Genealogies of the colonial present: the rediscovery of the local in conflict management interventions in Mindanao,the Southern Philippines

This article argues that the current attention on indigenous institutions, and the ‘local’ more generally, in peace-building and conflict management bears similarities with colonial and post-colonial attempts at pacifying volatile borderlands. This will be illustrated through a historical case study of the Southern Philippine island of Mindanao, which has witnessed a recurring Muslim insurgency throughout different phases of its history. In an attempt to cope with these violent uprisings, both the American colonial authorities and the authoritarian Marcos regime, as well as a range of contemporary international NGOs, have endorsed traditional institutional avenues of informal mediation. The argument for the deployment of the local in state reconstruction and peace-building as propagated in current literature on hybrid peace should therefore be reframed as a reinvention of colonial governance techniques of indirect rule. It will hereby also be argued that the underlying rationale for this current deployment of local/traditional institutions of mediation and governance confirms and builds further upon a colonial framing of the non-Western other as incapable of modern, liberal democracy.     

Effect of Lower Third Molar Segmentations on Automated Tooth Development Staging using a Convolutional Neural Network

Staging third molar development is commonly used for age estimation in subadults. Automated developmental stage allocation to the mandibular left third molar in panoramic radiographs has been examined in a pilot study. This method used an AlexNet Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approach to stage lower left third molars, which had been selected by manually drawn bounding boxes around them. This method (bounding box AlexNet = BA) still contained parts of surrounding structures which may have affected the automated stage allocation performance. We hypothesize that segmenting only the third molar could further improve the automated stage allocation performance. Therefore, the current study aimed to determine and validate the effect of lower third molar segmentations on automated tooth development staging. Retrospectively, 400 panoramic radiographs were collected, processed and segmented in three ways: bounding box (BB), rough (RS), and full (FS) tooth segmentation. A DenseNet201 CNN was used for automated stage allocation. Automated staging results were compared with reference stages – allocated by human observers – overall and per stage. FS rendered the best results with a stage allocation accuracy of 0.61, a mean absolute difference of 0.53 stages and a Cohen's linear κ of 0.84. Misallocated stages were mostly neighboring stages, and DenseNet201 rendered better results than AlexNet by increasing the percentage of correctly allocated stages by 3% (BA compared to BB). FS increased the percentage of correctly allocated stages by 7% compared to BB. In conclusion, full tooth segmentation and a DenseNet CNN optimize automated dental stage allocation for age estimation.     

Understanding voluntary program performance: Introducing the diffusion network perspective

Voluntary programs have rapidly become a means for the public, private, and third sectors to regulate and govern complex societal problems. Following the rapid and widespread emergence of these programs, scholars have been active in mapping, exploring, and interrogating their design and performance. Considerable advances have been made in describing program design and context conditions, and the actors involved in the voluntary program that relate to program performance. Less is known, however, about how these conditions affect program performance. Starting with one of the dominant theories on voluntary programs, the club theory perspective, this article seeks to understand how different program design conditions interact to affect the performance of 26 voluntary programs for low carbon building and city development in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Applying qualitative comparative analysis, the study finds that the club theory perspective has limited explanatory power for this specific set of cases. Iterative rounds of analysis indicate that a diffusion network perspective is the best complementary perspective for explaining the performance of this set of programs. The article concludes that, in situations of a non‐homogeneous market of voluntary program participants, a focus on the programs’ diffusion networks helps to explain their performance. This has implications for the design and implementation of such programs.     

Europeanization,Policy Transfer or Domestic Opportunity? Comparison of European Impact in Higher Education Policy

The study conceptualizes three distinct functions European initiatives have in national policy changes: providing a model (Europeanization), providing a communication platform (policy transfer) or providing a legitimizing label (enabling opportunism of domestic policy entrepreneurs). Building on the example of higher education policy changes in four European countries – Belgium/Flanders, Croatia, the Netherlands and Serbia ? the study demonstrates that Europeanization, which is the role that can potentially lead to convergence, is actually not the most prominent one. In most cases, European initiatives primarily serve as legitimizing labels for pre-existing policy preferences, thus leading to convergence of policy rhetoric and ideas, while allowing for significant diversity of policy instruments and outcomes.     

A short history of studying incremental institutional change: Does Explaining Institutional Change provide any new explanations?

Kathleen Thelen is one of the leading scholars studying incremental institutional change. In her early works from the 1990s, she introduced the conceptualization of different modes of incremental change. These modes have central attention in her recent co-edited book with James Mahoney, Explaining Institutional Change (2010). Compared with Thelen's earlier work, this book provides clearer definitions, addresses the explanatory factors of institutional change, and discusses the patterns and sequences of gradual institutional change. The theory presented by Mahoney and Thelen, however, seems overambitious and subject to a need to be overly crisp and clear.