Failure Of Community Research Articles

Assessing the inaction of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in Myanmar and Gaza Amidst Atrocity Crimes

The global community's failure to prevent severe human rights violations, such as the Rwanda Genocide and Yugoslavian atrocities, led to the development of the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine, adopted by the UN in 2005. R2P aims to shield populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Despite its promise, R2P's implementation is hindered by geopolitical interests and power dynamics. To address ongoing atrocities, it is essential to strengthen international accountability mechanisms and prioritize civilian protection, ensuring such violations are neither tolerated nor inevitable.

Describing the dynamics of recruits and juvenile scleractinian corals using 3d models: a case study from Cayo Mero reef, Morrocoy National Park, Venezuela

Understanding the dynamics of coral recruitment and post-settlement is fundamental to a better comprehension of coral reef dynamics and recovery. We studied the abundance and survivorship of coral recruits and juveniles together with benthic dynamics at a scale of months and centimeters in Playa Mero reef, a disturbed reef in Morrocoy National Park. For this, we used photogrammetry to monitor eight permanent 50x50 cm quadrats haphazardly deployed every 3–4 months over 18 months. Juveniles and recruits of Agaricia spp. were at least four times more abundant than reef builders such as Orbicella spp. A distance-based linear model showed that rugosity, macroalgae, coral cover, and sand were the most important benthic variables and predicted up to 46% of the spatial and temporal variation of recruit and juvenile corals. The mortality of juvenile corals was higher than net recruitment rates, and only a limited number of genera such as Agariciids, Colpophyllia, Porites, and Scolymia were observed as recruits. Using a logit model, we also found a positive relationship between the mean growth rate and survivorship of juvenile corals (Nagelkerke R2= 0.67). We concluded the lack of recruitment of large reef builders, and the rapid mortality of a limited number of juvenile species, might be a sign of a coral community's failure to increase coral cover.

Review of Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, by Amy B. Zegart

Since 9/11 there have been scores of publications focusing on the United States Intelligence Community's failure to prevent that day's tragedies. Amy Zegart's “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: the History and Future of American Intelligence” [1] is a welcomed departure from this trend. The main difference is that Zegart attempts to explain what the United States Intelligence Community—or USIC it is commonly called in government acronymese—actually does and how it carries out its mission. Zegart's main thesis is that the USIC is falling behind in its mission to most accurately inform our nation's policy makers because it is failing to adapt to the rapidly increasing availability of information to anyone. She does this using various examples of terrorism and other global events of the last two-plus decades.

Jordan and Syrian humanitarian refugees' dilemma: international law perspective

Jordan is not a signatory of the 1951 humanitarian refugees' treaty or its 1967 optional protocol. However, Jordan in 1998 signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UNHCR. Therefore, Jordan is legally obligate to receive refugees. As a result of the 2011 Syrian civil war, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Jordan. Syrian refugees have become a dilemma for Jordan, giving UNHCR, donor states, and the international community's failure to fulfill their obligations towards Jordan fully. This article reviews Refugees' protection under the global legal system. It informs Jordanian and UNHCR's legal and institutional framework while handling Syrian refugees' issues. It also evaluates Jordan's response to Syrian refugees and the challenges that have faced Jordan since 2011. Finally, the study examines whether or not UNHCR, donor countries, and the international community are committed to Jordan's obligations.

Guilt and Its Purification

Guilt and Its Purification

Publication patterns on occupied Palestine in four key medical journals 1990–2016: a descriptive study

