Electrifying the green peace? Electrification,conservation and conflict in Eastern Congo

ABSTRACT

Large-scale infrastructure in conflict-affected states is often seen as a crucial means to pursue economic growth, poverty reduction, and increasingly, peace-building. Legitimated by an emergent ‘Business for Peace’ agenda, a variety of private actors now also engages in such infrastructure projects. The Virunga Alliance is such an initiative which aims to tackle the interlinked problems of poverty, conservation and conflict in the east of DR Congo through commercialised hydro-power. To take stock of the politics unfolding around such infrastructure efforts, this article analyses the Virunga Alliance as a form of ‘technopolitics’. This entails tracing how current is generated, distributed and consumed, and how these processes generate new sites of power and control. In describing how Virunga offers a centralised, more concentrated supply of electricity as an alternative to the decentralised charcoal circuit, we show how electrification contributes to the expansion of a form of capitalism that prioritises big businessmen over small farmers, facilitates rent-seeking by political elites and amplifies social inequalities in Congo.     

Higher education and peacebuilding – a bridge between communities?

As the Syrian civil war enters its fifth year, with over four million refugees and no solution in the near future, the international community must better consider long-term planning in regards to the plight of refugees and services to support them, not just short-term emergency responses. Critically, higher education is all too often ignored when addressing refugee crises, pushed aside in favor of primary education, and effectively disempowering those best suited to eventually rebuild and reconstruct after war’s end. This paper examines the often less considered aspect of refugee access to higher education, using Duhok, located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as a case study, and hypothesizing that refugees’ inclusion in Duhok’s local higher education system can serve as an invaluable peacebuilding tool, bridging host and refugee communities, while empowering refugees to promote peacebuilding and development. We chose to focus on higher education because we agree with the idea espoused by Watenpaugh, Fricke, and Siegel that ‘university graduates … include Syria’s brightest and most ambitious young people … the human capital that will be critical to the rebuilding of Syrian society after the conflict has ended’. This study investigates Duhok area residents’ perceptions of the Syrian refugee crisis and the refugee population, refugees’ attitudes toward the host community and higher education, and personal views regarding intergroup relationships and the role of higher education, drawing primarily on field research conducted in 2013. Approached as a qualitative study, field research was conducted by a two-person team, with members representing the University of Duhok and New York University, and with the aim of actively working with research participants in the hopes of generating policy-related and practical recommendations.     

Pedagogical discourses of gender,peace, and equality: Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards

This article discusses a feminist critical discourse analysis research project of award-winning books of the Jane Addams Peace Association. Children’s books carry societal messages that are gendered, raced, and classed, with award-winning books carrying an additional message of exceptionality as they are viewed as deserving of attention. Thus, the discourses they circulate are important points of analysis. This research, using data from the Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards (focusing on books for older children – young adult literature), takes a feminist antimilitarist perspective to explore the sociocultural implications of children’s literature for education and learning. I examine research with respect to award-winning literature, define my theoretical framework of feminist antimilitarism, explain my methodology of feminist discourse analysis, and detail my findings. I conclude that the awards as a whole function pedagogically to define conflict in ways that privilege colonial discourses, with women represented in essentialist ways and inequality perceived as absent in the contemporary West.     

‘Pedagogies of resistance’ and critical peace education praxis

This paper explores ‘pedagogies of resistance’ – or critical and democratic educational models utilized by social movements – and how global examples of engaged educational praxis may inform peace education. The central inquiry of this article is ‘How can educational projects that resist larger social, political and economic inequalities offer understandings about how we learn, teach, and act for peace in diverse settings?’ Drawing upon literature from various fields, ideas and insights are offered about how the field of peace education can better respond to multiple and diverse realities, particularly those facing marginalized communities. The article provides an overview of key tenets of peace education and ideas central to ‘critical peace education;’ offers a framing of ‘pedagogies of resistance;’ and, lastly, details what directions emerge by putting these two educational forms in conversation.     

Passing on the history of ‘comfort women’: the experiences of a women’s museum in Japan

This article explores the activities and experiences of a women’s peace museum in Japan which especially tries to pass on the history of Japan’s military sexual slavery, or the ‘comfort women’ issue. The system of Japan’s military sexual slavery had not been written as a part of history until courageous survivors testified and documentary evidence was unearthed in the 1990s. With few material exhibits of sexual violence, testimonies play a significant role in the exhibitions. Panels displaying the testimony of both survivors and former soldiers try to represent the person as a whole, situating sexual enslavement or crimes as part of their overall life, rather than extracting the harsh experience in an isolated way. The concrete and detailed activities of this privately run museum show the challenges faced by museums dealing with the dark history of their own country.     

Protecting Human Rights: The Legitimacy of Judicial System Reforms in EL Salvador

Abstract — Research on democratic transitions in Latin America often ignore the importance of judicial systems — and related institutions — in achieving 'liberal democracy' and effectively safeguarding human rights, as contrasted with the restoration of 'electoral democracy.' This proves especially problematic in the instances of the former military-dominated authoritarian regimes of Central America. This article examines the efforts at judicial system and related reforms in EL Salvador since the 1992 Peace Accords, and relates those reforms to popular perceptions, both of previous institutions and of the institutional reforms and new institutions that have been created as part of the peace-making process. The reported survey research results suggest that the reforms on which liberal democracy in El Salvador depends, while generally viewed positively in the abstract, still rest on shaky foundations.     

试论GATT/WTO协定之私人执行——一个美国法的视角

私人执行GATT/WTO协定是指私人如何行使在GATT/WTO协定下的国家贸易权利。"1934年体制"下"进口竞争性产业"与"出口导向性产业"之间的博弈使得美国国会与总统在共同行使国家经济主权中,通过缔结GATT/WTO协定,为美国创设了市场准入权利与贸易救济权利。这些贸易权利要在国内法中被私人执行,则必须创新国内进口与出口贸易救济制度。     

论邓小平的全球化战略观

邓小平的全球化战略观可概括为:全球化是当今世界发展的客观趋势;和平与发展是全球化时代的世界主题;实行全方位的对外开放是应对全球化挑战的基本战略;建立公正合理的国际新秩序是推进全球化进程的基本准则。邓小平的全球化战略思想是指导中国应对全球化挑战的伟大思想旗帜。     

Collusion and Facilitating Practices: A New Perspective in Antitrust Analysis

A systematic revision of the notion of facilitating practices is put forward in this paper, with the purpose of relaxing the long-debated tension between economic and legal perspectives on oligopoly. Whereas the law knows of just one collusive illegal conduct, namely agreements, in economic theory the focus on internal enforcement makes the distinction between agreements and other behaviour resulting in the collusive outcome irrelevant. However, the tension may be relaxed, at least in a number of relevant circumstances, provided the focus of competition law shifts from straightforward co-ordination on market strategies to the firms' concerted efforts in the design and implementation of given organisational arrangements of the oligopolistic industry, to which an anticompetitive object can be attached. The theoretical analysis is extensively supported by examples drawn from some recent decisions of the European Commission and the Italian Competition Authority.     

邓小平的和平观与中国和平崛起

邓小平和平观为中国和平崛起奠定了坚实的理论基础.邓小平和平与发展的实践为中国和平崛起创造了良好的周边环境.和平崛起的道路就是中国特色社会主义发展的道路.我们既要坚定不移地走和平崛起的道路,又要迎接严峻的困难和挑战.