Egalitarian Process Research Articles

Gender gaps in the impact of the pandemic on the use of ICT in higher education

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic has led to a process of digitalisation of higher education that has forced a change in the habits of use of information and communication technologies (ICT) among professors. The literature analyses this impact from different perspectives, but the gender gaps that may have occurred in this regard have not been studied so far. The main purpose is to analyse the gender gap in the self‐concept of digital competence of Latin American professors and the impact that the pandemic has had on the habits of use of ICT among them. For this purpose, this paper conducts quantitative research. A questionnaire designed by the authors has been answered by a sample of 1062 professors, and the responses have been statistically analysed. The results prove that the self‐concept of digital competence influences males more than females in terms of their assessment of the didactic use of ICT. The pandemic has caused the frequencies of ICT use in different teaching activities to homogenise. Females have increased their use of ICT more than males—a certain correction of the digital gender gap occurs in the region after the pandemic, within faculty. The use of ICT among faculty has increased after the pandemic more among females than males, but insufficient digital competence hinders full digitalisation in both cases. It is recommended that universities develop digital training plans aimed at facilitating an egalitarian process of ICT integration.

Does Egalitarian Democracy Boost Environmental Sustainability? An Empirical Test, 1970-2017

Many argue that the twin problems of poverty and environmental degradation are best addressed by adopting greater egalitarian processes of governance. Greater egalitarian societies apparently contain the required social trust and consensus for making hard choices and tradeoffs for achieving environmental gains. We employ novel data on egalitarian democracy, which measure the equal access of the poor to political power and societal resources, and data covering weak and strong sustainability measured by the “adjusted net savings” and several indicators of atmospheric pollution. The results suggest that greater egalitarian governance reduces weak sustainability and increases the intensity of climate-harming pollution. Regardless of democracy, other measures of social equity, such as the GINI and equal access to health and political resources, increase, not decrease, atmospheric pollution. These results are robust to estimating procedure, several alternative models, and data. While liberté, egalité and fraternité should be pursued for their own intrinsic value, meeting urgent challenges from global warming may require more targeted solutions.

The optimistic utopia: sacrifice and expectations of political transformation in the Angolan Revolutionary Movement

The optimistic utopia: sacrifice and expectations of political transformation in the Angolan Revolutionary Movement

Scrum Language Use in a Software Engineering Firm: An Exploratory Study

Background: Although agile and Scrum have been important frameworks in software engineering for over a decade, little research has explored how teams use Scrum language within their sprints. Literature review: Most explorations of Scrum communication have been collected through self-reported means. These studies are inherently unable to explore how Scrum teams use Scrum-centric language in their meetings in ways that adhere or run counter to standard Scrum practice. Research questions: 1. In what ways is Scrum reflected in the language used by team members in various sprint meetings? 2. What associations exist between the job title of team members and their use of Scrum language? 3. What does a discourse analysis reveal about the ways in which this team uses language to value and discount Scrum? Research methodology: For three sprints over 10 weeks, I recorded meetings of 27 Scrum team members. I transcribed these meetings, developed a codebook for assigning Scrum language categories, conducted an interrater reliability agreement on the data, completed a correspondence analysis on how Scrum language associates with meeting types and job titles, and conducted a discourse analysis to determine in what ways these teams value and discount Scrum. Results/discussion: Scrum language was found in all recorded meetings across all three sprints, with much language found in the planning meetings. Few associations existed between Scrum language and job title, suggesting that Scrum at this engineering firm is an egalitarian process. In addition, the discourse analysis revealed that this engineering firm valued User Story and Sprint Execution language while discounting Capacity and Story Pointing language. Conclusions: Although this group broadly adheres to Scrum practices about 68% of the time, this study finds that several current standard components of Scrum are routinely discounted. This exploratory study suggests that more research into the in-situ use of Scrum language in engineering workplaces is necessary to better inform engineering professionals about the communicative expectations of Scrum and to better enable engineering communication educators to prepare future engineers for Scrum realities.

Reflecting on Leadership Development through Community Based Participatory Action Research.

