Negotiations for Refugee Repatriation or Local Settlement: A Game-Theoretic Analysis

This paper uses a model developed by Brams and Doherty (1993) to examine negotiations among a country of origin, a country of asylum, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a refugee crisis. A unique feature of the paper is its treatment of the country of asylum as a separate player in the negotiations, which makes the choice to permit or deny settlement in the asylum country endogenous.
The model is applied to two groups of Rwandese refugees: Tutsis living in exile in Burundi for three decades and Hutus in Zaire during the 1990s. The contrasting circumstances surrounding these two refugee crises provide an opportunity to study asylum countries that were sympathetic and unsympathetic, and to model changing attitudes in the country of origin and the international community toward the refugees. For both crises, the predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the unfolding of the negotiation process and the opportunities that eventually became available to the refugees.     

Suicide and homicide away from home

In 1980, suicides in the United States that occurred outside the victim's home state were most often committed by young single or divorced men. Hanging was the most common means of suicide. Homicide victims who were killed outside their home state were usually male, black, divorced, young, and killed by unusual (other) means or by law-enforcement officers.     

Credentialism,meritocracy, and merit: educational requirements and the public service

The American myth of mobility suggests that educational attainment, as evidenced by some credential, is the road to achievement for everyone. This has never been entirely true, but recent trends suggest that the educational credential may increasingly limit as well as offer opportunity. Additional educational requirements have often been equated with increasing the “professionalism” of the public service, but they may also serve as a reason to keep out minorities or women now that non-meritorious discriminatory barriers have been eliminated by the courts. Examples from Mississippi and New York are cited. Although the courts have been vigilant in insisting that tests and other selection devices be validated, they have been much more tolerant of educational requirements, often failing to subject them to the stringent tests of job relatedness and validity. Even when a particular government unit is willing to lower credential barriers that cannot clearly be justified, it may be subject to pressures from other government units or associations, focusing on “improving” professional qualifications.     

Information Sharing for Infrastructure Risk Management: Barriers and Solutions

There is a public interest in ensuring that infrastructure systems are appropriately protected and prepared for disruptions. While infrastructure protection is usually viewed as a public responsibility, infrastructure risk management actually requires a high degree of cooperation between the public and private sectors, particularly in the sharing of information about risks to infrastructure. Discussions with Chief Security Officers across sectors of the US economy reveal the complexity of the task, as they describe at length the private sector's requirements of multiples types of information about a range of potential threats. While the US government has established many mechanisms for sharing information, barriers remain that inhibit both the private and public partners from obtaining the information needed to protect infrastructure. Overcoming these barriers requires new thinking about the intelligence generation process, the mechanisms and practices upon which the process relies, and the responsibilities of those in the private sector who participate in it.