Suchergebnisse

Der Zusammenhang von Entwicklungsperspektiven und den Auswirkungen der transnationalen Organisierten Kriminalität (OK) ist in den letzten Jahren in Deutschland wie auf internationaler Ebene zunehmend in den Fokus gerückt. Dabei richtet sich der Blick besonders auf fragile und von Konflikten betroffene Staaten, die gemeinhin als besonders verwundbar für OK und deren Folgen angesehen werden. In der entwicklungspolitischen Debatte wird seit längerem darauf verwiesen, dass OK und kriminelle Gewalt eine Erklärung dafür sind, warum fragile Staaten mehrheitlich nicht die Millenniumsentwicklungsziele erreichen werden. Auch deshalb kommt die Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (EZ) nicht umhin, sich aktiv mit OK und den Risiken, die sie für fragile Staaten mit sich bringt, auseinanderzusetzen. Denn OK ist ein Querschnittsthema, nicht allein ein Sicherheitsproblem. Zudem kommen EZ-Akteure bereits mehr mit OK oder OK-relevanten Bereichen in Berührung, als üblicherweise angenommen wird - ob in bilateralen Programmen alternativer Entwicklung in Drogenanbaugebieten oder bei der Unterstützung des Aufbaus nachhaltiger Fischerei- oder Forstsektoren in Partnerländern. Die Analyse illegaler Ökonomien in Liberia, Sierra Leone und Guinea zeigt, dass die von OK ausgehenden Gefahren für Entwicklung über die Zeit und verschiedene Sektoren hinweg variieren. Denn OK kann unter den Bedingungen fragiler Staatlichkeit als externer Stressfaktor, in Form einer Gewaltökonomie, der Staatsvereinnahmung und/oder (Über-)Lebenswelt wirken. Die entsprechenden Gefahren lassen sich jedoch systematisch erfassen, um Ansatzpunkte und Zielkonflikte für die EZ im Umgang mit OK zu identifizieren. (SWP-Studien)

»Personalizations« are an expression of changed remembrance. Today, German memorials increasingly make individuals in the mass of the persecuted visible by presenting personal testimonials of the victims of Nazi crimes. Through the example of newly designed exhibitions at three memorial sites - the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Wannsee House Holocaust Memorial, and the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial site - Cornelia Geißler follows up on the question how the tension between individual and mass is presented today and envisioned together by youths in class. She critically reflects on the historical-political zeitgeist of the museum (re-)presentations and opens up new perspectives for the scientific investigation and pedagogical practice after Auschwitz. Cornelia Geißler (Dr. phil.) hat Erziehungs- und Politikwissenschaft in Berlin, Mainz und Edinburgh studiert. Sie ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Forschungsprojekt »Deportationen« am Internationalen Institut für Holocaust-Forschung, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

PACITA Conference at Berlin, Germany ; International audience ; Rice husks are the indigestible coatings of grains of rice. They are produced in large quantities by the rice milling industry, more than 1 million ton per year in Cambodia. In recent years, Cambodian enterprises have installed gasifiers, which burn rice husks to generate electricity. This is a two stage process: the biomass is first fed into a gasifier which produces syngas and ashes, then the syngas is cleaned and burned into an engine where it saves diesel fuel. Our study describes the sustainability challenges for deploying these technologies: how much does it depends on government intervention and on the state of the electricity market? What are the impacts of the gaseous, liquid and solid wastes? What are benefits for the local companies in term of profits, jobs and technology transfer?

ABSTRACT: The transfer of some decision-making authority from the domestic to the supranational arena as a result of the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 potentially changed domestic policy dynamics. The WTO agreements reflect the trade policy concerns addressed in the Uruguay Round in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This article applies and adapts historical institutionalism to explain how international organizations may constrain and facilitate certain domestic policy options. It demonstrates that, while the WTO legal framework has become more receptive of environmental sustainability concerns, the social sustainability concerns that were increasingly entering the debate over biofuel policies were not easily accommodated, and this was seen as a constraint on the content of the European Union's (EU) policy adopted in 2009. Only the environmental dimension of a broader concept of sustainability was included in the policy design.

There is an assumption in international relations literature that junior allies must choose between supporting a dominant global alliance partner and engaging with a rising power. Yet, Australian policy-makers have paradoxically managed to deepen Sino-Australian relations despite their bilateral alliance with the United States. They have developed a discrete China policy on the assumption that they could persuade Washington to accept it over time. They reasoned that this outcome was more likely if Australia used diplomacy to facilitate Sino-American cooperation and to develop an Australian China policy non-prejudicial to ANZUS. This article explores how this 'diplomatic formula' supported expansion of Sino-Australian relations under the Whitlam, Hawke, and Howard Governments. It explains Australia's intra-alliance influence and paradoxical foreign policy behavior and contributes to understanding the dynamics of asymmetric alliances during power transition.

There is a vigorous international debate about lowering the voting age to 16, with some jurisdictions already moving in this direction. The issue of the voting age also intersects with broader normative and empirical approaches to youth political engagement. Using evidence from Australia, this article evaluates empirically the arguments put forward for lowering the voting age. The findings suggest only partial support for lowering the voting age to bring it into line with other government-regulated activities. There is no evidence that lowering the voting age would increase political participation or that young people are more politically mature today than they were in the past. The absence of empirical support for the arguments in favour of lowering of the voting age has implications for how to transform democracy in order to attract greater youth engagement.

