Suchergebnisse

Vladimir Putin's rise to power marks a political turning point for Russia. This country, which experienced a loss of control on the international scene during the 1990s, now displays a desire to regain its historic place as a great nation. Faced with it is NATO, formerly created to oppose the USSR. After the Cold War, this defenseorganization expanded into the former Soviet space with the accession of the Central and Eastern European states. Such a situation combined with the Russian strategy of regaining power, especially in its neighbor, is causing tensions to return. However, it seems wrong to consider NATO as a single bloc. Indeed, the alliance take its decisions unanimously, so it seems relevant to analyze the policy between NATO and Russia through the bilateral relations of the members of the organization. The combination of these elements on the international scene brings either a rapprochement based on shared interests or a confrontation based on differences. This analysis makes it possible to highlight the political, economic, and security dynamics leading to a balance of powers, both European and global. ; L'arrivée au pouvoir de Vladimir Poutine marque un tournant politique pour la Russie. Ce pays, qui a connu une perte de puissance sur la scène internationale pendant la décennie 1990, affiche désormais une volonté de retrouver sa place historique de grande nation. Face à elle se trouve l'OTAN, créée jadis pour s'opposer à l'URSS. Après la guerre froide, cette organisation de défense s'est étendue dans l'ancien espace soviétique avec l'adhésion des États d'Europe centrale et orientale. Une telle situation, combinée à la stratégie russe de retrouver sa puissance, notamment dans son étranger proche, fait que les tensions reviennent. Toutefois, il semble erroné de considérer l'OTAN comme un bloc unique. En effet, en partant du fait que les décisions de l'Alliance sont prises à l'unanimité, il apparaît pertinent d'analyser la politique entre l'OTAN et la Russie à travers les relations bilatérales des ...

Purpose
This paper aims to seek to and understand how civil conflict and international claims inform one another. Does the existence of ongoing civil and international conflicts affect how a government addresses an international claim? The paper builds on existing literature that link international and domestic conflict. However, it suggests that the logic behind civil conflicts may be different from that for international ones as states decide how to deal with any one claim.


Design/methodology/approach
The paper posits that states faced with domestic conflicts and additional international claims are more likely to seek to resolve an international claim than those without similar conflicts. It develops a series of hypotheses about the likelihood of claim escalation and peaceful settlement attempts and proceed to test them quantitatively using the Issue Correlates of War data combined with the uppsala conflict data program/peace research institute oslo Armed Conflict Data.


Findings
On the one hand, the paper finds support for the argument regarding the difficulty states are faced with when seeking to resolve multiple international claims. On the other hand, it finds that the presence of civil conflicts incentivizes states to resolve international claims either by force or peacefully, suggesting internal violence can both lead to diversionary behavior and attempts at conflict resolution.


Research limitations/implications
The findings have important implications for work considering the complexity of domestic and international conflict linkages.


Originality/value
While many studies of claim militarization and peaceful attempts focus on dyadic and international characteristics, this paper creates a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of this foreign policy decision process.

An issue has recently arisen in international criminal law concerning the gravity of the offences listed in the Statutes of the International Tribunals: Should offences be ranked according to their seriousness and, hence, as entailing heavier or lighter punishment? Should the same act when charged as a crime against humanity or genocide be punished more severely than when charged as a war crime?

AbstractReligion as a Social Determinant of Health (SDOH) is established in relevant literature. The challenge is to translate the theoretical and empirical relationship between religion and health to practical applications and policymaking to build partnerships between state government entities and faith‐based organizations. Our manuscript focuses on the connection between adherence to religion and the pernicious public health problem of cancer in women. Using publicly available state level data and Ordinary Least Square regression analysis, we identify the SDOH, including adherence to religion, that are associated with state level rates of cancer screening for women. We confirm that states with higher levels of adherence to religion have higher rates of cancer screening for women including Pap smear and mammogram. Our results show that the magnitude of the effect of adherence to religion and state level rates of cancer screening for women is similar to that of other key SDOH. Our results provide state‐level targets for population health improvements that should be addressed with policy that recognizes and encourages partnerships with faith‐based organizations to improve health for women.