The need for leadership in nursing is well-documented and Domain Six of the doctoral section of the National Nursing Education Framework of the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN) is Leadership. While there are likely many paths to achievement of these leadership components, the intent of this paper is to share my journey through iteration of and reflection on my PhD dissertation research focused on a four-cycle community-based participatory action research study (CBPR) related to clinical teaching in Ghana. The focus of CBPR is to engage the researcher and the participant group (community) in collaborative, and egalitarian processes to assess and problem solve an issue in the community. Similarly, leadership promotes collaborative interpersonal relationships among leaders and followers to address issues and institutes change strategies in policies. This paper presents my experiences in building leadership capacity through this scholarly endeavor (PhD thesis) in relation to the CASN guideline.

The politics of global youth participation

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines increased opportunities for youth participation in global political affairs created by the United Nations and its member states in the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at three global youth conferences, this study demonstrates the operationalization of participatory governance, a current mode of global politics, that seeks to engage multi-stakeholders in a seemingly more democratic and egalitarian process. It investigates how the structure and culture of participation mechanisms found in international political processes limited youth engagement. Young people expressed both dissatisfaction with what they perceived to be their inability to participate meaningfully and their desire to fulfill their human right to participation. The author argues that this reflects the construction an ideal global youth-citizen today as marked by an individual’s exercise of compulsory participation as a self-governing and responsible subject. Participation is employed as a mode of governance so that young people may instrumentally advance thier life chances against the insecurities of social risks imposed on them in the retreat of state provisions. The study underscores the need to critically examine the institutionalization of political youth agency.

Социализация земельной ренты как способ реконструкции социальной структуры в интересах обеспечения экономической эффективности

The revolution proclaimed, inter alia, to transfer the ownership of land to those who worked on it for their own benefit. Still, even in theory, it was yet to be defined what kind of ownership was needed to meet its primary objective. It is always troublesome, when a capitalizable object is transformed into a public asset because in the context of the surplus product situation, no mechanism of such transformation has ever been developed. Nevertheless, soviet socialism achieved some progress in a more specific issue of transforming land into a public asset via socialized land rent, in particular, via a differential land rent. In the socialist time, an absolute land rent was challenged by the non-match between socialist monopoly and monopoly in terms of classical political economy as a source of absolute rent; lack of clear distinction between rent and profit on capital where there are no restrictions on capital overflow between economy sectors thus, rendering absolute rent literally non-existent in Pareto terms. Since the end of socialism, the egalitarian process has lost its gain of a socialized differential land rent and had to look for other options, this time in the new situation of private land ownership. This brings us to the works of Henry Georges where he suggests replacing taxes by land rent. Thereby socialization of a land rent from the instrument of elimination of social inequality will be transformed to the tool of economic efficiency.

Beyond Critique: The Partners for Change Outcome Management System as an Alternative Paradigm to Psychiatric Diagnosis

Critics claim that current psychiatric diagnostic systems lack reliability, validity, and clinical utility; are incompatible with known evidence of how change occurs in psychotherapy; are compromised by bias; and risk harmful effects for clients. This article argues that the Partners for Change Outcome Management System (PCOMS), a transparent, egalitarian process that collects and utilizes client feedback at each session, convincingly addresses these concerns. Furthermore, it suggests that PCOMS offers a viable alternative to the reimbursement and administrative functions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Diseases. The authors propose that PCOMS represents a radical realignment of the practitioner/client relationship via full, dialogical partnership at every level of psychotherapy practice and thus constitutes a step toward a new paradigm that reconnects psychotherapy and humanistic psychology with its core relational values.

