Conceptualizing Interstate Conflict: How Do Concept-Building Strategies Relate to Selection Effects?

An essential, but often overlooked, role of concepts lies in how they constitute or define populations. Explicit choices made by researchers about concept structure are tied inextricably to the selection rule for identifying cases to include in analyses. Concept construction issues are absolutely crucial because the concept structure used interacts in various, usually hidden, ways with theories and hypotheses that researchers want to test. The concepts used to select cases may be correlated with common dependent variables hence producing selection bias. We illustrate this potential by exploring international crises as they have been conceptualized by the ICB Project. We show that two alternative conceptualizations of “crisis” produce populations that correlate with common ICB dependent variables. Our empirical analyses pay particular attention to variables related to power because they are particularly susceptible to being influenced by these selection effects.     

Credibility and Strategy in International Mediation

We study mediation in international conflict as a process of strategic interaction among the two disputants and the (would-be) mediator. We develop a rational model that examines the choice, process, and outcome of mediation. We start with a conflict game of incomplete information played by rational players that examines the conditions under which disputants and would-be mediators would consider mediation a preferred strategy. The mediation game that follows models the mediator's choice of mediation strategy and the possible responses of the disputants offers. Finally, we explore the conditions under which a mediated solution emerges and the conditions under which mediation fails.

The credibility of the mediator—defined as the extent to which disputants believe the mediator's statements, threats, or promises and her ability to deliver the promised agreement—emerges as a key factor that drives the model. Each disputant has an assessment of the mediator's credibility. Broadly speaking, the more credible the mediator is perceived by the disputant, the more accepting the disputant will be of her offers. Yet, the mediator does not know how credible she is in the view of the disputants. This uncertainty affects the mediator's decision to intervene and her choice of strategies. We derive testable propositions from this model and test them on a dataset consisting of mediation efforts in international conflicts over the years 1945–1995. The findings generally support the propositions derived from the model, and we explore the theoretical and empirical implications of these findings.     

Leveraging virtual machine introspection with memory forensics to detect and characterize unknown malware using machine learning techniques at hypervisor

The Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) has emerged as a fine-grained, out-of-VM security solution that detects malware by introspecting and reconstructing the volatile memory state of the live guest Operating System (OS). Specifically, it functions by the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), or hypervisor. The reconstructed semantic details obtained by the VMI are available in a combination of benign and malicious states at the hypervisor. In order to distinguish between these two states, the existing out-of-VM security solutions require extensive manual analysis. In this paper, we propose an advanced VMM-based, guest-assisted Automated Internal-and-External (A-IntExt) introspection system by leveraging VMI, Memory Forensics Analysis (MFA), and machine learning techniques at the hypervisor. Further, we use the VMI-based technique to introspect digital artifacts of the live guest OS to obtain a semantic view of the processes details. We implemented an Intelligent Cross View Analyzer (ICVA) and implanted it into our proposed A-IntExt system, which examines the data supplied by the VMI to detect hidden, dead, and dubious processes, while also predicting early symptoms of malware execution on the introspected guest OS in a timely manner. Machine learning techniques are used to analyze the executables that are mined and extracted using MFA-based techniques and ascertain the malicious executables. The practicality of the A-IntExt system is evaluated by executing large real-world malware and benign executables onto the live guest OSs. The evaluation results achieved 99.55% accuracy and 0.004 False Positive Rate (FPR) on the 10-fold cross-validation to detect unknown malware on the generated dataset. Additionally, the proposed system was validated against other benchmarked malware datasets and the A-IntExt system outperforms the detection of real-world malware at the VMM with performance exceeding 6.3%.     

Agencies without borders: Explaining partner selection in the formation of transnational agreements between regulators

Transnational collaboration between regulatory agencies has proliferated rapidly within the last three decades. However, given that information regarding the motives, trustworthiness, and capabilities of potential partners is typically imperfect, decisions about with whom to collaborate are inevitably characterized by a degree of uncertainty. To better capture these dynamics, this article uses a network analytical perspective and hypothesizes that agencies are more likely to form agreements with agencies to whom they are already indirectly connected (transitivity), that are highly connected (preferential attachment), or with whom they share tie-characteristics (assortativity). To test these hypotheses, a stochastic actor-oriented model is used to analyze an original, self-coded data set in which bilateral information exchange agreements between national securities agencies (n = 143) are mapped out over a 18-year period. The results show that the formation of agreements between regulatory agencies is driven by (i) the number of shared partners (i.e. triadic closure); and (ii) similarity regarding agency characteristics (i.e. homophily).     

