consumers and facilitate their food purchases, but it is necessary to improve their promotion.

Human rights are again a subject for public concern & interest, for several reasons: more vocal dissent from the USSR, deterioration of human rights in Third World countries, & the attention gained from the Helsinki Conference & from President Carter's firm stand on human rights. The political impact will be felt in Europe & in international circles. The concept that human rights extend beyond the domestic jurisdiction of nations is not new. It was almost included in the agreement to establish the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg; the Charter of the UN includes it as one of its four principles; various treaties assert it to be an international issue. The debate on human rights has moved from the UN, where power blocs are influencing & compromising the credibility of its actions, to newly established organizations with a clearer sense of purpose, like the Council of Europe, which signed the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights & Fundamental Freedoms in 1950. It is significant that the US, under President Carter, has changed its policy toward the USSR & other offenders in stating that violations are not a matter of domestic jurisdiction. This poses an interesting situation for the Helsinki Conference, which convenes in June 1977: the USSR has used a provision for the Final Act of the Conference in 1975, which states that nations should not intervene in another's domestic affairs to rebut criticism that it is not following the guidelines for human rights from the Helsinki Final Act. For the US to raise this issue, every signatory's state will have to review this. International relations will be very much affected by the issue of human rights. In Western Europe, the most important Communist parties have criticized the USSR for its actions against dissenters. These Eurocommunists will have to reexamine Marxist & Marxist-Leninist doctrines to determine if they are humanist doctrines. Eastern Europe is feeling increasing public pressure for observance of human rights. It is significant that the debates are taking place in Europe, where they will have definite repercussions. C. DeCicco.

Disinformation threatens the virtue of knowledge. The notion of truth becomes corrupted when citizens believe and give credibility to false, inaccurate, or misleading messages. This situation is particularly relevant in the digital age, where users of media platforms are exposed to different sorts of persuasive statements with uncertain origins and a lack of authenticity. How does academia understand the disinformation problem, and are we equipped to offer solutions? In response to this question, our study provides an overview of the general definitions, trends, patterns, and developments that represent the research on disinformation and misinformation. We conducted a systematic review of N = 756 publications covering eight years, 2014-2022. This period captures phenomena such as Trump's emergence as a candidate for the US presidency, his term in office, as well as the leadership of figures such as Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, and various similar populist and nationalist leaders across a range of democratic and semi-democratic societies. This period is also one that witnessed the first global pandemic, when misinformation and disinformation not only threatened societal cohesion but the lives of people. This systematic review explores the critical terminology used, the areas of social life where disinformation is identified as problematic, the sources identified as creating or circulating this material, as well as the channels studied, the targets, and the persuasiveness of the discourse. What this article offers, then, is an overview of what we know about disinformation and what gaps in research should be pursued. We conclude that given the problems that misinformation and disinformation are seen to cause for democratic societies, we need to assess the contribution of social science in providing a foundation for scientific knowledge.

Indiscriminate bill-postings have become one of the nuisances threatening the 'health' and aesthetic credibility of the physical environment in post-colonial Nigerian society. Although the problem is a serious one, it is yet to receive attention from the academia and other concerned authorities in Nigeria. It is within this context that this study examines bill-postings as pervasive media culture, using Edo Central District (ECD) of Edo State, Nigeria as a case study. In doing this, it adopts an evaluative methodology. This is complemented by interviews and random photographic snapshots of posted-bills across the district under examination. This study finds out that the indiscriminately posted-bills are eyesores, which apart from not being aesthetically pleasing, exacerbate the environmental management challenge in the ECD. It also discovers that the problem is a multilayered one, judging from the different kinds of posters that are commonly posted by diverse groups in society. Consequently, this paper asserts that probing the sociological causes and implications of the menace could offer some insights on how to redress the situation. To this end, a number of suggestions are made, with a view to improving the condition of the physical environment in ECD.