BackgroundThe atrocities in Syria have been covered in the four general medical weekly journals in the USA and the UK. Medical journal articles addressing political determinants of public health have rightly described and criticised the international community's failure to enforce humanitarian law while urging global bodies of power to ensure protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure and medical services. Discussions of the political influences on health of people in the occupied Palestinian territory (West Bank and Gaza Strip) seem to be considered politically out-of-bounds by some medical journals. This study used a keyword-based search to explore patterns of publication about the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel by four large US and European medical journals. MethodThe four highest ranked, peer-reviewed, international medical journals were searched: The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, and The British Medical Journal (BMJ). Searches were conducted between Sept 1 and Sept 6, using each journal's search engine with the keywords “Gaza”, “West Bank” and the stems “Palestin*” and “Israel*” in all fields for the period Jan 1, 1990, to Sept 6, 2016. News and commentary articles were included in the findings. FindingsThe searches found the term “Palestin*” in 49 articles from the two US journals (32 in JAMA; 17 in NEJM) and 694 articles in the two UK journals (236 in The Lancet; 458 in BMJ). “Israel*” was found in 840 articles in US journals (386 in JAMA; 454 in NEJM) and in 2972 articles in UK journals (1388 in The Lancet; 1584 in BMJ). “West Bank” was found in nine articles in US journals (nine in JAMA; none in NEJM) and in 297 articles from the UK (211 in The Lancet; 86 in BMJ). “Gaza” was found in 18 articles in US journals (15 from JAMA; three from NEJM) and in 487 articles in UK journals (324 in The Lancet; 166 in BMJ). InterpretationCompared with the two US-based medical journals, the UK journals published substantially more articles with the relevant keywords and discussed political responsibilities for the dire health conditions experienced by the Palestinian people. The journals included in this study differed in the extent to which they featured news and comments, which might have affected the number of published articles. Because there is a larger research establishment in Israel than in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the keyword “Israel” might have been included in a larger number of clinical and biomedical scientific papers. Medical leaders, including journal editors, have a responsibility to participate in the discussion around this preventable situation, which could have long-lasting public health consequences. FundingNone.

The European Migration Crisis (2011-2015): A Crisis of Failed and Fragile States

The surge in migrants seeking protection across Europe has been described as the second largest movement of people since the end of World War II. Prominent among the migrants are displaced citizens from the conflicts of Syria, Libya and Iraq. These situations represent Anarchy characterized by powerfully armed groups operating as central authorities under abysmal conditions. Millions of citizens are therefore displaced and forced to flee in search of safety and protection. Libyan, Iraqi and Syrian cities and towns once known for vibrancy are now ghost towns in total ruins with charred remains of death bodies and no safe drinking water or electricity to support livelihood. Using clearly defined theoretical and empirical analysis, the paper show that said failure and fragility coupled with the international community's failure to effectively respond to displaced citizens caught in these conflicts have led to mass migration of refugees across most of Europe.

Imaginative geographies of Algerian violence: conflict science, conflict management, antipolitics

The massacres that spread across in 1997 and 1998 shocked the world, both in their horror and in the international community's failure to respond. In the years following, the violence of 1990s has become a central case study in new theories of civil conflict and terrorism after the Cold War. Such of Algeria now contribute to a diverse array of international efforts to manage conflict-from development and counterterrorism to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and transitional justice. With this book, Jacob Mundy raises a critical lens to these lessons and practices and sheds light on an increasingly antipolitical scientific vision of armed conflict. Traditional questions of power and history that once guided conflict management have been displaced by neoliberal assumptions and methodological formalism. In questioning the presumed lessons of 1990s Algeria, Mundy shows that the problem is not simply that these understandings-these imaginative geographies-of Algerian violence can be disputed. He shows that today's leading strategies of conflict management are underwritten by, and so attempt to reproduce, their own flawed logic. Ultimately, what these policies and practices lead to is not a world made safe from war, but rather a world made safe for war.

Responsibility to recommend: the role of the UN General Assembly in the maintenance of international peace and security

The international community's failure to respond to the large-scale commission of international crimes points to an abiding flaw in the United Nations (UN) system, namely the inability or unwillingness of the Security Council's permanent members to act in response to such atrocities. This article focuses on the problematic confluence of international governance and humanitarian response. Specifically, it analyses two major efforts to address these issues and their possible interaction. First, the ‘Uniting for Peace’ Resolution (U4P), which provides that where the Security Council is unable to act due to a veto, the General Assembly can make recommendations for collective measures, including the use of force, in a situation of a breach of international peace and security or aggression. Second, the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P), encompassing the notion that if a state is manifestly failing to protect its citizens, the international community may, where necessary, take forceful action to protect those affected. This article argues that the UN embodies a system of collective security and that when the necessity of intervention to halt atrocities is defeated by a Security Council veto resulting in a governance vacuum, the U4P Resolution affords the Assembly a mechanism to recommend measures under the third pillar of R2P. Although R2P has arguably been fundamentally damaged by events in Libya, and more recently Syria, the utilisation of the U4P resolution could serve to fill the lacuna caused by Security Council deadlock and potentially reinforce and legitimise the R2P concept.

