Social media and Russian territorial irredentism: some facts and a conjecture

ABSTRACT

After Kremlin policymakers decided to incorporate the territory of Crimea into Russia, updates on public attitudes in Russian-speaking communities elsewhere in Ukraine would have been in high demand. Because social media users produce content in order to communicate ideas to their social networks, online political discourse can provide important clues about the political dispositions of communities. We map the evolution of Russian-speakers’ attitudes, expressed on social media, across the course of the conflict as Russian analysts might have observed them at the time. Results suggest that the Russian-Ukrainian interstate border only moved as far as their military could have advanced while incurring no occupation costs – Crimea, and no further.     

A shift towards collaboration: Examining practitioner's economic development practices in Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic

Regional collaboration has been suggested as a more effective way to promote economic development than competitive approaches. In Ontario, despite attempts by the provincial government to encourage regional collaboration, research finds that municipalities are still engaging in inter-territorial competition. In this article, we conducted interviews with thirty-seven practitioners to determine if economic development practices in Ontario have shifted towards more collaborative approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article finds that regional collaboration, as an economic development practice, has intensified in the province during the recent pandemic. Practitioners noted three reasons for engaging in regional collaboration: pool resources, reduce duplication, and complete regionally task-oriented goals.     

Autonomy,Dependence or Culture: Examining the Impact of Resources and Socio-cultural Processes on Attitudes Towards Intimate Partner Violence in Ghana,Africa

Despite the high levels of domestic violence (intimate partner violence) against African women, tests of competing theories on why the practice is common in the region are quite limited. This study evaluates the effects of resources and cultural factors on attitudes Africans hold about the acceptability of gendered violence, and specifically wife beating (battering). Answers to these questions are relevant to the discourse on intimate partner violence, at least, as pertains to male-dominated societies such as those found in Africa. Drawing on national data from the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, we explore these linkages in an African context. Our findings suggest that egalitarian decision-making and equal household contributions are associated with a reduced acceptance of abusive actions toward women. We suggest that new questions must be asked concerning the present and future role of men and women within households and the community. We share equally in the conceptualization, data analysis, and writing of the paper. We thank Drs. Nancy B. Miller and Cheryl Elman for their helpful comments on this article.     

Community‐Based Organizations and Institutional Work in the Remote Rural West

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long‐dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community‐based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California–based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state‐ or industry‐led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions.     

The German question: Anglo‐American,French and west German perspectives

Geteiltes Land ‐ halbes Land? Essays über Deutschland, eingeleitet von Richard Löwenthal. By David P. Calleo, Roger Morgan, Raymond Poidevin and Michael Voslensky. Frankfurt/Berlin: Ullstein, 1986. Pp.240. DM 38.00.

Die deutsche Frage aus der heutigen Sicht des Auslandes. Edited by Han‐nelore Horn and Siegfried Mampel. Berlin: Duncker &; Humblot, 1987. Pp.135. DM 28.00.

Germany between East and West. Edited by Edwina Moreton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp.185. DM 22.50.

Deutsche Frage und Westbindung. Edited by Klaus Weigelt. Melle: Knoth Verlag, 1986. Pp.151. DM 14.80.

Die offene deutsche Frage. Gesprdche mit unseren Nachbarn. Edited by Jean‐Paul Picaper and Günter Oeltze von Lobenthal. Berlin: Colloquium, 1987. Pp.199. DM22.00.

Le vertige allemand. By Brigitte Sauzay. Paris: Editions Olivier Orban, 1986. Pp.280.

Welches Deutschland soll es sein? Frankreich und die deutsche Einheit seit 1945. By Ernst Weisenfeld. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1986. Pp.203. DM 29.80.

Confronting the German Question. Germans on the East‐West Divide. By Renata Fritsch‐Bournatzel. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988. Pp.150. £16.50.

Das ganze Deutschland. Perspektiven der Wiedervereinigung. By Wolfgang Seiffert. Munich: Piper, 1986. Pp.377. DM 19.80.

Einheit statt Raketen. Thesen zur Wiedervereinigung als Sicherheitskonzept. By Bernhard Friedmann. Herford: Busse/Seewald, 1987. Pp.180. DM 38.00

Deutsche Fragen oder die Suche nach der Staatsräson. Historisch‐politische Kolumnen. By Micheal Stürmer. Munich: Piper, 1988. Pp.211. DM16.80.     

Disciplinary Divides in Post-Conflict Justice and Peace: Tracking If and How we Share Ideas

ABSTRACT

The study of post-conflict justice and peace incorporates ideas from many disciplines and on a range of topics including justice, reconciliation, democratization, and peace. While diversity is valuable, it can also lead to confusion in theory and practice and so requires close evaluation of how diverse ideas interact, and to what end. This paper begins the systematic examination of such interactions by using new bibliometric software to track citations between two particularly influential literatures contributing to post-conflict theory: the legal and the psychosocial. The paper describes how these traditions interact and the impact on the post-conflict literature as a whole.