Figures publiques: l'invention de la célébrité, 1750–1850

Celebrity as an object of academic study has steadily been gaining currency in recent years. It remains, though, an ambiguous term: at one extreme, it is employed to denote a very modern state, specifically linked to audio-visual media; while at the other it is considered to encompass the whole spectrum of fame, from the glory of emperors, to the fascination of the beautiful starlet, to the charisma of a religious cult. Antoine Lilti sets out to navigate a course between these two points, considered respectively as too reductive or too broad. Instead, he investigates the birth and development of a very precise phenomenon: namely, a widespread interest in the private lives of public figures, which resulted from the elision between public and private worlds that took place from the mid eighteenth century. In order to better define this form of fame, Lilti usefully makes brief reference to associated contemporary notions, including reputation (related to honour), glory (generally posthumous), and popularity (most often associated with politics). Celebrity, in his definition, refers to the process by which the colleagues, admirers, or neighbours among whom a reputation might exist are replaced by a public that has no prior association with the famous individual. The illusion of intimacy is acquired through the close attention paid to the mundane, private details of the celebrity's life: curiosity is the defining feature of this one-way relationship. Lilti argues that this served the further purpose of creating communities of interest that defined themselves by whom they admired, quite distinct from the rational public sphere of earlier accounts. The book proceeds through a series of case studies, ranging from Voltaire, Rousseau, Garrick, and Mozart through Mirabeau, Marie-Antoinette and Franklin, to Byron and Napoleon. The central consequence of examining these varied figures is to underline what, for Lilti, is one of the key features of his version of celebrity: it is an egalitarian process, to which the actor or the writer is just as susceptible as the emperor or politician. But the different figures also allow for discussion of different facets of this developing trend: the media for creating celebrity, the drawbacks of being a public figure, the relationship between man and work, and celebrity as it is linked to power. Although Lilti does describe how the phenomenon he studies relates to modern celebrity culture, this is not, I think, his only concern. Rather, he is interested in a particular moment; a combination of sociopolitical circumstances that resulted in the development of a very specific form of fame. There are many pathways he is forced to leave untrodden, not least the complex relationship between his version of celebrity and the posthumous glory to which he only gestures. It is inevitable, too, that those wedded to the idea of a much longer history of celebrity will dispute the historical specificity of this account. However, Lilti contends that his aim is to make celebrity a useable tool for researchers, and in this regard this meticulously researched and engagingly written account is immensely valuable.

The distribution of influence in purchase decisions by male homosexual couples

ABSTRACTThe purchase decisions of families are of great interest to marketing researchers, yet families also have become increasingly multi‐faceted, especially in Western societies, where non‐traditional families are far more prevalent and evident in public and business life than they once were. Even as it attempts to adapt to some changes, marketing has not kept up with every development; homosexual couples in particular remain poorly researched. This article therefore examines which factors affect the distribution of influence between partners in male homosexual, long‐term relationships when they make purchase decisions. In line with some extant predictions, male homosexual families tend to use highly egalitarian processes to make purchase decisions. Sex‐role orientation generally does not significantly affect the distribution of influence. In contrast with prior work, this study also shows that a partner's resources affect his relative influence. The investigation demonstrates that some conflict resolution styles employed by partners have significant effects on influence distribution in the context of purchase decisions by male homosexual couples. By providing insights into the purchase decision‐making of male homosexual couples, this research broadens the understanding of homosexual consumers in general. Moreover, the findings about the effect of conflict resolution styles on the influence distribution in male homosexual couples adds significantly to consumer research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Value of Staff Nurse Involvement in Decision Making

The objectives of this study were to explore the perceptions of hospital-based staff nurses regarding their involvement in decision making and to gain an understanding of the ways nurses would like to be involved in decision making. How nurses want to be involved and the extent to which hospital-based staff nurses are involved in formal and informal structures for decision making remain unknown. Stratified cluster random sampling was used to identify hospitals to participate in the study. Staff nurses and chief nursing officers (CNOs) from 10 hospitals in Colorado were invited to participate in this qualitative descriptive study informed by grounded theory. Focus groups with staff nurses and individual interviews with CNOs were also conducted. Safe quality patient care was threaded throughout discussions among the staff nurses and CNOs. Staff nurses viewed involvement in decision making through the lens of an egalitarian process, whereas administration viewed involvement as soliciting input but making decisions unilaterally.