Accountability in the Aftermath of Rwanda's Genocide

Over the span of 100 days in 1994, almost one million Rwandans died in a genocide that left Rwandan society traumatized and its institutions in disarray. The genocide implicated not only the actual instigators and killers, who came from all levels of Rwandan society, but also the culture of impunity that had thrived in Rwanda for decades. This culture of impunity and inaction in the face of atrocities eerily mirrored the international community's failure to intervene to prevent or respond to the genocide. The genocide provoked a process of reflection within Rwanda and the broader international community about how the genocide came to pass and how Rwanda can rebuild so that such an event will never happen again. This chapter attempts one element of this reflection by considering how the legal mechanisms established in the aftermath of the genocide might help transform the Rwandan culture of impunity into a culture of accountability.

"Everybody knows psychology is not a real science": Public perceptions of psychology and how we can improve our relationship with policymakers, the scientific community, and the general public.

In a recent seminal article, Lilienfeld (2012) argued that psychological science is experiencing a public perception problem that has been caused by both public misconceptions about psychology, as well as the psychological science community's failure to distinguish itself from pop psychology and questionable therapeutic practices. Lilienfeld's analysis is an important and cogent synopsis of external problems that have limited psychological science's penetration into public knowledge. The current article expands upon this by examining internal problems, or problems within psychological science that have potentially limited its impact with policymakers, other scientists, and the public. These problems range from the replication crisis and defensive reactions to it, overuse of politicized policy statements by professional advocacy groups such as the American Psychological Association (APA), and continued overreliance on mechanistic models of human behavior. It is concluded that considerable problems arise from psychological science's tendency to overcommunicate mechanistic concepts based on weak and often unreplicated (or unreplicable) data that do not resonate with the everyday experiences of the general public or the rigor of other scholarly fields. It is argued that a way forward can be seen by, on one hand, improving the rigor and transparency of psychological science, and making theoretical innovations that better acknowledge the complexities of the human experience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Solving the futures challenge – all you need is a 3LA

In this article, the author responds to a number of claims regarding the Integral Operating System, Causal Layered Analysis and the field of Futures. In particular, the author takes aim at those who claim that the reason the futures field has been lacking in influencing change towards more positive world is the result of not having an effective tool kit. To the contrary, the author suggests that the Futures community's failure at changing the existing ‘market driven paradigm’ has more to do with “… an unwillingness to get our hands dirty and to play in the same sandbox as our clients.” To that end the author targets in particular, a piece suggesting that making the Causal Layered Analysis more complex, exclusionary and ‘new and improved’ is the best way to make inroads into the economic liberalism model now in control. In counterpoint the author suggests that not only is this a flawed approach, it is unlikely to assist those with greatest need – the wider Futures Community.

Global Trends and Constraints on Tax Policy in the Least Developed Countries

Through decades of tax reform and cross-border collaboration, the world's wealthiest countries have adopted domestic tax policy norms that meet their mutually beneficial interests. But these norms have introduced rigorous change and increasingly rigid parameters for tax policy in the world's poorest countries. While much scholarly attention is devoted to identifying tax strategies that poor countries could or should adopt in response to global tax trends, relatively little is paid to the process through which these trends developed and how they constrain alternative policy choices. This article argues that many of the biggest challenges to taxation faced by the world's poorest countries are a reflection of the international community's failure to consider the impact of their tax policy consensus on these vulnerable nations. It concludes that the world's wealthiest nations should unleash the global constraints on tax policy by reforming their own approaches to taxation.

Changing the Rules? State-Building and Local Government in Afghanistan

This paper looks at how a certain understanding of states is affecting the types of activities emphasised in state-building agendas. It proposes an approach to understanding states and their roles, drawing on ideas of institutions and their rules as a means of mediating power, and applies this to a discussion of two ‘state-building’ initiatives at the subnational level in Afghanistan. It shows how resistance to attempts to impose ‘bureaucratic rules’, coupled with the international community's failure to understand the role of states in mediating power, has contributed to the failure to date of interventions to reform local government. This has directly affected reconstruction and stability in Afghanistan.

