East Africa's pastoralist emergency: is climate change the straw that breaks the camel's back?

The global warming trend of climate change is having severe adverse effects on the livelihoods of the Turkana pastoralists of northwestern Kenya. Care has to be taken in making assertions about the impact of climate change. The biggest effects may come not from lower average rainfall but from a widening of the standard deviation as weather extremes become more frequent. In a region already prone to drought, disease and conflict, climate change, access to modern weapons and new viral livestock diseases are now overwhelming pastoralists' coping capacity and deepening the region's roughly 30-year dependency on famine relief. This article examines the livelihood strategies of the Turkana and several poverty reduction programmes currently established, while addressing the reality that traditional pastoralism may no longer be a viable livelihood option, given the effects of climate change, disease and the ensuing conflict over diminishing resources. The findings conclude that the future for traditional Turkana pastoralists is dismal because they continue to depend on an environment that may no longer support them. Humanitarians are recommended to shift their focus to advocate and invest in alternative livelihood strategies that generate economic independence and help the Turkana adapt to their changing environment.     

A Framework for Dynamic Causal Inference in Political Science

Dynamic strategies are an essential part of politics. In the context of campaigns, for example, candidates continuously recalibrate their campaign strategy in response to polls and opponent actions. Traditional causal inference methods, however, assume that these dynamic decisions are made all at once, an assumption that forces a choice between omitted variable bias and posttreatment bias. Thus, these kinds of “single‐shot” causal inference methods are inappropriate for dynamic processes like campaigns. I resolve this dilemma by adapting methods from biostatistics, thereby presenting a holistic framework for dynamic causal inference. I then use this method to estimate the effectiveness of an inherently dynamic process: a candidate’s decision to “go negative.” Drawing on U.S. statewide elections (2000–2006), I find, in contrast to the previous literature and alternative methods, that negative advertising is an effective strategy for nonincumbents. I also describe a set of diagnostic tools and an approach to sensitivity analysis.     

War in the Nursery, 1798: The Persecuting Breast and the Melancholy Babe in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui

I know that, as proof of the inferiority of the [female] sex, Rousseau has exultingly exclaimed, "How can they leave the nursery for the camp!" -Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman INTRODUCTION: CONTAGIOUS READING AND CRITICAL ENNUI     

Market Demand for Civic Affairs News

This paper uses time series methods to test the relationship between civic affairs content and audience share for the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news in the mid-1990s. Because these programs competed in the same market, but varied the amount of their civic affairs coverage, they present an excellent opportunity to analyze this relationship. The study uses hand-coded news abstracts and O.J. Simpson murder trial coverage as separate measures of news content. The study finds that lower levels of civic affairs content and higher levels of O.J. news are associated with greater audience share.     

Britain, the United States and the Syrian crisis, 1957

This paper seeks to analyze the Syrian Crisis in 1957 and its impact on the Anglo-American reconciliation after the dispute over Suez in the previous year. The Middle East remained at the forefront of British and American continued regional instability and led to close allied cooperation over the perceived Soviet threat in Syria. This ensured that by the time of the Washington Conference in October 1957 both Macmillan and Eisenhower agreed that the Middle East required a joint Anglo-American policy to safeguard vital regional interests.     

Britain,the United States and the Syrian crisis, 1957

This paper seeks to analyze the Syrian Crisis in 1957 and its impact on the Anglo‐American reconciliation after the dispute over Suez in the previous year. The Middle East remained at the forefront of British and American continued regional instability and led to close allied cooperation over the perceived Soviet threat in Syria. This ensured that by the time of the Washington Conference in October 1957 both Macmillan and Eisenhower agreed that the Middle East required a joint Anglo‐American policy to safeguard vital regional interests.     

Indeterminacy,Disagreement and the Human Rights Act: An Empirical Study of Litigation in the UK House of Lords and Supreme Court 1997–2017

This article explores the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the decision making of the House of Lords (UKHL) and the UK Supreme Court (UKSC). How does Convention rights content vary across areas of law in the UKHL/UKSC? Are some judges more likely than others to engage in Convention rights discourse? Is judicial disagreement more common in cases with higher levels of Convention rights discourse? A robust method of answering questions of this nature is developed and applied to decisions of the UKHL/UKSC, showing that the Convention rights content of decisions has varied over time and over substantive areas of law. Higher levels of human rights discourse are associated with greater levels of disagreement. A benchmarked measure of human rights content is developed to show the effect of the particular judge on the human rights content, illustrating the indeterminacy in human rights discourse and how its deployment can be contingent on judicial attitudes.