Feedback

In response to Nicky May's Conference Report ('Performance and accountability in the New World Order' Vol. 5 No. 1: 71-3), Michael Edwards and David Hulme, the organisers of the Workshop, present their point of view.     

Feedback

Kishore Saint, one of our founding Editorial Advisers, is standing down after accompanying us through our first six years. Welcoming Development in Practice 'as a forum with a diverse constituency and global range around the problematic phenomenon of development', he shares here some parting thoughts on the challenges with which Development in Practice must grapple in the future.     

Feedback

The following account of a development programme in southern Mexico responds to the issues raised by John Grierson in his article entitled 'Limited liability companies and development agencies' (Development in Practice 5/1, February 1995).     

Feedback Opinions and Suggestions from Readers at Home and Abroad

To build a bridge between editors and readers and improve the editorial equality of International Understanding, Asking for Opinions and Suggestions was issued by our editorial office last December; we have received active responce from our readers at home and abroad. Many officials from foreign embassies in Beijing have offered high appreciation, they hold that International Understanding is a window open to mutual understanding between China and the rest of the World. An Australian reade…     

Conflict Dynamics and Feedback: Explaining Change in Violence against Civilians within Conflicts

Conflicts are complex, dynamic processes wherein the frequency and intensity of violence changes throughout the contest. In this article, we explore the temporal dynamics of two long-term civil wars—DR-Congo and Sudan—to identify systematic and random conditions that lead to changes in civilian targeting. Violence committed by rival political actors, territorial exchange, and the number and addition of violent agents strongly shape the likelihood that civilian targeting events and casualties increase or decrease over time. General and country differences emerge from vector autoregression analysis to suggest that (1) three types of violent agents—rebels, militias, and the government—are locked in spirals of violence where violence against civilians by one actor leads to subsequent violence by another actor; (2) rebels and government forces respond to the other side’s acquisition of contested territory by increasing counterattacks on civilians, specifically in DR-Congo; and (3) increasing numbers of active nonstate agents lead to higher violence rates in the following months. Among these, civilian targeting by rival actors triggers the most follow-on violent events against civilians.     

Feedback loops in a world of complexity: a cybernetic approach at the interface of foreign policy analysis and international relations theory

Feedback in foreign policy occurs when a state's foreign policy affects the international context of that state and those changes in context subsequently impact on the state's future foreign policy decisions. In this way, feedback loops can develop, which may become self-reinforcing and in which foreign policy and international context continuously affect each other. Even though such processes are ubiquitous especially in a globalized world, they have hitherto received little systematic attention. We introduce cybernetics as a perspective that puts such feedback effects at the centre of attention and provides an accessible sequential framework for analysing them. Such a cybernetic analysis not only demonstrates the significance of feedback processes in foreign policies but also speaks to several recent debates in international relations theory and foreign policy analysis. In particular, it highlights processes of learning and change, of non-linearity and indeterminacy, and enables the researcher to integrate insights from structure- and agency-based approaches. We outline the merits of a cybernetic analysis by discussing the effects of feedback in the United States' War on Terror.