Climate Change and Global Environmental Governance

Elizabeth R. DeSombre, Global Environmental Institutions (New York: Routledge, 2006). James Gustave Speth and Peter M. Haas, Global Environmental Governance (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006). Pamela S. Chasek, David L. Downie, and Janet Welsh Brown, Global Environmental Politics, 4th ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006). Richard E. Saunier and Richard A. Meganck, Dictionary and Introduction to Global Environmental Governance (London: Earthscan, 2007). Global environmental governance has emerged as a hot topic in scholarly circles. The manifest inadequacy of international policy cooperation in response to transboundary pollution problems and the need for better management of shared natural resources has led to a flurry of academic writing. Scholars in environmental studies, political science, international relations, and law are now critically analyzing the structure and effectiveness of the international environmental regime and efforts to address change, declining fisheries, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, the spread of toxic chemicals, and other issues. These problems have also captured attention in the public arena. Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to focus the public on the climate crisis. His book An Inconvenient Truth and related movie have won numerous awards. Adding to this arc of interest, a number of scholarly books that seek to illuminate the institutions, legal structures, and politics that shape global-scale environmental policymaking have been released over the past several years. The logic of collective action in the international environmental arena is clear. Absent cooperation, the spillover of pollution from one country onto its neighbors or into the shared space of the global commons, as well as the over-exploitation of shared natural resources, promise not just environmental degradation but also economic inefficiency, political instability, and diminished social welfare. Ecological interdependence, expanded economic inter-linkages, and tensions at the trade-environment interface have also made environmental cooperation an important element in the process of establishing the terms of engagement for international commerce. (1) The world community's failure to stem the buildup of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere and resulting fears that the world is suffering the effects of change--global warming, sea level rise, increased intensity of windstorms, changed rainfall patterns, and other problems--add urgency to the quest for a better-functioning international environmental regime. All of the books surveyed in the following paragraphs find negative trend lines with regard to environmental cooperation, with the exception of efforts to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other chemicals that destroy the ozone layer. Understanding which international environmental efforts are effective--and why--thus takes on a degree of urgency among issues of global policymaking. Unfortunately, these recent books, while beginning to explore the contours of this important question, do too little to help us understand how to move forward and build a more effective international environmental regime. Nevertheless, the works reviewed provide an important starting point for this critical inquiry. Elizabeth DeSombre's Global Environmental Institutions offers a thorough tour of the existing structure of environment-related international organizations. As part of the Global Institutions Series, edited by Thomas Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, the book provides a useful history of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), although some of the details of her analysis have been disputed. (2) DeSombre illuminates the governance, financing, and scientific efforts of UNEP and also reviews the Earth Summits, (3) which have helped structure the international community's thinking about environmental challenges over the past forty years. …

Jared Cohen. One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007. xxviii + 230 pp. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00. Cloth. $18.95. Paper.

Jared Cohen. One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007. xxviii + 230 pp. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00. Cloth. $18.95. Paper. Those who have followed the debate on the international community's failure in Rwanda might be forgiven for not wanting to read One Hundred Days of Silence: it appears to be yet another finger-pointer that chooses to excoriate the U.S. for its failure to prevent and end Rwanda's genocide. However, while the general argument is not new - that the U.S. could have done more and in certain ways acted to make the situation worse - the author presents us with fresh, nuanced evidence and convincing narrative to reinforce this claim. The book's chief strength is Cohen's understanding of the inner workings of the U.S. government machinery; we learn as much about the decision-making process and culture of the individual bureaucracies as we do about the genocide. From his time as an intern at the State Department and Pentagon, Cohen is able to distinguish between the bureaucratic process and the personal culpability of individual policymakers. He takes us inside the monolith, identifying the individuals whose positions would have allowed them to do more than they did and exposing the claim that inaction was just the product of systemic failure; he shows us instead that it was the result of a policy of calculated non-interventionism (95). Cohen goes further and argues that the U.S. was not just guilty of choosing inaction. It worsened the situation in at least two ways. First, pushing for the draw-down of UNAMIR (the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country) emboldened the extremists and removed the protection on which several thousand Rwandans were directly dependent. Second, and perhaps more debatably, by pressing for the inclusion of the extremist Coalition pour la Defense de la Republique et de la Democratie (CDR) party in the Arusha peace process, the U.S. contributed to the breakdown of the talks with the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) movement. Cohen also uses his insider knowledge to show that there was much the U.S. easily could have done that would not have involved putting boots on the ground. For example, in his most cogently argued chapter he claims that the U.S. could have severed diplomatic ties with Rwanda during the genocide or that the president personally could have called the principal organizers of the genocide to hold them responsible. As it was, there were no senior-level meetings or discussions of Rwanda inside the government, and he argues the U. …

