Suchergebnisse

Overview of the telecommunications sector in Nepal. The project is designed to strengthen the NTC as an institution and, through a balanced package of high priority works, expand local telephone facilities in Kathmandu and other urban areas, provide telephone service for the first time to about 90 rural communities, expand facilities to cater to resultant additional domestic long distance and international telephone traffic, and expand existing telex facilities and extend service to towns other than Kathmandu. Project costs and financing. ICB procurement: cables, ducts, subscriber facilities, rural transmission equipment, earth station, telexes, computers, office aid. Statistics, 1982-92. (Econom. Voorlichtingsdienst)

Nepal's agricultural sector overviewed. The proposed project would aim: (a) to consolidate the investments made during the earlier phase of development by making all physical facilities fully operational; (b) to further improve the agricultural production base and the socio-economic infrastructure (roads, bridges, drinking water); (c) to expand forestry plantation and soil conservation programs; and (d) to promote development of effective local level planning and implementation of rural development projects. Project costs and financing. ICB procurement: vehicles, equipment and furniture, fertilizer and agrochemicals. Statistics, 1987-1994. (Econom. Voorlichtingsdienst)

Overview of Malaysia's education sector. The main objective of the project would be to assist the Government in accelerating the implementation of policy reforms and institutional changes aimed at improving the quality of education and the efficiency of educational management as well as at increasing access to better education. In support of this objective, the project would help finance the first five-year phase of a ten-year program to develop and improve the primary and secondary education subsector under the Fifth Malaysia Plan (1986-1990). Financing. ICB procurement: civil works, furniture, equipment. Statistics, 1984-95. (Econom. Voorlichtingsdienst)

The Ellison Model Executive Mentoring Inclusive Community Building Model (The Ellison Model) is used in training people to initiate and implement inclusive community building (ICB) projects using executives and professionals from a variety of fields and industries to mentor university and pre-college students, all serving as mentors at each succeeding level of function. The model promotes ethical values and inclusion in community development. Participants at ICB conferences receive conflict resolution, relationship management and cultural sensitivity/diversity training through interactive and dramatic techniques. This essay examines the theoretical premises upon which The Model bases its philosophies. Theories examining the nexus between culture and conflict are also explored. Conflict resolution as a unitary process (from the individual perspective) is also discussed within the context of relationship management.

An essential, but often overlooked, role of concepts lies in how they constitute or define populations. Explicit choices made by researchers about concept structure are tied inextricably to the selection rule for identifying cases to include in analyses. Concept construction issues are absolutely crucial because the concept structure used interacts in various, usually hidden, ways with theories & hypotheses that researchers want to test. The concepts used to select cases may be correlated with common dependent variables hence producing selection bias. We illustrate this potential by exploring international crises as they have been conceptualized by the ICB Project. We show that two alternative conceptualizations of "crisis" produce populations that correlate with common ICB dependent variables. Our empirical analyses pay particular attention to variables related to power because they are particularly susceptible to being influenced by these selection effects. 4 Tables, 1 Figure, 44 References. Adapted from the source document.

Crisis escalation to war is a subject of longstanding interest. Case studies, formal models and statistical analysis offer compelling explanations for why some crises escalate to war while others do not. Much less can be said in answer to the following question: where do crises come from in the first place? In this paper, we first introduce the concept of a near crisis following the approach taken over the course of more than four decades by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. A near crisis is just below a crisis as defined by ICB with regard to intensity, as it lacks one essential condition for a crisis—higher likelihood of military hostilities. Second, we present a newly developed dataset that contains information on 86 cases in which actors perceived a threat to one or more basic values, along with an awareness of finite time for response to the value threat. We also present simple statistical models comparing (a) near crisis to crisis and (b) crisis to war that show that analyses based on the Near Crisis dataset will contribute to advancement of knowledge.

Crisis escalation to war is a subject of longstanding interest. Case studies, formal models and statistical analysis offer compelling explanations for why some crises escalate to war while others do not. Much less can be said in answer to the following question: where do crises come from in the first place? In this paper, we first introduce the concept of a near crisis following the approach taken over the course of more than four decades by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. A near crisis is just below a crisis as defined by ICB with regard to intensity, as it lacks one essential condition for a crisis—higher likelihood of military hostilities. Second, we present a newly developed dataset that contains information on 86 cases in which actors perceived a threat to one or more basic values, along with an awareness of finite time for response to the value threat. We also present simple statistical models comparing (a) near crisis to crisis and (b) crisis to war that show that analyses based on the Near Crisis dataset will contribute to advancement of knowledge.

This study reports the results of a project to construct dyadic-level data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project data collection. The project defines coding rules used in identifying crisis dyads and applies them to identify 766 crisis dyads for the period from 1918 to 1994. This research makes it possible to perform a careful comparison of crisis dyads to dyads involved in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). The comparison indicates that conflicts that qualify as both a MID and a crisis are significantly more severe than conflicts that do not pass both thresholds. The study offers a robustness analysis of Russett and Oneal's Triangulating Peace (2001) and finds that two of the three Kantian variables theorized to inhibit conflict involvement maintain a relationship similar to the onset of international crises as they do for MIDs. The analysis indicates that economic interdependence is a somewhat weaker inhibitor of crises than MIDs.

Underlying the emerging interest in the role of rivalry processes as antecedents to interstate conflict is the simple idea that conflict within the constraints of rivalry works differently than conflict outside of rivalry. In this article, we inspect the concepts of protracted conflict, as developed within the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project, and rivalry, and discuss some of their applications to crisis escalation. The protracted conflict and rivalry concepts are not identical, but they do overlap in terms of their emphases on historical context, serious goal incompatibilities, and stakes that might be resolved coercively. Developing an argument for the concept of rivalry possessing fewer limitations than protracted conflict, we proceed to analyze and test the interaction between rivalry and other variables, again making use of an ICB escalation model, when predicting crisis escalation to war. Throughout, our basic question concerns what role interstate rivalry plays in crisis behavior. Are the crises of rivals more lethal than those of non-rivals? If so, can we pinpoint why that is the case? We find that rivalry not only makes escalation more likely, but also significantly interacts with more traditional predictors of conflict, such as capability ratios, the number of actors in a crisis, democracy, and the issues under contention.

AbstractIt has often been said that the closest thing we have to an empirical law in international relations is that democracies do not fight against each other. This study adds to the literature on democratic peace by focusing on the crisis behaviour of democracies and nondemocracies. International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project data are used to conduct a quantitative analysis of states' crisis activity from 1918 to 1988. Strong support emerges for the three hypotheses of the study. First, it is clear that democracies initiate fewer crises than nondemocracies. However, democracies tend to escalate crises to higher levels of severity. Finally, democracies eventually win the crises in which they become involved. The conclusion is that democratic leaders face strong incentives to "select" winnable crises against nondemocratic states because of the audience costs they face, but when the opponent is another democracy, the domestic audience expects leaders to compromise.