Internal Fighting Research Articles

From Kings to Dukes: Brittany between the 5th and the 12th Century

Brittany owes its name to the Brythonic immigrants who moved from insular Britain to north-western Gaul, then known as Armorica, between the 4th and the 7th centuries. The north and west of the Breton peninsula were colonised by these settlers from across the Channel, while the eastern part of modern Brittany, the area around Rennes and Nantes came under the control of the Franks. By the end of the 5th century, the latter had taken over control of the whole of ancient Gaul, apart from the tip of ancient Armorica where the Bretons resisted the Frankish kings’ domination for some time. Brittany even witnessed the emergence of a royal lineage recognised in due course by the Franks in 851, but the new Breton kingdom was soon weakened by the Viking raids and internal fighting. This weakening of the central Breton power in the 10th century effectively benefited the aristocracy which wielded power at a local level. In the 11th and 12th centuries, counts, viscounts and castellans would gain power under the relative authority of a prince: the Duke of Brittany. At that time, Brittany was a principality with little effective power for two centuries, until the prince’s power was reinforced by the Plantagenets during the second half of the 12th century. Lying in the westernmost part of France, on the fringes of the Kingdom of the Franks, Brittany had a distinct and peculiar history, shaped by dual Brythonic and Frankish influences.

The Palestinian Authority after Mahmoud Abbas: Anticipation for the Future

The article discusses the possible scenarios in the event that the position of the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA) becomes vacant, in light of the absence of an institutional structure of the PA, legal justifications or political solutions that can be relied on, if Palestinian parties choose to resort to the democratic path, to elect a new president, or even bring a successor to the President of the PA, who enjoys popular and regional acceptance. Due to the difficulty of predicting the post-Mahmoud Abbas era, and the absence of any signs or indicators to anticipate the next stage and considering the persistence of the internal Palestinian division including that of the Fatah movement, and the emergence of new political currents, the author applies the scenario approach by presenting a set of possible scenarios, based on the available data and information discussed in some detail in the article. The article presents a theoretical and descriptive reading of the developments of the history of the PA, focusing on legal mechanisms through which the president of the PA is chosen, analyzing, and linking these mechanisms to the current reality of the PA through discussing the most important challenges facing the succession of Abbas. This is done based on the severe divisions within the Fatah movement, and its declining popularity, as well as the influence of regional and international parties. The article relies on many Arab, English, and Hebrew academic sources. It also includes interviews with a group of experts and specialists in Palestinian affairs. With the analysis of each possible scenario for the future of the PA after Abbas, the author concludes that the fourth scenario is most possible and realistic one, which suggests that Palestinians will be able to reach a consensus on a person to lead the PA after Abbas, especially since the absence of consensus could lead to more disintegration and internal fighting.

The Comintern, “Negro Self-Determination” and Black Revolutions in the Caribbean

The article discusses the slogan of “Negro self-determination” adopted by the Communist International and the traces of its influence on post-Comintern political transformations in the Caribbean. Particular attention is paid to the establishment of Afro-centric regimes in Haiti and Grenada. It is argued that the events in these two countries after the Second World War bear visible traces of the influence of the pre-war Comintern propaganda. Haiti experienced a regime, which combined Afro-centric and Communist rhetorics with severe anti-communist repression. Grenada experienced a more complex transformation, which started with the “trade union revolution” of 1951 and continued with a short-lived Socialist revolution of 1979 led by the New Jewel Movement. The political transformations in Grenada, crushed as a result of internal fighting and foreign military intervention in 1983, had a significant Caribbean and Afro-centric component, probably the closest to the ideals of the Comintern.

Zabójstwo ideologiczne w twórczości Fiodora Dostojewskiego

Ideological Killing in the Works of Fyodor DostoyevskyThe key issue of the article is the motivation for murder – the “ethics” of killing. The moral dimension of murder and the killer’s axiological awareness become crucial. The article answers questions about various aspects of murder. Is killing always wrong? Are there any situations in which the categorical ban on taking human life can be relativised in the context of the defence of another human being and higher values? Are there any values for the implementation of which political ideas and ideologies can justify mass murder, and, as a result, bloody revolution, war, and genocide? What is the role of a culture that promotes ideologies based on the idea of killing or internal fighting? The author deals with the issue of ideological murder in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels. The article addresses moral issues concerning the murder, as well as the metaphysical dimension of crime. On the basis of Crime and Punishment and Demons, the author shows what blind faith in ideology can lead to.

