Search results for "Subject"

The Impact of Regionalism on Democracy Building: An Examination of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

2017

Since the early 1990s, the world has witnessed a new wave of regionalism and a mushrooming of regional integration organizations, particularly in the global South. Focusing on Africa, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) ranks among the most promising examples of regionalism on the continent. The SADC explicitly aims at building and advancing democracy in the region and its member states as part of its broader agenda on regional development. From a political science perspective, there is general agreement that regional integration and parallel institution building can be useful measures to promote and strengthen democratic rule, since an appropriate institutional “lock-in” impl…

Two novel subjective logic-based in-network data processing schemes in wireless sensor networks

2016

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of connected low-cost and small-size sensor nodes. The sensor nodes are characterized by various limitations, such as energy availability, processing power, and storage capacity. Typically, nodes collect data from an environment and transmit the raw or processed data to a sink. However, the collected data contains often redundant information. An in-network processing scheme attempts to eliminate or reduce such redundancy in sensed data. In this paper, we propose two in-network data processing schemes for WSNs, which are built based on a lightweight algebra for data processing. The schemes bring also benefits like decreased network traffic load and inc…

Analyzing Cascading Effects in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

2018

International audience; Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are resources that are essential for the performance of society, including its economy and its security. Large-scale disasters, whether natural or man-made, can have devastating primary (direct) effects on some CI and significant indirect effects (cascading effects) on other CIs, because CIs are interconnected and depend on each other’s services. Recent work by Laugé et al. expressed the dependency values among CIs as dependency matrices for various durations of the primary CI failure. For better preparedness and mitigation of CI failures knowledge of the weak points in CI interdependencies is crucial. To this effect, we have developed …

Connecting theories of cascading disasters and disaster diplomacy

2018

Abstract Disaster diplomacy examines how and why disaster-related activities (disaster risk reduction and post-disaster actions) do and do not influence peace and conflict processes, especially whether or not a causal chain can be established between dealing with disaster risk or a disaster and outcomes in peace or conflict. Cascading disasters might provide a useful theoretical framing for mapping out causal pathways for disaster diplomacy. In conceptually exploring the intersection between disaster diplomacy and cascading disasters, this paper concludes that both disaster diplomacy and cascading disasters have limitations because they try to develop focused causal chains which, when exami…

Making sense of crises: the implications of information asymmetries for resilience and social justice in disaster-ridden communities

2017

New information and communication technologies (ICT) have enabled communities to collect and share information and tap into a network of peers in unprecedented ways. For more than a decade, informa...

Can Gender Equality Be Institutionalized?

1999

Institutional innovation can be understood as launching an institution within an intact institutional and cultural context. Such attempts of guided institutionalization pose a crucial built-in problem. The goal of institutional innovation is to create new routine-reproduced, taken-for-granted behaviour patterns. The means to reach this goal is rational, purposive action, which is the very opposite of routinized enacting. This immanent contradiction of institutional innovation is discussed on the basis of a comparative study on the introduction of gender quotas in Norwegian and German political parties. The analysis draws on more than 50 qualitative interviews with parliamentarians from bot…

How women are imagined through conceptual metaphors in United Nations Security Council Resolutions on women, peace and security

2017

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is a landmark pronouncement on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Not only does this resolution highlight the important role of the involvement of women in peace processes, but it also stresses the importance of their equal participation in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace. Furthermore, it also triggers the approval of some other resolutions, which are all further elaborations on that first document. The aim of this paper is to analyse, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the way in which women are actually narrated in these pronouncements by means of the two conceptual metaphors that are most often repeated: WOME…

The role of social perception in disaster risk reduction: Beliefs, perception, and attitudes regarding flood disasters in communities along the Volta…

2017

Abstract People's perceptions of natural, spiritual, and social phenomena are socially constructed. Social perception is important because it helps people to make sense of the physical and social world and therein interact with it. Earlier research specializing in the study of human behaviour has emphasized a linkage between people's perceptions and their behaviour. In this article, the authors employ a similar theory with the intent of proposing a theoretical framework that examines the factors that influence people's perception and attitude (mitigation and response) towards the hazards they face. This discussion is done on the premise of “culture”, “experiences” and “disaster risk reducti…

2018

Abstract Disaster diplomacy investigates how and why disaster-related activities do and do not influence conflict and cooperation. Studies into the topic so far have tended to develop the theory, analyse a specific case study in space and time, or connect both. Explorations of disaster diplomacy case studies over the long-term are so far absent from the literature. This paper explores Jammu and Kashmir in the Himalaya as a long-term case study for disaster diplomacy. Jammu and Kashmir has a long history of conflicts, multiple environmental hazards, and significant vulnerabilities yielding major disasters, with each topic generally addressed separately in the literature. This paper explores …

Helices of disaster memory: How forgetting and remembering influence tropical cyclone response in Mauritius

2020

Abstract Tropical cyclones have had a considerable impact on Mauritius. Large cyclones are relatively rare, and in popular imagination are thought to hit Mauritius every 15 years. Yet it has been over 25 years since the last cyclone widely considered as ‘significant’. Critically, there is little known about the role of memory in responses to cyclones and details regarding responses to past cyclones in Mauritian history are scant. This article examines past experiences and impacts of cyclones in Mauritius, as well as contemporary perceptions of cyclone vulnerability and memories of historical cyclones. The analysis draws on both community interviews and archival research conducted in Mauriti…