Preventive action and conflict mitigation in Nigeria’s 2015 elections

Prior to the 2015 Nigerian general elections, there were concerns that the fierce political contest would lead to electoral violence in the country. However, the elections were conducted peacefully, with fewer disputes and election-related deaths than previous elections. This study accounts for the fall in the level of electoral violence in Nigeria and discusses the lessons that Nigeria’s experience presents. It argues that the avoidance of destructive electoral disputes in Nigeria was the result of preventive action taken by the country’s electoral commission, civil society groups, and development partners. The specific preventive actions taken include innovations in election administration aimed at enhancing electoral transparency and credibility, election security measures such as early warning and peace messaging, and preventive diplomacy urging the main candidates and the political elite to embrace peace. The key lesson that can be drawn from Nigeria’s experience is that a well thought out conflict prevention strategy should be an integral part of electoral governance, especially in countries with a high risk of electoral violence.     

冷战后美欧的对华政策

冷战后美国和欧盟的对华政策明显地拉开了距离 ,他们的对华政策的调整变化是由各自所处的国际环境、经济利益和战略利益所决定的 ,它对美中关系、欧中关系的发展产生了重要的影响。     

九一一事件以来美国反恐过程中的主导性隐喻及其后果

九一一事件后,国际反恐行动似乎已陷入"越反越恐"的怪圈,这与人们对恐怖主义的"越描越恐"密切相关,而隐喻的存在及广泛使用是导致"越描越恐"的重要原因。在恐怖主义的治理中,作为必不可少的思维方式,涉恐隐喻具有启发性,但也因其随意性、凸显与隐藏的特征,限制了人们关于恐怖主义的思想和行为。在美国涉恐的政治、媒体和学术话语中,"恐怖主义是战争""恐怖主义是野蛮的东西""恐怖主义是疾病"和"恐怖主义是不受欢迎的植物"是占主导地位的隐喻。这些隐喻深植于历史、人们的恐惧、社会系统和舆论中,很大程度上代表了人们对恐怖主义的正统看法。进行隐喻分析,使用多种隐喻,一定程度上能缓解隐喻陷阱,但仍不能消除它。因此,在恐怖主义治理的过程中,坚持"犯罪"隐喻为主导、灵活使用多种措施、重建受损的政治秩序、减少对无辜平民的伤害和对穆斯林的歧视尤为重要。     

武装组织治理制度与反叛成功

当前武装组织治理制度建设成为内战研究的重点。武装组织治理制度是武装组织对其控制区域和民众管理的相应制度与规则体系。以反叛成功为分析对象,通过系统评估武装组织治理制度建设对其内战中获得冲突优势的影响,可以看到,武装组织的反叛成功并不直接由武装组织治理制度决定,而是取决于武装组织治理制度在内部与外部产生的效果。在内部维度,武装组织治理制度需要取得良好的相对治理绩效;在外部维度,武装组织治理制度需要一个有利的国际战略环境并可对其进行塑造。而武装组织治理制度并不能确保相应效果的实现。通过混合研究的模式对以上观点进行检验:在定量研究方面,通过两个不同层次的数据库对于武装组织治理制度与反叛成功的关系进行检验,发现武装组织治理制度与反叛成功之间无直接的联系;在案例比较研究方面,通过两个具体武装组织的实践案例(阿富汗塔利班和"伊斯兰国"组织)进行分析,可以发现武装组织治理制度与反叛成功之间的关系并不确定,因此并不存在简单的正向促进关系。     

战争和革命对20世纪初俄国货币体系的影响

俄国是一个十分好战的国家,在18世纪初成为了欧洲强国之后,为了维持它的强国地位,俄国坚持对外扩张的政策,连年战事不断。受国家落后的经济状况和巨额战争经费所累,俄国货币体系混乱不堪。进入20世纪,俄国经历了日俄战争、1905年革命和第一次世界大战,受战争影响俄国的货币体系几乎陷入瘫痪的状态。     

The legitimacy of occupation authority: beyond just war theory

ABSTRACT

So far, most of the philosophical literature on occupations has tried to assess the legitimacy of military rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts by exclusively employing the theoretical resources of just war theory. In this paper, I argue that this approach is mistaken. Occupations occur during or in the aftermath of wars but they are fundamentally a specific type of rule over persons. Thus, theories of political legitimacy should be at least as relevant as just war theory for the moral evaluation of occupations. This paper, therefore, draws on both traditions and argues that just war theory plays a limited role in identifying the purposes and appropriate agents of occupation authority, but that theories of legitimacy are necessary for explaining why and under which conditions foreign actors have the right to rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts.     

战争与和平的新思维——评托夫勒的《未来的战争》

托夫勒在《未来的战争》一书中,从新的视角分析和预测了当今及未来有关战争与和平的诸多问题,提出了现代文明冲突根源于生产力发展水平、知识是未来军队战斗力的核心资源和知识可以成为未来维护和平的因素等重要论断,但他把战争限制在不同文明之间的“民主和平论”、把知识视为未来战争的源泉和主权观上的“西方中心论”,则是片面的和错误的。     

Mythologizing war: legacies of conflict in Croatian parliamentary debates

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes models based on latent semantic analysis and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Using a complex vector representation of war-related concepts, the paper specifically focuses on their framing in the context of right-wing authoritarianism. The results show a negative trend of pushing the most frequent war-related concepts to more extreme framing as a potential reflection of their political abuse and ongoing mythologization.     

Over the centuries: a history of Wollstonecraft reception

ABSTRACT

Both Wollstonecraft’s fame and infamy are attributable to her lived experience as the woman author of the only radical republican feminist text published in the pamphlet war of the 1790s. Yet, her radical republican politics were divorced from her gender politics in the early reception. This paper argues that this separation was subsequently sustained in part by interpretive practices that rest on the suppression of the original split. It shows that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both outside and within academia, the dominant interpretive tendency of neglecting Wollstonecraft’s radical republican politics has deradicalized both her historical political thought and her iconic image. This conventional reception has both enabled and limited the resources made available through Wollstonecraft to feminists throughout history.     

江泽民"新安全观"探析

20世纪90年代以来,一些西方国家顽固坚持用冷战思维构筑国际安全秩序.以江泽民为核心的党的第三代领导集体,从反对霸权主义、维护世界和平出发,在批判冷战思维的基础上,积极倡导"新安全观",推动建立以"互利、互信、平等、合作"为核心内容的国际安全新模式.