论我国自主创新文化建设

自主创新的内外系统具有不确定性和复杂性。由于系统复杂性和文化嵌入性,没有主体的创新实践和没有文化的创新主体皆不存在,自主创新生成于社会文化建构。创新文化类型、层次与具体内容各方面均内涵丰富,其建构旨在建设融合＂责任心、宽容心、自信心、恒心＂的创新文化支撑体系。自主创新文化建设的路径选择在于主体、制度、教育、科学精神、传统文化等层面进行系统推进,从而在根本上实现＂尊重创新、鼓励创新、向往创新＂的社会文化转向。     

程序公正的价值——兼议实体公正与程序公正冲突的解决

实现公正是法哲学的核心问题。在我国推进法治建设的今天,尤其是目前正处在转型时期,各种利益纠缠在一起,在这样一个价值观剧烈冲突、客观标准剧烈变动,对于实体是否公正不好判断的情况下,程序上的公正就尤为重要了。实体公正与程序公正发生冲突时,应有正确的价值选择以期实现司法公正,实现我国社会主义法治。     

Desirable and undesirable migrants. Disease,eugenics, and discourses in modern Buenos Aires

Immigration was a central feature in the making of modern Buenos Aires. Elites celebrated the massive presence of immigrants but also voiced concerns about the arrival of certain groups perceived as potentially dangerous to the making of a healthy, modern “Argentine race.”Eugenic discourses rationalized those concerns around the idea of desirable and undesirable immigrants. People with tuberculosis were part of the latter. These discourses, however, were merely discourses, either not implemented in practice or mostly inconsequential. This article underlines the importance of being cautious when historical narratives of eugenics are only based on discourses.     

“Journalism ideology” and its influence on the producers of Radio Sonder Grense radio current affairs

In the same way that people can have a political or a personal ideology, their professional identities and how they practise a craft or an occupation may be influenced by what can be labelled as a “professional ideology”. Through conducting interviews with the producers of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Afrikaans radio programmes Monitor, Spektrum and Naweek-Aktueel, this article reports on research which showed that there is indeed such a thing as a “journalism ideology”. The interviews focused on how “internal influences” – such as a journalist's background and training, newsroom routines – and “external influences” – such as the audience – influenced the decisions they made in choosing news stories and producing content. This “journalism ideology” influences the producers and in turn the news content of these current affairs programmes that are listened to daily by almost two million listeners. The conclusion drawn from the study is that, although the participants’ “journalism ideology” largely determines the news stories for their programmes, structural forces, newsroom routines and organisational constraints often dictate their actions. Finally, although all the participants saw themselves as “watchdogs of democracy”, internal pressures within the SABC could endanger that role.     

The Party Paradox: a Comment Nicolas van de Walle (Cornell) February 20, 2018

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes several stylized facts and implications concerning intra-party violence developed in the other articles of this special issue on intra-party violence in African electoral systems. It then turns more specifically to the implications of intra-party violence for democratic consolidation in the region, and argues that paradoxically, though parties are centrally important to democratic politics, the degree to which they are internally inclusive and participatory may not have much importance, or may indeed undermine democracy. Though they are perhaps the key actor on the path to a consolidated democracy, they tend to work best when they themselves are not internally democratic.     

中国特色社会主义国家治理的优势认同与入径选择

中国特色社会主义的国家治理优势是具有集成性、高效性、吸纳性和自主性特性的结构性优势。增强中国特色社会主义国家治理的优势认同,对进一步发挥中国特色社会主义国家的治理优势意义重大,必须增强国家治理优势主体内容的认同,消除国家治理优势理解上的认同偏颇。增强中国特色社会主义国家治理优势的认同自觉,为中国特色社会主义国家的治理优势认同奠定实践基础,深化在具体体制机制、运行环节和方式方法上的改革创新,强化斗争意识、增强斗争本领,是增强中国特色社会主义国家治理优势认同的入径选择。