Common Language,Different Meaning: What Mediators Mean When They Talk About Their Work

Mediators, for the most part, describe their work as facilitation but what they actually mean varies considerably. Based on an exploratory study with nearly 90 mediators in Canada (all of whom are also mediation trainers), the author describes the great diversity among mediators' understanding of commonly-used terms like facilitation, transformative, settlement, and humanistic. She also reports on how such factors as context, gender, and number of years mediating affect mediator perceptions of what they do. In addition, the author shows how perceptions affect the overall philosophy and goal of the mediation practitioner. One implication of this research is that we can no longer presume to know what people mean by mediation, nor can we assume mediators are like-minded in how they understand their work. Thus, practitioners, scholars and policymakers are encouraged to be purposefully clear when describing and writing about the practice of mediation.     

When States Choose to Die: Reassessing Assumptions About What States Want

In order to explain the creation and maintenance of a number of important international institutions, scholars must reconsider a commonly held assumption about what states want. Structural realists show that the assumption that states desire survival explains a wide range of outcomes. Yet the survival assumption prevents both realists and liberal institutionalists from offering a plausible account of international organizations that are costly to autonomy. The cultures of anarchy argument helps explain when the desire to survive is more or less salient but is burdened with the survival assumption nonetheless. I argue that it is useful to assume that states pursue the national interest and that survival is only a potential means to that end. By employing this assumption within the cultures of anarchy framework, we can begin to formulate an explanation for the willingness of states to cede autonomy to international institutions.     

日欧美新能源战略及其对中国的挑战

随着国际能源短缺和气候灾害的加剧,日本、欧盟和美国近些年来相继出台了新的能源政策.从表面上看,日欧美新能源战略只是要进行一次能源结构的调整,但实际上远远超出了能源和气候范围,包含着复杂的战略动机,必将掀起一场全球性政治经济博弈.中国作为一个发展中国家,只有以积极的态度面对这场博弈,才能抓住机遇,完成发展经济和实现经济发展模式转型的双重任务,缩小与发达国家的差距.     

Inequality and Human Rights: Who Controls What, When, and How

This article tests the empirical relationship between inequality and the protection of personal integrity rights using a cross-national time-series data set for 162 countries for the years 1980–2004. The data comprise measures of land inequality, income inequality, and a combined factor score for personal integrity rights protection, while the analysis controls for additional sets of explanatory variables related to development, political regimes, ethnic composition, and domestic conflict. The analysis shows robust support for the empirical relationship between income inequality and personal integrity rights abuse across the whole sample of countries as well as for distinct subsets, including non-communist countries and non-OECD countries. The hypothesized effect of land inequality is also born out by the data, although its effects are less substantial and less robust across different methods of estimation. Additional variables with explanatory weight include the level of income, democracy, ethnic fragmentation, domestic conflict, and population size. Sensitivity analysis suggests that the results are not due to reverse causation, misspecification or omitted variable bias. The analysis is discussed in the context of inequality and rights abuse in specific country cases and the policy implications of the results are considered in the conclusion.     

Justice,Understanding, and Mediation: When Talk Works,Should We Ask for More?

Stimulated by reading Susan Silbey's compelling (1994) profile of Patrick Davis, who mediates special education disputes in Massachusetts, the author discusses the dimensions of these disputes and what it is that parents hope to gain by participating in the process. Recent research suggests that procedural justice is important to them: having the opportunity to voice their concerns, having those concerns acknowledged, and being treated with dignity and respect. These aspects of the process often contribute to personal and emotional goals as well. But parents are also clearly seeking a substantively fair and just result. Substantive justice may sometimes be overlooked as programs develop evaluative tools and other measures to assure quality in mediation. The author also traces the legal history of special education law and points to her research and personal experience as Director of Pennsylvania's special education mediation system in reflecting on mediation's potential in this area. She concludes by observing that skilled mediation is people-centered and has the potential to improve the relationship between the parties; it also can routinely attend to rights-based concerns.     

"共同的目标,不同的方法"中国和挪威在尼日利亚"国际研讨会纪要

2008年1月30日,由挪威研究智库(Econ Poyry)、中国社会科学院西亚非洲研究所,以及尼日利亚国际问题研究所(Nigerian Institute of International Affairs)联合主办的国际研讨会在北京召开.会议围绕上述研究机构近4个月来就尼日利亚的投资环境、投资风险开展的合作研究成果进行研讨.     

Institutions,the Illegal Drug Trade,and Participant Strategies: What Corrupt or Pariah States Have In Common with Liberal Democracy and the Rule of Law

Institutions generate incentives that guide behavior, but many analysts and policymakers underestimate the power of institutions to affect behavior by ignoring how distinct strategies work to generate similar outcomes in different institutional contexts. This article uses the illegal trade in psychoactive substances to illustrate how outcomes (the size of the illegal drug market) across very distinct political institutions can be the same because individuals adopt different strategies in their pursuit of the same behavior: to participate in the illegal drug trade. The illegal trade in psychoactive substances represents an understudied and poorly studied issue in international relations. Arguments that focus on the deviant characteristics of governments in the developing world and organized crime to explain the trade are misleading for empirical and methodological reasons. I propose a general argument about the proliferation of the illegal drug trade that accounts for its success in countries struggling with poverty, corruption, terrorism, and pariah leaders, as well as in rich, stable democracies in which the rule of law “reigns.” The article takes factors that are often seen as distinct in explaining the drug trade (e.g., civil rights in liberal democracies and corruption in developing countries) and demonstrates that their explanatory logic represents variations on the same causal variable: the ability to conceal oneself. My insight is that the strategies used to achieve concealment vary by the institutional context in which participants find themselves.