Political Turbulence and Stalemate in Contemporary Malaysia: Oligarchic Reconstitutions and Insecurities

AbstractMalaysian politics has been turbulent over the past two decades, as seen in the damaged tradition of leadership transition, non-violent revolts against successive regimes, and unstable realignments of opposing forces. Two startling symptoms point to disorder. One is the heavy electoral losses and loss of legitimacy suffered by the post-Mahathir regimes. The other is the political re-entry of Anwar Ibrahim and Mahathir Mohamad. The persisting turbulence raises certain questions. Why has the ruling party, the United Malays National Organization, been susceptible to internal fighting, being at once a source of hegemonic stability and systemic instability? Why has the apex of the United Malays National Organization repeatedly jeopardised its traditions of leadership succession? Why has one leader, Mahathir Mohamad, been involved in all the disputes? How did the crisis of the party, not just the regime, become intimately tied to economic crisis? Conventional paradigmatic explanations of Malaysian politics – inter-ethnic rivalry in a plural society, elite solidarity, and regime type (semi-democratic, hybrid, or competitive authoritarian) – are of little help even if ethnicity, elite conduct, and authoritarian rule are relevant. Instead, this essay suggests that the turbulence is part of a long trajectory of oligarchic reconstitution bound to a peculiar nexus of state, ethnicity, and class. The paper does not construct a theory of Malaysian politics. It offers a historically informed exploration of a leitmotif of an unfinished project that runs through much of the past 20 years of political conflict and struggle.

Violent and Nonviolent Changes in the Images of Cities in the Arab Spring Countries

The Arab Spring transformations have caused tangible impacts on the urban environment throughout the Middle East with varying levels. In some cities in countries like Libya, Yemen and Syria, deliberate and accidental destruction has taken place, resulting in severe transformations in the image of these cities that could be considered as lasting or difficult to amend. In some cities, the damage caused to urban built environment could be considered a co-lateral damage as a result of internal fighting between the people and their regimes, or the fighting between the different factions in the country or from external interference of regional or international powers. Urbicide, which is defined as a deliberate destruction of cities is also another form of damaging the built environment or the city image, in which parties in an internal conflict tend to destroy symbols or quarters of their rivals to inflict a tangible damage to their social and moral believes. The impacts on the built environment and the image of the city, can result as well from non-destructive measures, for example changes in land uses or decisions to demolish specific buildings that belong to the former era will also result in a clear change in the city image. This paper highlights the types of transformation of the city images that took place as a result of the Arab Spring revolutions. The cases discussed in this paper focus mainly on cities from both Syria and Egypt. This highlighting is done in regard to the nature of change, as mentioned above, the violent transformation in the case of Syrian cities and few cases in Egypt and the nonviolent transformation with the examples from Egypt.In case of the Syrian cities the transformation is caused and sparked by the civil conflict, however the course of reconstruction of these cities after the conflict ends is argued to take one of three paths; reconstruction, renovation or redevelopment. While in case of the nonviolent transformation that is taking place already in Egypt, the nature of change was affected by political, social and security aspects, which in turn had direct impacts on the images of the Egyptian cities after the Arab Spring revolutions.

Telecommunications in the Porfirian Era [Porfiriato

Communications in the Porfirian era immediately brings to mind the railroads that contributed to bringing Mexico into the modern world, leaving behind the burdens of colonial times and the internal fighting of the nineteenth century. However, there is little information and research on telecommunications during the Porfirian era or Porfiriato although it is precisely at this time when the first telecommunication revolution takes place in Mexico. As the foundations of telecommunications in Mexico are established during the Porfiriato, this articles presents a snapshot of the general situation at the beginning of Porfirio Diaz’s regime, as well as the bases for regulating telegraph and telephone services. All this data will provide the context needed to address the specific and different aspects of telegraphy, telephony and radiotelegraphy discussed in this article.

عدم الاستقرار السياسي في ليبيا: دراسة في العوامل الداخلية والخارجية

Libya presents the experience of the failed state model after the so-called "revolutions of the Arab Spring". The full absence of institutions under the Gaddafi regime, and the quick moving into pluralism, but in its unhealthy form. Such pluralism was a reflection of the multi-tribal and territorial, religious, ideological plurality. Kind of internal conflict was arisen, because of the sharp intersection among those forces, turning most often into internal fighting between the conflicting parties which was supported by regional and international intervention making the Libyan issue more complicated problem.