Le Cycle de Renart: From the Enfances to the Jugement in a Cyclical Roman de Renart Manuscript

This article is a reading of a Roman de Renart manuscript from the often neglected gamma family, which subsumes the narrative to a broadly biographical (or cyclical) framework. The manuscript studied here therefore opens with an Enfances text, which lays the ground for seeing the fox as a radically evil creation, and his crimes as inevitable repetitions of his evil propensities. Whereas the alpha and beta families open with the famous trial (Le Jugement de Renart), the gamma family locates it later, after a series of misdeeds by the fox, meaning that this episode now serves less as an attempt to punish Renart for a single sexual crime than to mark the impossibility of holding him to justice for anything he has done. Using an approach to repetition deriving from Lacanian theory, the author argues that the Jugement, itself now a rerun of a previous trial, represents the community's failure to confront the Renardian trauma that haunts it, and, by extension, its inability to function effectively. Thwarting the ideological closure of justice allows Renart to become an emblem of the fiction itself.

Reconceptualizing Research on Undergraduate Alcohol Use

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is presented as an unrecognized and urgently needed approach for addressing the persistent public health concern of college student drinking in the United States. A major contention of this article is that the lack of progress in reducing alcohol-related harm among college students during the past several decades has been the research community's failure to effectively engage and collaborate with undergraduates on shared concerns. The challenges of addressing college student drinking are reviewed, distinctive features of CBPR are described, and suggestions are provided for adopting CBPR as a more viable approach than those offered by traditional campus strategies.

Legal Moralism and the Harm Principle: A Rejoinder

In "Harm Versus Sovereignty: A Reply to Ripstein," Colin Bird criticizes several arguments of my article "Beyond the Harm Principle." In my earlier article I raised two objections to the Harm Principle, before going on to develop my alternative. The first is that it is underinclusive, because it is unable to identify a significant class of wrongs that a liberal state would want to prohibit: harmless trespasses against person and property. The second is that it requires independent grounds to explain which harms merit prohibition. Bird seeks to answer the first challenge by denying that the harm principle has any difficulty at all in accommodating those harmless trespasses that merit prohibition, and to answer the second by proposing that harms be balanced against each other to determine where prohibition is justified. In this brief response, I show that Bird's conceptualization of the harm principle enables it to account for my examples only by making it so elastic as to provide no real constraint on prohibition. Bird defends the harm principle as an alternative to what he calls "legal moralism," the legal prohibition of acts based on their nature rather than their effects on others. I shall show, however, that his interpretation of the harm principle generates an indirect form of legal moralism.

Misjudging Islamic Terrorism: The Academic Community's Failure to Predict 9/11

Most academic experts within the International Relations (IR) community and other, more specialized disciplines, failed to predict or warn government policymakers and the public of the possibility that events of 9/11 magnitude could take place on the U.S. homeland. Given that long-term investigation of trends in world affairs is one of the sources that has always informed policy analysis, this represents an interesting question to examine. The analysis contained in this assessment suggests that the ontological, methodological, and conceptual problems within and between the disciplines, combined with a skewed absorption with the prospect of developments in Asia, created a gap in the knowledge about Islamic terrorism and groups like Al Qaeda, which in turn caught most of the academic community unaware on 9/11. This article performs a quantitative study to determine the nature and scope of this apparent analytical failure on the part of academics in IR and other specialized disciplines to predict 9/11 and aims to address why this failure took place.