Laying the Groundwork for Participatory Budgeting – Developing a Deliberative Community and Collaborative Governance: Greater Geraldton, Western Australia

Participatory Budgeting (PB), an institutional innovation to promote democratic change, is a form of collaborative governance in which citizens are involved in decision-making processes about how to spend part or all of available government funds. Like the broader concept of democracy, for PB to be effective, there needs to be an ongoing participatory process that involves the building of civic capacity and infrastructure. This paper focuses on a particular attribute of civic efficacy, that of deliberative public engagement, defined as collaborative problem solving through informed, inclusive, egalitarian processes with the outcomes influencing policy, decisions and/or collaborative action. It is argued that to be a deep democratic reform, PB needs to be more intentionally deliberative than usually practiced, within an environment that nurtures civic collaboration and empowerment. In the current situation of disaffected, often angry and/or cynical citizenry, without resorting to revolution, overcoming the pervasive sense of impotence to effect real change is not easy. It requires ongoing effort to create the civic capacity, policies and the institutions that will enable everyday people to work together with decision-makers to achieve collaborative public wisdom, decisions and action. For PB to avoid being merely a superficial band-aid to the perceived malaise of our democratic systems, we contend that the culture in which it is situated needs to be nurtured and stewarded to be more collaborative, considered and egalitarian. The deliberative democracy process instituted over a number of years in Greater Geraldton, Western Australia, shows how some of the preconditions for an effective participatory budgeting initiative could be achieved. The lessons learned are widely applicable to other western democracies, and potentially, other forms of governance.

The Strength of Collective Processes: An ‘Outcome Analysis’ of Women’s Collectives in India

Mainstream literature on organising usually assumes formal hierarchical structure, clear lines of reporting, supervision and well-defined rules as mandatory for efficiency and efficacy. Rigid rules could, however, negatively impact involvement, satisfaction, motivation and performance as they would not take into consideration the complexities of human behaviour. This article argues that collective or non-hierarchical organising empowers the individual participants involved in the process, but such organising experiments are rare and seldom documented. The article analyses a few women’s collectives from around the country, particularly focusing on Bailancho Saad, in Goa, which turned 25 years old on 12 October 2011. It also draws on the experiences of Saheli in New Delhi and Forum in Mumbai, both of which are older. These organisations, ideologically opposed to hierarchy as well as patriarchal and dominating power structures, work for women through seemingly egalitarian processes and ‘participatory’ styles of functioning. In this article we look at some of the strengths of collective organising by analysing their outcomes.

An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening (review)

Reviewed by: An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening Jacob Juntunen An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening. By Mickle Maher. Theater Oobleck at the Chopin Theatre, Chicago. 17 October 2009. This fall, Chicago-based Theater Oobleck remounted co-founder Mickle Maher’s An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening in celebration of the script’s ten-year anniversary. Oobleck’s significance stems from its collaborative process—one that replaces current theatrical norms of hierarchy with true ensemble creation. This model, which has served Maher and other Oobleck regulars for over two decades, acts as an instructive example of collaborative theatre at its most successful. A consideration of the Faustus revival’s rehearsals, design, script, and acting demonstrates the strengths and successes of this egalitarian process. In an interview with me, Maher discussed Oobleck’s methods. The playwright, Maher argued, brings a unique vision to the rehearsal room and lobbies for his or her position. Actors, however, have the prerogative to change lines and actions, and with no director, Oobleck solicits the opinion of invited observers, known as “Outside Eyes,” to become involved in rehearsals. According to Maher, observer David Isaacson suggested the opening for the remount of Faustus—one that immediately erased the distance between spectator and performer. This choice held great import, because audience inclusion is another crucial aspect of Oobleck’s democratic theatrical experience. The first moment of design that immediately inserted the audience into the world of the play consisted of keeping a packed group of forty waiting until curtain time in the low-ceilinged, blood-red basement lobby of the Chopin Theatre. Suddenly, Faustus (Colm O’Reilly), dressed in a cheap suit, slid open a door that separated the lobby from the playing space. He sizzled with irritation as he herded viewers to two rows of folding chairs roughly ten feet across from each other in a tight alley. He then slid the door to the lobby closed, producing a dark, sealed-off space. This direct interaction between Faustus and spectators created a claustrophobic environment in which the fictional character mingled with the real audience. Once in Faustus’s world, spectators saw two folding chairs facing each other on either end of the long-playing space. In the far chair sat a thin man with a sharp face, staring dispassionately; this was Mephistopheles (David Shapiro), who, although a [End Page 291] massive presence throughout, never spoke a word. The only light sources came from two orange globes hanging in the alley between the two chairs; beyond the reach of the feeble bulbs, darkness closed in. The chair in which Mephistopheles sat immobile and the chair Faustus left empty as he prowled the room created an atmosphere of contest in which the silent Mephistopheles, like an unholy priest at a public confession, always had the power. Because of the alley configuration, the soft lighting that revealed little beyond the spectators, and the sense that a contest was being judged, the illusion of characters and audience inhabiting the same world was fulfilled, creating the space for Faustus’s hypnotic words, sometimes imploringly delivered at less than arm’s length away. Click for larger view View full resolution Colm O’Reilly as Faustus in An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening. (Photo: Kristen Basta.) Click for larger view View full resolution Colm O’Reilly as Faustus in An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening. (Photo: Kristen Basta.) In Maher’s script, Faustus recounts his last day—one remarkable for his apology to us, the assembled audience. Faustus’s morning began like any other during his past twenty-four years. He awoke to Mephistopheles eating a hard-boiled egg at the foot of his bed and reading his diary. Faustus relates how he raged against his servant, not only because of the mess, but...