AbstractThe field of e‐democracy has approached the problem of improving democratic decision making by emphasizing encouraging broad participation. This is due to a perceived lack of credibility on part of politicians, indicated by decline in both turnout in elections and recruitment to political parties. Experiences so far show that while in local contexts use of electronic tools in combination with redesigned democratic processes have indeed affected participation positively, both scaling and quality requires more sophisticated technical tools of at least two kinds. One kind, recognized by the e‐democracy community, are tools supporting cooperative work for facilitating communication among humans. Another kind, this paper argues, is tools for more formal problem modelling. The e‐democracy field has so far almost exclusively been concerned with encouraging and—at best—modelling, moderating, and reviewing discussions. Experiences from e.g. citizen juries point to the importance of expert participation. Decision Support Systems could provide—mediated—expert participation in virtual groups and in communication with the public. To achieve this, there is a need to carefully consider both the usability of Decision Support Systems and their role in the overall democratic system. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The present thesis extends the economic literature by introducing green horizontal innovation. Green horizontal innovation is characterized by new technologies that solve an existing pollution problem but give rise to a new one at the same time. A prominent example are CFCs that once replaced poisonous refrigants but are now phased-out themselves. Even groundbreaking technological advances are often merely shifting instead of solving environmental problems. Another concept introduced in this thesis is technological uncertainty. Ex-ante the properties of the next technology developed are not known. New technologies can be of two types. Either they come as perfectly clean 'backstop' technologies or as green horizontal innovations and are labeled 'boomerangs'. In an infinite horizon model the socially optimal pollution and R&D policies under green horizontal innovation and technological uncertainty are derived. The main results are that in the absence of a backstop all available polluting technologies should be engaged in production. Moreover, under technological uncertainty a finite sequence of innovations is optimal. This informs ongoing policy debates like the one on the future of electricity production where there are trade-offs between two polluting technologies – nuclear power and fossil fuels. Moreover, the present thesis evaluates implementation strategies under green horizontal innovation. In a two-period model the government grants patents and adjusts environmental policy in case innovation occurs. However, the government is assumed to be unable to pre-commit on future environmental policies. The key insight is that tradable permits can fail to implement static efficient allocations. Efficiency is limited by patent holder's monopoly pricing. The owner of the new technology might choose a license fee that restricts output to levels below the social optimum. Quantity regulation via pollution permits is therefore not effective. In contrast to previous results in the literature this also holds under vertical environmental innovation. The interaction between patents and environmental regulation goes therefore both ways. The choice of the environmental instrument affects incentives to innovation and patents create distortions in output markets. More sophisticated instruments are shown to be able to reduce the distortions caused by patents. A government's ability to commit is crucial for dynamic efficiency. A prominent concept to solve the time-inconsistency problem is to delegate specific policies to an independent agency, e.g. a central bank. McCallum (1995) criticized this approach by claiming that delegation does not solve the commitment problem but merely relocates it. McCallum's critique is formalized and partially contradicted. If there is uncertainty over future states of the world, delegation can improve credibility. Commitment is achieved by the costs incurred to pass and later change a law or the constitution. The higher these costs, the more credible are the associated policies. However, if there is uncertainty over the optimal future policy, these costs reduce a government's flexibility. Hence, there is a trade-off between credibility and flexibility. Delegation is able to relax this trade-off if the bureaucrat responds to shocks in a way that is at least somewhat in line with the government's preferences. Under uncertainty the government has more incentives to invest into credibility if she delegates. This insight explains the observed commitment effect of delegation and helps to improve the institutional design of environmental regulation and other policy areas.

The European context of cooperation across borders demonstrates how it engages all stakeholders from a variety of territorial levels in an intensive, collaborative dialog. This approach makes bordering regions more resilient to current and predictable threats, and is largely focused on the practical problem-solving of local needs. Regardless of the (non)material benefits the European cross-border perspective provides, the situation remains very different in the Azerbaijan-Georgia cross-border reality, where the traditional understanding of borders continues to prevail. A field inquiry has shown that territorial local communities have not had a homogenous attitude towards the borderline and their neighbors, and that local municipalities lack the power and credibility to deal with local challenges autonomously. Unlike the European CBC, this cross-border context does not include the elements of bottom-up cross-border planning and locally institutionalized forms of collaboration.

