Suchergebnisse

Benutzerkommentar

There appears to be a growing consensus among those engaged in research in the international organization field that regional integration has been the most stimulating area of research for the last ten years because of the conscious efforts of the major theorists in this area to develop and test hypotheses concerning the dynamics of organizational development. There is consensus also that the rest of the field could profit by developing a more conscious concern with the dynamics of organizational development. Robert O. Keohane's "Institutionalization in the United Nations General Assembly" represents a substantial attempt to provide the framework for a model of organizational development applicable to the United Nations.

The United Nations at its present stage of development is a political system of formally coordinate Members, each able to place before the Organization the demands that flow from its own environment. One can hypothesize that a stable environment will yield a stable pattern of demands on the United Nations political system. Similarly it can be hypothesized that a change in the environment—the major components of which are the Member States—will change the pattern of demands made on the political system of the Organization. It is on just such a change that this article proposes to focus. In the period between 1955 and the end of 1968, 37 African states, largely devoid of experience in the contemporary international arena and struggling with the multitudinous problems of fashioning coherent national entities in the face of both internal and external pressures, joined the United Nations. The admission of these states substantially altered the Organization's environment and the demands being made upon it. It is suggested here that these changes have been so substantial as to alter the nature of the political process of the Organization. Concern will be focused successively upon the nature of the entry of the African states into the United Nations, a determination of the areas in which the African states have made demands upon the system, the constitutional structure of the Organization as it has evolved under the impact of the African states, the impact of the African states on the handling of major issues, and finally on trends and implications of the role of African states in the United Nations.

This review essay will focus on four central questions which the author believes to be closely related to the problem of progress in the study of international organizations. These questions, narrowed to fit the scope of this essay, are the following: 1) What has been the role of international organizations in the national security strategy of the United States; 2) what has been the impact of the United States in the international organizations of which it is a member; 3) what has been the impact of participation in international organizations on the range of United States choices and methods in the foreign policy area; 4) what impact have changes in the shape of the international political system had upon United States participation in international organizations and upon those organizations' impact on the United States. This analysis will concentrate only on studies relevant to these themes.

The fifteenth session of the General Assembly of the United Nations which convened in New York in September 1960 marked an important turning point in the history of the Organization. The United Nations had been created primarily through the efforts of states with a European or European-derived political and social culture possessing a common history of political involvement at the international level. During its first ten years the Organization was dominated by the problems and conflicts of these same states. However, by 1955 the process of decolonization which has marked the post-1945 political arena began to be reflected in the membership of the United Nations. In the ten years preceding the end of 1955 ten new nations devoid of experience in the contemporary international arena and struggling with the multitudinous problems of fashioning coherent national entities in the face of both internal and external pressures joined the Organization. By 1960 the rising tide of decolonization had reached flood crest with the entry in that one year of seventeen new Members—sixteen of which were from Africa.

With the increased concern in the post-1960 period over the problem of achieving an equitable geographical distribution in the United Nations Secretariat, renewed attention has been focused on the role of short-term appointments in the recruitment of Secretariat personnel. What in the previous fifteen years of the Organization's history had been viewed largely as a technical facet of personnel policy suddenly became an issue of political contention in both the Fifth (Administrative and Budgetary) Committee and in the General Assembly itself. This article will first briefly detail the various positions in the debate over the role of short-term appointments. Its main focus, however, will be on the institutional dynamics to which secondment relates and on an attempt to gain insight into its operation through the experience of the European Communities with this type of appointment.

This book analyses the transplantation, development and adaptation of the two largest Tibetan and Zen Buddhist organizations currently active on the British religious landscape: the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) and the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (OBC). The key contributions of recent scholarship are evaluated and organised thematically to provide a framework for analysis, and the history and current landscape of contemporary Tibetan and Zen Buddhist practice in Britain are also mapped out. A number of patterns and processes identified elsewhere are exemplified, although certain assumption.