Suchergebnisse

"After more than seventy years, the Palestinian refugee problem remains unsolved. But if a deal could have been reached involving the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, it was in the early years of the Arab-Israeli conflict. So why didn't this happen? This book is the first comprehensive study of the international community's earliest efforts to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on a wide range of international primary sources from Israeli, US, UK and UN archives, the book investigates the major proposals between 1948 and 1968 and explains why these failed. It shows that the main actors involved - the Arab states, Israel, the US and the UN - agreed on very little when it came to the Palestinian refugees and therefore never got seriously engaged in finding a solution. This new analysis highlights how the international community gradually moved from viewing the Palestinian refugee problem as a political issue to looking at it as a humanitarian one. It examines the impact of this development and the changes that took place in this formative period of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the limited influence US policy makers had over Israel."--

AbstractThe international community increasingly promotes referendums as it intervenes in self-determination conflicts around the world. However, the ability of self-determination referendums to bring about peace remains uncertain. This paper develops the argument that the conflict resolution potential of self-determination referendums is conditional, depending on whether or not they are held under the mutual agreement of the relevant minority and majority groups. When mutually agreed, self-determination referendums are likely to generate shared perceptions of fair decision-making and thereby increase chances for peace. By contrast, unilateral self-determination referendums are likely to increase ethnic grievances and, therefore, the risk of separatist violence. I find support for this argument in a global statistical analysis, short case studies, and a survey experiment. Overall, this study suggests that self-determination referendums can make a positive contribution to peace, but only if the conditions for a partial compromise on a referendum, including its terms, are ripe.

This volulme challenges the conventional view that the conflict in Ukraine is primarily an interstate conflict, and highlights its deep domestic roots. For all parties within Ukraine and beyond to move from confrontation to dialogue will require untangling these roots and embracing a change of heart, or cartharsis. To assist in this endeavor, the book employs the lens of classical Greek tragedy, which once performed a similar therapeutic function in Athenian society.

International Joint Ventures: Economic and Organizational Perspectives is the result of a symposium on International Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances held by the Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation at Pennsylvania State University. The book gives a cross-disciplinary treatment of the economic and managerial issues affecting joint venture formation, operation and performance, including subjects ranging from the impact of international trade policy to cross-cultural communication on joint venture operations. The volume enriches our understanding of each discipline from the vantage point of the other, building a more complete understanding of joint ventures as a mode of entry into domestic and international markets. Two categories of question are analyzed: issues of importance to the joint potential and actual participants in a joint venture, and issues related to the social effects of joint ventures from the point of view of society as a whole or its agent, the regulator. The questions are addressed using simple theoretical models and conceptual discussions as well as empirical analyses. Audience: Executives, policy makers and scholars of economics, decision analysis, political science and management

Based on paper presented before the Association of Asian studies, Boston, Mass., Apr., 1957.

Abstract
Hostile regional environments can spur civil war at home. Do they also affect mediation in a state's ongoing civil war? We hypothesize they do, but in ways that produce competing effects: Third parties hesitate to offer mediation in a conflictual environment, but hostile environments also make disputants more amenable to mediation. We test these diverging expectations using a measure of conflict environments that aggregates spatially and temporally proximate civil war in a state's neighborhood. Our empirical analyses reveal that third parties are significantly less likely to offer mediation as exogenous factors mount, a finding that holds even for third parties who have historic or security linkages to the civil war state. However, we find limited evidence that disputants' decisions to accept mediation are driven by regional security concerns. Instead, local conflict conditions present more pressing concerns that drive disputants to accept offers to mediate. Taken together, the findings suggest potential mediators should pay attention to both a civil war state's regional environment and local conditions, lest they underestimate disputants' willingness to come to the table. Our work newly underscores the costs and risks associated with conflict hot spots and the risk for certain conflicts to be bypassed by peace brokers.

This article analyses the historical geography of nuclear energy through the spatial lens of river basins. Approximately half of the world's nuclear power plants were built along one or the other river. There, they gave rise to both conflict and cooperation. Drawing on the theoretical notion of water interaction, which takes into account relations of both conflictual and cooperative nature, we distinguish between such relations in three dimensions: space, environment, and infrastructure. The spatial dimension gravitates around social and political processes where proximity and distance are at the heart, often linked to the search for suitable sites for nuclear construction. The environmental dimension refers to conflict and cooperation around the radioactive and thermal pollution of waterways. The infrastructural dimension, finally, highlights how nuclear power plant builders, when they arrived from the 1950s onwards, had to relate to pre-existing infrastructural features of the rivers, which sometimes led to clashes with other actors and sometimes to more cooperative forms of interaction. In empirical terms, we focus on three European river basins that came to play particular-ly important roles in European nuclear history: those of the Rhine, Danube, and Elbe.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how male and female managers may regulate their workload differently in response to conflicting job‐home pressures. The main hypothesis is that female managers seek to reduce anticipated discord by investing less time in their work role. The paper investigates this postulated link between managers' gender and work‐family conflict via their workload, based on a conceptual model and within a Scandinavian context. The central argument is evaluated against a competing explanation of structural constraints, implying that female managers in stead of choosing reduced workloads are required to work less.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a large survey of Norwegian managers. The applied sample size is 2,195, with 1,740 men and 455 women. In addition to indicators of time‐based work‐family conflict the questionnaire contains detailed information on managers' individual background and positional characteristics. To trace direct and indirect influences of gender over different analytical stages, a step‐wise regression analysis is carried out.FindingsInitial investigations document that female managers have a lighter workload, more frequently perceive glass ceiling constraints and less often experience work‐family conflict. Step‐wise regression analysis demonstrates that the effect of gender on job‐home tensions is mediated mainly by managers' workload, and is less related to the glass ceiling. This pattern is consistent with central hypothesis, still the alternative explanation cannot be totally ruled out.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper is limited to the Scandinavian setting at a single point in time.Practical implicationsIt is important that employers recognize the need for more optimal time arrangements for women in higher‐level positions. In addition, female managers could benefit from support networks across work organizations.Originality/valueThis paper is among the first to examine the mediational processes by which gender influences work‐family interdependencies for managers, tracing indirect pathways as well as direct effects for alternative model specifications. A representative sample with a broad set of individual and positional characteristics in combination with a relevant regression approach provides credible and robust results.

International audience ; Wars and civil conflicts under various shapes were at the forefront of the political scenery in the works of Machiavelli. The multiplicity of terms Machiavelli drew upon to describe civil conflict partly convey the common perception, partly point at a distinction of major important, between positive or negative types of conflict in regard of their outcome. In this contribution, we will focus on civil conflict, its analysis being, according to us, the backbone of the Discourses. In order to introduce Machiavelli's thinking on civil conflict, we will first present the "shareholders" of this conflict, and analyse how The Discourses specifically contribute to their analysis. We will then show how Machiavelli immersed her/his reader into the dynamics of civil conflict. We will pursue our examination by highlighting the aim of Machiavelli: that of providing tools of analysis to assess the implications of conflict, good or bad in regard of their relationship to freedom. Finally, we will comment upon two aspects that relate to Machiavelli's thinking of civil conflict, or may rather be considered as intertwined with it: the conception of the people as a political actor and the vision of the body politic.