The carcass of dead policies: lessons for Obama in dealing with Iran

The United States has spent 30 years clinging to variations of the same policy towards Iran, to no avail. ‘Doing the right thing’ has proved perplexing, complicated and, ultimately, elusive. In 1979, the United States struggled to come to terms with Iran's transformation from consort to adversary. Washington had difficulty fitting Iran into the hierarchy of regional and international priorities, often viewing it through the prism of its other regional concerns. Administration tensions, varying levels of dysfunction and wider governmental conflict also affected policy formulation and execution by producing different agendas, and, occasionally, a range of different assessments of US policy. Underpinning and exacerbating these problems was the fact that policymakers were doing a jigsaw with missing pieces. Two types of intelligence failures, missing and poor information and flawed interpretation, proved debilitating. A further complication was the fact that the United States and Iran engaged in a dialogue of the duff for nearly 30 years. Besides not hearing each other (and when they did, regularly misunderstanding the message), bad timing and the intervention of events conspired repeatedly to frustrate initiatives and confound a breakthrough. This case-study-based analysis of policymaking and policy explores why successive administrations have failed to ‘park Iran in a better place’ and offers a set of lessons for the Obama administration as it confronts this unique ‘non-relationship’.     

我国台湾地区消费者权益司法保护方法简析

消费者权益是一种分散的、弱小R权益,对其进行司法保护需要建立特别的诉讼制度。我国台湾地区借鉴西方国家的先进经验,建立了小额诉讼、选定当事人诉讼、团体诉讼和民事公诉制度,形成了消费者、消费者保护团体和政府共同参与维护消费者权益诉讼的司法保护体系。我们应当借鉴台湾地区的作法,完善我国消费者权益司法保护制度。     

关于中日公务员考录制度的比较研究

我国公务员考录制度建立后,对推动我国政治体制改革和行政活动法制化、规范化、科学化起了重要作用。但是我国尚处于初级阶段的公务员考录制度不能适应社会发展需要的现象日益突出,影响到我国公务员队伍建设的进行和行政体制改革的推行。文章对中日公务员考录制度进行了详尽的比较,借鉴日本的有益经验对进一步完善我国公务员考录制度提出了合理的意见和建议。     

关于民事责任承担中公平责任适用的探讨

公平责任是民法的基本原则,但是在体育竞技比赛中能否适用该原则,我国法律没有明确规定。文章通过具体案列探讨了该原则的使用条件,以及法官的自由裁量权在公平责任的使用上应当受到限制。     

“常态性”贸易战对我国经济与就业的影响研究

中美贸易战对我国经济增长和就业扩大产生了不利影响，阻碍了全球经济复苏的步伐。改革开 放以来，贸易摩擦已成为中国必须面对的一种常态现象。在中美贸易战的背景下，中国经济和就业结构正处于 转型升级的关键时期，面临着诸多的挑战，包括经济下行压力增大、与贸易战直接相关的产业及其就业形势不 容乐观、经济结构调整导致摩擦性失业增多等。为此，应加快贸易发展方式转变，实施主动进口的贸易政策， 合理加大对外投资力度，充分利用和熟悉国际贸易规则，同时高度重视对劳动力的教育和培训，增强劳动者的 就业适应能力。     

略述民事证据中的非法证据排除

合法的收集证据是一个比较重要的问题。在民事诉讼中要明确证据的合法性,让非法证据排除原则得以充分的发挥作用。在我国民事证据立法中,应当就陷阱取证、偷拍偷录、私人侦探、测谎证据等非法证据排除规则在适用中经常涉及到的问题加以规定,还应该借鉴国外非法证据排除的一些例外情况。     

基于绩效的公务员薪酬制度改革研究

20世纪80年代初,发达国家开始在薪酬体系中大量引入基于绩效的薪酬制度。绩效薪酬改革的方向是精简薪酬体系和下放薪酬管理职能,建立宽幅弹性薪酬体系和绩效薪酬的指标体系,并在薪酬与绩效之间建立密切的关联方式。本文以英国和韩国为例,对绩效薪酬制度进行分析。     

Funding,capabilities and the use of child soldiers

Recent years have seen increased scholarly attention given to the issue of child soldiering. Primarily dedicated to the decision-making calculus of rebel groups, this body of work has generally emphasised supply-side versus demand-side arguments. We contribute to this growing literature by explicitly investigating a previously untested aspect of the latter. Prior scholarship has made vague references to a potential association between economic endowments and child soldiering, including natural resource wealth, but scant empirical attention has been given. We argue that the specific type of endowment has important consequences for the decision to utilise child soldiers. We argue access to and exploitation of lootable natural resources (e.g. gemstones) to be especially likely to promote the use of child soldiers due to their ease of access, the low skills required to harness them and the heightened likelihood that groups will become more profit-oriented. A systematic cross-national investigation of rebel groups provides robust evidence that lootable resources such as diamonds and gemstones are strongly associated with the use of children, while non-lootable resources such as oil are not.     

Ethnicity and conflict severity: accounting for the effect of co-ethnic and non-ethnic militias on battlefield lethality

How does the presence of armed pro-regime groups affect conflict lethality? This study examines the relationship between ethnicity, militia violence and conflict lethality in civil wars. We emphasise that differences in whether pro-regime militias were recruited in accordance with their ethnicity or not are critical in their influence upon conflict lethality, which we estimate in battlefield deaths. To that end, we categorise militias into groups recruited on their ethnic basis (co-ethnic militias) and those recruited regardless of their ethnicity (non-ethnic militias). We hypothesise that conflicts are more lethal when non-ethnic militias are involved. We link higher number of battle-deaths in conflicts with non-ethnic militias with the militia use of one-sided violence against civilians. Co-ethnic militias – that is militias recruited from the same ethnicity as rebels – are deployed amongst their co-ethnics and therefore tend to target civilians less than non-ethnic militias. This militia–civilian relationship has direct impact on conflict severity. To test our hypotheses we conduct global statistical analysis of 84 intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2014.     

“There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence – a noun,a verb and 9/11”: terrorism,fear and the after,after 9/11

In the years since 11 September 2001, pundits, politicians and scholars of terrorism and international relations routinely have declared that 9/11 “changed everything”. This article explores not only how those decisions transformed the United States and the global response to terrorism, but also how both the decisions and response sustained a sense of fear. Further, they made possible, to paraphrase then candidate Joseph Biden’s critique of former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, the framing of so much of the global political debate about terrorism, and national security references as simply 9/11 accompanied by a noun and a verb. Finally, the article examines the consequences of this framing for not only our understanding of terrorism, but also our understanding of terrorism and violence within the current global system.