Generic universalism in world politics: beyond international anarchy and the world state

Even though the notion of ‘world politics’ has become increasingly widespread in the discipline of International Relations, its deployment in the disciplinary discourse has been highly problematic. This article argues that the impasse of the discourse on world politics is owing to its commitment to a political ontology of identitarian pluralism, most forcefully articulated in the work of Carl Schmitt, which limits the political imagination to the binary opposition of the preservation of international anarchy and its hierarchical domestication in the world state. As long as politics is cast in identitarian terms, it is impossible to conceive of the universal dimension of political praxis other than in terms of the universalization of some particular content, i.e. as a hegemonic project. We shall then outline the pathway towards a non-identitarian understanding of world politics through an engagement with the universalist themes in the philosophy of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. We shall reconstitute the authors’ alternative to identity politics that rehabilitates the notion of universalism from ‘postmodern’ criticism and reconstructs the category of the universal in non-identitarian or generic terms of indiscernibility and ‘whatever being’. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical dimension of generic world politics as a radically egalitarian process of the emergence of the world community of ‘whatever singularities’.

A Conceptual Definition and Theoretical Model of Public Deliberation in Small Face?to?Face Groups

Although scholars have begun to study face-to-face deliberation on public issues, “deliberation” has no clear conceptual definition and only weak moorings in larger theories. To address these problems, this essay integrates diverse philosophical and empirical works to define deliberation and place it in a broader theoretical context. Public deliberation is a combination of careful problem analysis and an egalitarian process in which participants have adequate speaking opportunities and engage in attentive listening or dialogue that bridges divergent ways of speaking and knowing. Placed in the meta-theoretical framework of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), deliberation is theorized to exist at the center of a homeostatic loop, in which deliberative practice reinforces itself. A review of theory and research on the causes and effects of deliberation leads us to develop this structurational conceptualization into the self-reinforcing model of deliberation. This model posits that public deliberation is more likely to occur when discussion participants perceive potential common ground, believe deliberation is an appropriate mode of talk, possess requisite analytic and communication skills, and have sufficient motivation. Deliberation directly reinforces participants' deliberative habits and skills, and it indirectly promotes common ground and motivation by broadening participants' public identities and heightening their sense of political efficacy.

A Conceptual Definition and Theoretical Model of Public Deliberation in Small Face-to-Face Groups

Although scholars have begun to study face-to-face on public issues, deliberation has no clear conceptual definition and only weak moorings in larger theories. To address these problems, this essay integrates diverse philosophical and empirical works to define and place it in a broader theoretical context. Public is a combination of careful problem analysis and an egalitarian process in which participants have adequate speaking opportunities and engage in attentive listening or dialogue that bridges divergent ways of speaking and knowing. Placed in the meta-theoretical framework of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), is theorized to exist at the center of a homeostatic loop, in which deliberative practice reinforces itself. a review of theory and research on the causes and effects of leads us to develop this structurational conceptualization into the self-reinforcing model of deliberation. This model posits that public is more likely to occur when discussion participants perceive potential common ground, believe is an appropriate mode of talk, possess requisite analytic and communication skills, and have sufficient motivation. Deliberation directly reinforces participants' deliberative habits and skills, and it indirectly promotes common ground and motivation by broadening participants' public identities and heightening their sense of political efficacy.