The world is experiencing an unprecedented shift in wealth and power away from the West and towards the developing countries According to some estimates the combined gross domestic product of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will surpass that of the G7 nations by 2032. India's GDP alone is predicted to surpass that of the United States by 2043 and China's GDP will be almost twice that of the US by 2050. Rising powers are using this newfound wealth to expand their global influence. China has taken the lead in investment and development in Africa. Russia is consolidating its influence in the Post-Soviet space. India is flexing its muscle on the subcontinent. Brazil is pushing for regional integration in South America and promoting diplomatic initiatives to address some of the world's most difficult problems, such as the Iranian nuclear program. What is the impact of institutions and regimes during periods of major power transition in the international system? My dissertation challenges liberal theories, which argue that the institutions and regimes established by the Western powers after World War II constitute a resilient and robust "International Liberal Order" (ILO) that will shape and restrain the behavior of rising powers. I develop a test of eight observable hypotheses for how the ILO should affect the behavior of rising and then test these against the behavior of post-Soviet Russia. I find that the Russian case fails along all eight hypotheses and that Russia has adopted a range of policies that undermine the existing order and work to transform it. The ILO's institutions and regimes have not shaped and constrained Russia's behavior in the ways that the theory predicts. Nor have the larger political and economic processes that ILO theorists believe bolster the existing order, such as global economic integration, the rise of transnational non-state actors (NGOs and big business) and the spread of liberal and democratic values, made Russia more amenable to integration into the ILO. Evaluated in this way, claims about the robustness and resilience of the existing order fail, suggesting that Russia and other rising states will look to use their growing power to bring about major changes in the international order.Interestingly, it's not only Russia's behavior that does not conform to the ILO's expectations. The leading Western powers have not been willing to give Russia a seat at the table that would give it a real say over major political and economic questions. They continue to be wary of growing Russian power and suspicious of Russia's true intentions. As a result, Russia's leaders are unsatisfied with the existing order's ability to promote their country's interests. Instead of embracing the ILO, Russia has increasingly looked to preserve its freedom of action and has followed an independent foreign policy course. The Russian case challenges the ILO's universalistic argument that all emerging states will simply find common cause within the existing framework of international institutions and regimes. It shows that rising states have a mind of their own and that they are ready to utilize a wide range of tools to realize their ambitions. They see the ILO as only one among many means to pursue their interests. But in many cases concerns about relative gains and their reluctance to enter into relationships of dependence will also make them question the wisdom of working through existing institutions. Rising states will often see the pursuit of their own power and capabilities - rather than strengthening institutional relationships - as the most reliable strategy for promoting their interests. They will also look to use their newfound power to transform international institutions so that they serve their interests more effectively. Not only is there a demand for change on the part of rising powers, but they may also be able to effect change more readily than is usually acknowledged by either realist or liberal IR theories. Both realist and liberal theories assume that rising powers only have two strategies open to them: they can either accept the existing order or wage a full-out frontal assault to overthrow it (i.e., behave as Germany and Japan did in the lead up to WWI/WWII or the Soviet Union did after WWII). Proponents of the ILO argue that rising powers will accept the established order because they will find the costs and risks of pushing for change to be prohibitive. In examining Russia's behavior, I find that rising powers have a wider menu of effective strategies and tactics available to them - from simply ignoring the parts of the ILO that they do not like, to forming new relationships and institutions that achieve specific aims. These strategies allow rising powers to resist the current order and work towards its gradual transformation without having to challenge it openly and directly. The future international order may take the form of a traditional multi-polar system where order is the product of power balancing between system's most powerful states. This does not mean that we will see a complete return to intense military completion between great powers, as some realists have claimed. Though liberal theorists tend to overstate their transformative effects, new technologies and other processes related to globalization have had a profound effect on international relations. Nuclear weapons and growing economic interdependence will moderate conflict between states and make the prospects of great power war - and even the type of hard balancing we witnessed in earlier historical periods - remote. Competition between states will be intense, though it will manifest itself primarily in the economic and ideological (soft power) realms. Nontraditional security threats will also continue to be a primary concern in the years to come. However, states will be more likely to address these threats through ad-hoc and bilateral cooperation, rather than through institutions. Change can be gradual and can come through the decay and reform of old international institutions or the creation of new ones. This last point gives us some comfort and hope for the future as we enter an era of uncertainty and unpredictability in international politics. It suggests that Western leaders need not be afraid of change. Rather than insisting that rising powers accept the existing order, it may be in the West's own long-term interests to begin looking for ways to work with rising powers to transform the international order so that it better serves the interests of all of states.

Over the past decades, the world has witnessed an unprecedented growth in global value chains, propelled by increasingly demanding quality standards. These trends lead to concerns about the impact of value chains on development and poverty and about the possible protectionist nature of quality standards in rich countries. This book offers the first integrated theoretical analysis of the economic and political factors which determine the level of quality standards, as well as their economic effects along the value chain. Using realistic assumptions motivated by empirical research, the theoretical framework in this book makes it possible to study the efficiency effects as well as the distributional consequences of one of the most striking evolutions affecting global trade and development today

" This book addresses implications for ""Gold Standards"" of education research-especially in science education and literacy. These standards are meant to provide evidence-based educational outcomes found effective in randomized controlled trials, following patterns of evidence used in medical research. Similar expectations have emerged in other countries-from education ministries, for researchers working with U.S. colleagues, and for researchers with multinational and non-profit support. The current ""Gold Standard"" policy, developed in the United States through the 2001 ""No Child Left Behind"" [NCLB] Act and the 2002 Education Sciences Reform Act, attempts to improve the effects of schooling and enhance educational research. The contributions to this book explore perspectives on how best to implement multiple standards of education research. "

This paper presents an investigation of the linguistic choices employed in harassment complaints submitted to the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women and four police stations located in Lahore during 2017-2018. In a patriarchal society such as Pakistan's, where a woman's honour epitomizes the whole family's honour (Atakav 2015, 52; Sharlach 2008, 96), sexual harassment, a stigmatizing issue is hardly ever reported (Ali and Kramar 2015, 241). This paper, using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis's (Lazar, 2005, 2007) theoretical perspective of asymmetrical gendered power relations mirrored in harassment complaints, explores the form and severity of harassing practices which had prompted women in Lahore to report them. In order to unwrap the complex interplay of gender and power, linguistic features of the complaints are examined through Fairclough's text analysis (1989, 1992), the first dimension of the 3D model which explores lexical choices such as adjectives, adverbs, culturally informed metaphors and metaphorical extensions, which are embedded in grammatical structure exemplified through transitivity analysis. In this paper, harassment complaints are analysed as important documents invested with socio-cultural gender ideologies that underline the need for dismantling gender oppression to achieve social transformation.