International audience ; Favelas which, as spaces, are often considered as urban margins or, more exactly, as being outside of the right of/to the city, have been witnesses to various consecutive repressive systems. From military dictatorships to criminal armed groups including a police institution, favelas have always been subjected to one form of control or another, generating a violent social order imposed authoritatively upon residents. While collective actions and social projects can be affected by the violence generated, they are not absent for all that. The intermediary sphere, i.e. between public and private, seems to be the privileged place for claiming socio-spatial justice. In these "authoritarian spaces " , a new security policy, established these last years, brings us to question whether a possible democratisation of these spaces and a transformation of collective action have taken place.

This article focuses on language-in-education policies and planning in relation to the three Sinitic languages taught in formal education in Taiwan today: Mandarin - the usual medium of instruction, and Holo Taiwanese and Hakka - the home and/or ancestral languages of the majority of the population (We use the term Sinitic language to avoid using 'Chinese dialect' with its implications of lower status and links with the national and cultural entity of China). These policies will be analyzed in the context of Taiwan's social and political history, current debates about identity, language rights and resources, and concerns about Taiwan's status in the international community. Taiwan's unique situation illustrates the complex relationship between language, ethnicity, national identification, and economic and global concerns. The Taiwan case also demonstrates the power, as well as the limitations, of government sponsored language planning.

The Cold War was centered on the fight for superiority in the international system between the United States and the Soviet Union. The tension between both parties was communicated through their testing of nuclear weapons, as to reveal the power of mass destruction to one another. Semipalatinsk is a nuclear weapons test site in present-day Kazakhstan in which the Soviet Union conducted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests. These tests not only proved to be threatening to the United States, but also to the inhabitants of the region. The grave toll proved to be more dangerous to the people and the environment rather than the Soviet Union's adversary, the United States. As a result of the countless nuclear tests, the post-USSR Kazakh government adopted a nuclear weapons free agenda and became an advocate for the removal of nuclear weapons.

The locations of international borders reflect political aspirations as well as power politics and attempts to bring state boundaries in line with nations. The expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia and the exclusion of the Philippines from the United States indicate the power of narrowly defined borders to govern national identity. The concept 'nations-of-intent' allows us to explore counterfactual borders as a way of examining how political aspirations translate into national borders. The paper explores three Asian cases - Malaysia, Mongolia and Vietnam - and makes reference to Indonesia in considering how different senses of what was possible and desirable in the context of decolonization generated different ideas about where borders should lie. This approach also allows us to interrogate losing forces retrospectively about the policies they would have followed within different border configurations.

On October 7, 2012, Hugo Chávez was comfortably re-elected president of Venezuela. Just days before the vote the impression given by major international print media was that the vote was a close-run thing, an assessment which proved to be at best optimistic. We argue that Western media coverage of the election in Venezuela was designed to skew the result towards the opposition and that these efforts singularly failed. The conclusions of our analysis are, first, that the "propaganda" model advanced by Chomsky is now faltering in the Americas and, second, that the region is acting in manner that is increasingly free of influence from the US. Venezuela thus stands as a case of the citizenry of a country actively and independently asserting its political agency despite clear attempts to redirect its thinking and decision-making.

Decay waves have been observed in the megahertz range in the helium plasma generated by the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket magnetoplasma thruster. They are measured using one of the tips of a triple probe connected to a 50 Ω input of a spectrum analyzer via a dc block (a small capacitor). The maximum amplitude of all waves is in the center of the plasma and does not appear correlated to the radial electron density or temperature profiles. The waves seem to be generated close to the helicon antenna that was 91 cm "upstream" from the measuring Langmuir probe. A possible explanation is parametric decay of the large amplitude helicon wave that also generates the plasma. ; This project was proudly supported by the International Science Linkages programme established under the Australian Government's innovation statement Backing Australia's Ability.

On October 7, 2012, Hugo Chávez was comfortably re-elected president of Venezuela. Just days before the vote the impression given by major international print media was that the vote was a close-run thing, an assessment which proved to be at best optimistic. We argue that Western media coverage of the election in Venezuela was designed to skew the result towards the opposition and that these efforts singularly failed. The conclusions of our analysis are, first, that the "propaganda" model advanced by Chomsky is now faltering in the Americas and, second, that the region is acting in manner that is increasingly free of influence from the US. Venezuela thus stands as a case of the citizenry of a country actively and independently asserting its political agency despite clear attempts to redirect its thinking and decision-making.

Decay waves have been observed in the megahertz range in the helium plasma generated by the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket magnetoplasma thruster. They are measured using one of the tips of a triple probe connected to a 50 Ω input of a spectrum analyzer via a dc block (a small capacitor). The maximum amplitude of all waves is in the center of the plasma and does not appear correlated to the radial electron density or temperature profiles. The waves seem to be generated close to the helicon antenna that was 91 cm "upstream" from the measuring Langmuir probe. A possible explanation is parametric decay of the large amplitude helicon wave that also generates the plasma. ; This project was proudly supported by the International Science Linkages programme established under the Australian Government's innovation statement Backing Australia's Ability.

International audience ; The article discusses the combination and tensions between patronage and participatory practices in the field of area-based public action in the case of Águas Emendadas Territory, central-western Brazil. It offers a socio-anthropological approach of patronage by the analysis of instrumental relationships among Aguas Emendadas participatory board and projects, combined with a reading of the affective dimension of patronage relationship from the principle of reciprocity. ; L'article traite de la conjonction et des tensions entre pratiques clientélistes et innovations participatives en matière d'action publique territorialisée dans le cas du Territoire Águas Emendadas au centre ouest du Brésil. Il propose une approche socio-anthropologique du clientélisme par l'analyse des relations instrumentales au niveau du conseil participatif et des projets de ce territoire, associée à une lecture de la dimension affective du rapport de clientèle à partir du principe de réciprocité.