L’arca di Noè: ovvero la chiesa di Callisto e l’uniformità della ‘morte scritta’

In an essay of 1957 S. Mazzarino stressed the importance of the history of Roman church between Commodus’principalities and Severus Alexander’s one as the key event of the process of the democratization of culture: in particular he focused his attention on the pontificate of pope Callixtus who after the defeat of his enemy Hippolytus proponed a real “open” church community, not intolerant, inclined to forgiveness and to reintegratio. This kind of church was a sort of Noah’s ark « in which there were dogs, wolfes, ravens and all clean and unclean animals ». All in all it was an egalitarian process that may be checked in Christian funerary inscriptions of the first half of the IIIrd century; differentely from the coeval pagan epigraphic praxis there is no reference to retrospective events of life: on the funerary incriptions there is only the name of the dead, even for bishops. This “new” praxis may constantely be verified in the original nuclei of the cemeteries of Callixtus, Domitilla, Praetextatus, Priscilla, Novatianus, Calepodius, Maius: therefore it was a widespread practice that made all people equal before death without any reference to social, economic, cultural differences. So a strong ideological connotation emerges that seems to be inspired by the strict position of Paulus expressed in Gal. 3, 28 and Col. 3, 11.

Civil Society and Regional Security: Tensions and Potentials in Post‑Crisis Southeast Asia

This article delineates the areas where there might be same consonance between the dynamics underlying the present interest in Southeast Asia in the nation of civil society and those linked to the current reassessment of the discourse and practice of security in the region. The areas where tensions can be expected between these two sets of dynamics are also considered. An attempt is then made to establish the policy parameters which, under such circumstances, should guide the regional debate on these issues. The central argument advanced in this context is that it is now possible to create in Southeast Asia mechanisms allowing for a degree of synergy between the development of civil society and that of regional security which will be beneficial to both of these processes. Introduction Civil society has traditionally been conceived of by its proponents as a site of resistance against two forces: that of the state and that of the market. [1] In societies where the state apparatus and the nature of economic development are seen as creating forces of social inequality and exclusion, the exponents of civil society have argued that it can help constitute a space where critiques of these forces can be formulated and alternative trajectories of political and economic development propounded. This explains the wide appeal of the concept in current debates on the different scenarios for the reconstruction and development of Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis. If the current period is to mark a reassessment of the prevalent models of economic and political development in the region, the argument goes, then civil society represents an ideal standpoint from which to ensure that the reconstruction of regional and domestic politico-economic frameworks gives pride of place to more participatory and egalitarian processes and institutions. The rising demand for more participatory and egalitarian models of governance is also very much at the heart of the ongoing reconceptualization of domestic and regional security, as required by the recent upheavals in the region. [2] Security in Southeast Asia has been framed conventionally and quite exclusively in terms of the strength and sustainability of state-building and economic development, which have been at the top of the agenda of the countries in the region. The multi-level crisis which unfolded in mid-1997, however, appears to have ushered in a broader understanding of the different underlying factors which come into play in these processes and must, therefore, be considered part of the security equation. The importance, for example, of widening the space for public participation in development planning and implementation is now better recognized as one of these factors, which the crisis revealed as a necessary precondition to further economic and political growth. There are also dissimilarities, however, between the inner logic pursued by the proponents of civil society and that animating current debates on the reformulation of security in Southeast Asia. For its supporters, civil society is both a process and a goal: it is through the development of civil society that political and economic frameworks in the region can be made more democratic, and it is the presence of a strong and effervescent civil society which will, in the end, be proof of the success of that enterprise. The process of security reformulation, however, has, first of all, involved a much more disparate set of actors. Concepts of security are, of course, being debated within official channels, and these channels also bring into play a series of more informal networks which involve, for instance, academics, linked tacitly or more overtly to official circles. In turn, this structure, whereby Track One (official) and Track Two (unofficial) actors interact on issues of security, offers points of contact with civil society actors (dubbed Track Three in this milieu). …