Suchergebnisse

We present a new game-theoretic analysis of an abstract auction game that captures essential strategic aspects of escalation phenomena. Two competitive adversaries commit resources irreversibly in order to win an indivisible prize; the winner will take the prize while both winner and loser incur the cost of their bids (investments). Following O'Neill (1986), we first reexamine a discrete version of the game and emphasize some strategic considerations that give rise to new bidding strategies of players. These new strategies, however, confirm O'Neill's result qualitatively: Rational players should not bid against each other. We then introduce a more general model of the game and show that escalatory competitive bids are compatible with equilibrium play. Equilibria with escalating bidding eventually realize a "draw": Initial firmness (leading to escalation) is followed by conciliatory behavior that eventually implements a common commitment level.

AbstractThis study presents a comparative analysis of two case studies in which attempts were made to resolve intractable ethno-national conflicts: the peace process undertaken in Aceh between the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement, which led to the signing of the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (mou) ending the conflict in Aceh; and the process conducted in the Sri Lanka conflict from 2001 through 2004 between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers, which failed to yield an agreement. The two peace processes will be examined using readiness theory, which focuses on the factors influencing the decision to enter into negotiations. This article also attempts to extend the hypotheses of readiness theory to explore the process of concession-making during the negotiations that took place in the two case studies. The findings indicate that the theory does contribute to understanding the dynamics of the pre-negotiation in both case studies and that applying its hypotheses may contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of the process of reaching an agreement in the Aceh process and of the factors leading to the failure of the negotiations in the Sri Lanka conflict. The analysis also gives rise to some questions that challenge readiness theory and its hypotheses – empirically and methodologically.

Les gouvernements locaux ont pour rǒle d'encourager d'une part la croissance économique, d'autre part l'intégration politique. Cette double fonction devient potentiellement contradictoire dans des conditions qui sont soit celles de la croissance, ou de la récession économique. Les gouvernements locaux sont donc organisés, et pour empěcher l'émergence de conflits politiques urbains intenses, et pour assurer l'adaptation continue aux besoins changeants de la croissance économique. Plusieurs mesures structurelles des politiques étatiques vont en ce sens:

la décentralisation conditionelle de la fiscalité et des dépenses
la ségrégation structurelle de l'économique et du politique remplissant ces fonctions.

Mais ces měmes mesures ont produisent aussi, dans le měme temps, des contraintes fiscales, qui sont ainsi l'une des traductions des conflits politiques possibles. Dans cette perspective, la crise fiscale est analysée en tant que stratégie de gestion politique des fonctions contradictoires des gouvernements urbains.

After more than half a century of war and broken ceasefire agreements, Burma is currently in the midst of landmark peace talks between its government and a coalition of ethnic resistance groups. In July, the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination Team (NCCT)—representing sixteen ethnic nationalities including the Karen, the Kachin, the Mon, the Arakanese, and the Shan—met in Kachin-held Laiza to discuss the terms of a proposed national ceasefire, under negotiation with the government since last November. The ethnic nationalities, of which all but the Kachin and the Ta'ang have already struck bilateral ceasefire agreements with the government, are calling for greater administrative autonomy within a new federal Union of Burma, control over natural resources in their territories, and a guarantee that political dialogue with the government will take place within months of a national ceasefire accord.

Conflict-related sexual violence has become increasingly recognized in international spaces as a serious, political form of violence. As part of this process, distinctions between the categories of 'sexual violence' and 'torture' have blurred as scholars and other actors have sought to capitalize on the globally recognized status of torture in raising the profile of sexual violence. This move, while perhaps strategically promising, even already fruitful, prompts us to heed caution. What might we inadvertently engender by further pursuing such positioning? While torture and sexual violence have both been widely framed within the academic literature as strategic in recent decades, only torture, and not sexual violence, has emerged from elements of this literature as (potentially) legitimate, despite the slippages between them as categories of violence. This article offers one avenue for thinking through what an invigorated focus on sexual torture as a category of violence might unwittingly render possible, and thus for reflecting on the possible stakes of collapsing the categories of sexual violence and torture. Ultimately, we argue that we should perhaps resist the urge to frame sexual violence as torture and instead cleave to the sticky signifier of 'the sexual', despite the ways in which it has served to normalize, perpetuate and obfuscate grievous harms throughout history.

This commentary discusses the framing of the production of a series of online text-based and visual resources aimed at researchers embarking on Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnerships, and in particular supporting non-Indigenous researchers to think about our/their methods, assumptions and behaviour. We identify the tension in mainstream funding for such partnerships, and discuss the implications of Northern epistemological claims to agendas and universality as against Southern epistemologies acknowledging diversity and challenging oppressions. We note the distinct bases for Indigenous methodologies. Our commentary outlines and illustrates the online downloadable resources produced by our own Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnership, including a video/audio recording, a comic, and blog posts, addressing decolonized collaborative practice.