Suchergebnisse

Many professions occasionally involve the selection of an alternative from among many problem solutions which have impacts in multiple-interest areas; however, due to the very nature of his work, the practicing engineer, regardless of specialty, is unavoidably engaged in this selection process. The emergence of national concern for environmental and social consequences of technical enterprises, as reflected through legislative action, has accentuated the need for multicriteria design methodologies in some areas of engineering (i.e., automotive). Consequently, interest in the development of pragmatic and theoretically sound approaches to multi-impact design situations has been keen. Any approach to multicriteria design/decision problems involves two fundamental aspects: (1) generating information regarding the range of possible designs and their associated impacts; and (2) generating relative value information which is used to compare the relative imp-cats leading to the selection of a "preferred" or "best compromise" alternative. The methodology developed herein is the integration of a formal mathematical programming technique for generating the full range of feasible alternatives with a pragmatic and well-accepted group-interaction technique for extracting value information regarding alternatives. The integration results in an iterative group-interaction process which leads to successive reductions in the preferred range of alternatives until the most preferred alternative is identified. The methodology developed in this research represents an improvement over other methodologies reported in the literature in two areas: 1) The noninferior set is explicitly identified insuring selection of a group decision point which is noninferior, 2) a least squared error mathematical filtering technique is developed for smoothing relative value data obtained from the decision making body. In addition, a convergence proof is developed which not only indicates the theoretically sound and robust nature of the algorithm developed in this work but in addition provides a basis for an improved class of algorithms for solving classical nonlinear constrained problems. The technique was developed for and implemented in an interactive software package. The multiobjective decision problem is solved in a single encounter with a cooperative decision making group.

As Ward Thomas details in The New Dogs of War, militias and paramilitary groups wield greater power than national governments in many countries, while in some war zones private contractors perform missions previously reserved for uniformed troops. Most ominously, terrorist organizations with global reach have come to define the security landscape for even the most powerful nations. Across the first decades of the twenty-first century we have witnessed a dramatic rise in the use of military force by these nonstate actors in ways that have impacted the international system, leading Thomas to undertake this valuable assessment of the state of play at this critical moment. To understand the spread of nonstate violence, Thomas focuses on the crucial role played by an epochal transformation in international norms. Since the eighteenth century, the Westphalian model of sovereignty has reserved the legitimate use of force to states. Thomas argues that normative changes in the decades after World War II produced a "crisis of coherence" for formal and informal rules against nonstate violence. In detailed case studies of nonstate militias, transnational terrorist networks, and private military contractors, Thomas explains how forces contesting state prerogatives exploited this crisis, which in turn reshaped international understandings of who could legitimately use force. By considering for the first time all three purveyors of nonstate violence as aspects of the same phenomenon, The New Dogs of War explains this fundamental shift in the norm that for centuries gave states the monopoly on military force.

The Fall and Rise of Nonstate Violence -- Coherence and Contestation : Explaining International Normative Change -- Partisans, Liberators, and Militias : Normative Change and the Legitimization of Nonstate Violence -- One Man's Freedom Fighter? Normative Change and the Geopolitical Construction of Terrorism -- From Soldiers of Fortune to Fortune 500 : Normative Contestation and the Return of Entrepreneurial Violence -- What's at Stake? The Implications of Nonstate Actor Violence.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. The Fall and Rise of Nonstate Violence -- 2. Coherence and Contestation: Explaining International Normative Change -- 3. Partisans, Liberators, and Militias: Normative Change and the Legitimization of Nonstate Violence -- 4. One Man's Freedom Fighter?: Normative Change and the Geopolitical Construction of Terrorism -- 5. From Soldiers of Fortune to Fortune 500: Normative Contestation and the Return of Entrepreneurial Violence -- 6. What's at Stake?: The Implications of Nonstate Actor Violence -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

The "birth" of Latin American nations -- From people to nation: Mesoamerica -- From people to nation: the Andes -- Gender and expanding ethnicity -- Migrations, trade, and other human interactions

"While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our time. The thesis of this book is that there are various ways to decolonize the representation of Amerindian peoples. Each chapter has its own decolonial thesis which it then resolves. Chapter 1 proves that there is coloniality in contemporary scholarship and argues that word choices can be improved to decolonize the way we describe the first Americans. Chapter 2 argues that literature in Latin American begins before 1492 and shows the long arc of Mayan expression, taking the Popol Wuj as a case study. Chapter 3 demonstrates how colonialist discourse is reinforced by a dualist rhetorical ploy of ignorance and arrogance in a Renaissance historical chronicle, Agustin de Zárate's Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú. Chapter 4 shows how by inverting the Renaissance dualist configuration of civilization and barbarian, the Nahua (Aztecs) who were formerly considered barbarian can be "civilized" within Spanish norms. This is done by modeling the categories of civilization discussed at length by the Friar Bartolomé de las Casas as a template that can serve to evaluate Nahua civil society as encapsulated by the historiography of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a possibility that would have been available to Spaniards during that time. Chapter 5 maintains that the colonialities of the pre-Independence era survive, but that Criollo-indigenous dialogue is capable of excavating their roots to extirpate them. By comparing the discussions of the hacienda system by the Peruvian essayist Manuel González Prada and by the Mayan-Quiché eye-witness to history Rigoberta Menchú, this books shows that there is common ground between their viewpoints despite the different genres in which their work appears and despite the different countries and the eight decades that separated them, suggesting a universality to the problem of the hacienda which can be dissected. This book models five different decolonizing methods to extricate from the continuities of coloniality both indigenous writing and the representation of indigenous peoples by learned elites."--Publisher's website

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Ethics, Norms, and the Study of International Relations -- 2. Principle Meets Power: Groundwork for an Analysis of Ethical Norms -- 3. International Assassination: "An Infamous and Execrable Practice" -- 4. Aerial Bombing to 1945: "A Frightful Cataclysm" -- 5. Aerial Bombing since 1945: A Norm Revived -- 6. The Limits of International Ethics -- Bibliography -- Index

"International Law and Armed Conflict" published on by Oxford University Press.

Este artículo propone ubicar a José Martí en un contexto teórico basado principalmente en los ensayos que él escribió durante su estadía en Estados Unidos. La teoría que él postula va más allá de la retórica meramente política anticolonialista que repudia el dominio que España ejercía sobre Cuba y expone dos otras facetas del colonialismo: la subordinación económica a través de tratados o conferencias internacionales así como también la subyugación psicológica inherente a la respuesta humana a estos tratados y conferencias. Esta psicocolonialidad resulta en actores individuales y nacionales que se convierten en protagonistas de dos caras en sus esfuerzos por obtener las mejores ventajas económicas, muchas veces a detrimento de otras naciones latinoamericanas. Martí propone la verdad y el h

Among the more perennially contentious issues on the campuses of many Catholic colleges and universities is the presence of the Reserve Officers'Training Corps, or ROTC. While opposition to ROTC has been by no means limited to Catholic schools, the centrality of moral and religious principles to the mission of these institutions has provided purchase for many of the arguments of ROTC critics. This article examines the major arguments put forth in support of the claim that ROTC is fundamentally inconsistent with Catholic Church teaching and, therefore, at odds with the mission of Catholic colleges and universities. The article concludes that each rests on interpretations of Catholic moral thought and teaching that are not only incomplete but also incorrect and that claims of a basic contradiction between the religious identity of Catholic institutions of higher learning and ROTC programs do not stand up well to scrutiny.