The appeal to death is a type of argument that either explicitly or implicitly invokes hu­man finitude. This rhetorical device contributes to the credibility of requests, wishes, etc., or blocks communication. The illocutionary power of the appeal to death is determined by the means it uses, which range from inductive generalisation and deductions to approaching the limit of this generalisation, to the threat of going beyond the existential boundaries of the dis­course, to the problem domain losing its existential status, and to the threat being carried out. All of them make communication insignificant and the subject, or even the opponent, non-existent. This style of argumentation is peculiar to 'pre-logical' communities where the logical culture of social communication is underdeveloped and unwanted, where an instrumental appeal is made not to the law but force, not to freedom but arbitrariness.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has been widely conceived as a Chinese effort to promote reforms of global financial governance. While the existing literature of contested multilateralism tends to focus on the problem of threat credibility, this article highlights the necessity of strategic reassurance in institutional contests. To facilitate incremental reforms of the existing order, rising powers like China need not only to pose credible challenge towards established institutions, but also to demonstrate their benign intentions and commitment to future cooperation. Besides revealing strength and resolve, the creation of a new multilateral regime helps rising powers to signal their self-restraints and reassure other powers. Consequently, the institutional configuration of new multilateral organizations involves a trade-off between the dual needs for threats and reassurance. Chinese behaviours in creating the AIIB can be explained through this framework. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

In recent years, blockchain-based techniques have been widely used in cybersecurity, owing to the decentralization, anonymity, credibility and not be tampered properties of the blockchain. As one of the decentralized framework, Sapiens Chain was proposed to protect cybersecurity by scheduling the computational resources dynamically, which were owned by Computational Resources Owners (CROs). However, when CROs in the same pool attack each other, all CROs will earn less. In this paper, we tackle the problem of prisoner's dilemma from the perspective of CROs. We first define a game that a CRO infiltrates another pool and perform an attack. In such game, the honest CRO can control the payoffs and increase its revenue. By simulating this game, we propose to apply Zero Determinant (ZD) strategy on strategy decision, which can be categorized into cooperation and defecting. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy decision method.

The article is devoted to the problem of the revolution impact on the government legitimacy. Revolutions in modern times have become a synonym of a legitimate way of overthrowing the existing government. If in previous historical era in politics the people´s right to riots and uprisings was denied, the current policy recognizes their right to revolution. Without recognition of this right, the revolution is not only deprived of legitimacy, but also the institutions which arise in the process of its implementation lose credibility. ; Посвящается проблеме влияния революции на легитимность власти. Революции в Новое время стали синонимом легитимного способа свержения существующей власти народом. Если в предшествующие исторические эпохи в политике отрицалось право народа на бунты и восстания, то современная политика признает право народа на революцию. Без признания этого права революция не только лишается доказательств ее закономерного характера, но и доверия к институтам власти, которые возникают в процессе ее осуществления.

While international election observations missions often aim to present generalizable claims about the quality and integrity of an election, their findings are rarely based on a representative sample of observations, undermining the credibility of the missions. Bias in the selection of polling stations, among other things, can inflate or deflate the percentage of polling stations where observers find significant flaws. This article uses original data from Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) election observation missions to illustrate the nature of the problem of selection bias in international election observation, and show how the percentage of 'bad' polling stations (in the absence of selection bias) can be estimated through a weighting procedure. The article finds that, while there is a strong degree of selection bias, this does not significantly impact the overall percentage of 'bad' polling stations that is reported by OSCE observation missions.

Sexual violence, abuse and mass rapes became a method of warfare long ago. Women and children are the most vulnerable category of the population becoming victims of crimes of all parties to the armed conflict. In most cases, their security and protection is the task of UN peacekeeping missions and regional organizations in peacekeeping. However, the reverse side of the Peacekeeping Operations "medal" is commitment of acts of violence by the peacekeepers. This situation undermines credibility of the UN and evokes a negative attitude of the civilians to UN personnel and members of the military contingent of operation. This article describes the problem of committment of sexual harassment and abuse by the peacekeepers, UN activities to resolve the situation, as well as issues regarding prevention, investigation and punishment for such crimes at the present stage. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n24p483