Peronism of Mendoza in 1973 elections

Return to the polls and electoral triumph of Peronism in 1973 closed a stage characterized by a deep legitimacy crisis, which had been opened with Peron overthrow in 1955. The political reorganization of the “movement”vin the province of Mendoza showed an intermittent tension between those who adhered to the “verticalist peronism” and a group of leaders who built new political parties called “neo-Peronist”, whose rise found an end in 1966 gubernatorial elections. Rehabilitation of political activity in 1971 revived the internal fighting among the various Peronist factions, looking for a place in the nominations process for the 1973 elections. Despite the unification of some sectors, the conflict within the party did not end after the victory at the polls, but surfaced soon after the start of the Government of Alberto Martinez Baca. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the decomposition process that Peronism of Mendoza 1suffered after the overthrow of Peron in 1955, its subsequent reorganization to face the general elections of 1973 and the results of the elections.

Brothers in arms – An experiment on the alliance puzzle

The generic alliance game considers players in an alliance who fight against an external enemy. After victory, the alliance may break up, and its members may fight against each other over the spoils of the victory. Our experimental analysis of this game shows: In-group solidarity vanishes after the break-up of the alliance. Former ‘brothers in arms’ fight even more vigorously against each other than strangers do. Furthermore, this vigorous internal fighting is anticipated and reduces the ability of the alliance to mobilize the joint fighting effort, compared to a situation in which victorious alliance members share the spoils of victory equally and peacefully.

War with Outsiders Makes Peace Inside

This article presents a new theoretical perspective on the diversionary use of force. Players are partitioned into groups and choose how to allocate their resources to production, fighting against other groups, and fighting internally. The model gives a rationalist explanation of the group cohesion effect: when there is a lot of fighting between groups, there is less internal fighting. In equilibrium, players choose sufficiently high external conflict in order to avoid internal conflict. In contrast with the existing literature, this diversionary use of force takes place even though there is no asymmetric or incomplete information.

WINNING VOTES AND WEATHERING STORMS: THE 2009 EUROPEAN AND PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN GREECE

In 2007, the New Democracy (ND) party led by Kostas Karamanlis renewed its term in office, albeit with a very slim parliamentary majority (see Gemenis 2008). For the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) the result marked the fourth consecutive defeat in local, national and European elections and drove the party into a crisis. Although its president, George Papandreou, easily won the open primary with more than 55% of the vote, the party fell into a protracted internal party fighting which lasted several months. For the following nine months, the opinion polls indicated that disillusioned PASOK supporters were moving towards the Coalition of the Left, of Movements and Ecology, known as Synaspismos (SYN), which was experiencing a remarkable surge in its popularity (Figure 1). This popularity was also related to the election of the former party spokesman Alexis Tsipras as the new party president in the February 2008 party congress, which was devised as a strategy to make the party more appealing to young voters.

Engineering design as an intellectual problem

Engineering education has recently been going through a process of internal fighting between the tendency to introduce more and more information and skills in the fields of computerization and mathematics (mathematics for engineers), on the one hand, and the need to provide the student with pure empirical technical and design knowledge and experience, on the other hand. In most mechanical engineering departments, the outcome of this competition has been a reduction in the time allotted to teaching the empirical part of engineering information: there is often a psychological barrier to understanding the importance of this group of subjects, and the computer- and mathematics-associated subjects usually win out. As a result, the new graduate usually knows how to fight the computation struggle but he/she is not able to formulate his/her final engineering goal. This paper focuses on various aspects of this situation. In particular, we set out to defend the need for serious and in-depth teaching of the empirical information required in engineering design work.

Supply Management: The Past and Future

This paper reviews many of the controversial issues surrounding supply management in the Canadian dairy and poultry sectors. In this context, the underlying theory is extended to include decision making where both joint production and import controls are in place. Also the supply management system is discussed within a rent‐seeking framework. This provides both a method by which to analyze the various forces that will either keep the supply management system in operation or lead to its demise, as well as a means by which supply management can be improved. Concerning the former, it appears, for example, that the tariffs under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade are sufficiently high that producers are better off with supply management than with a system with no production controls. If this system falls apart, it will largely be due to internal fighting among provinces and/or producers over expanded market share.

Internal fighting predicted.

The majority of care in the community could be placed in the hands of the nursing profession which would be perfectly competent to deal with many problems presented to family doc tors, according to Labour Social Services Secretary, Robin Cook.

An Additional Warfare Element in Territorial Expansion

Otterbein has found that a major cultural element in the tendency of a society to expand its territory appears to be its level of military so phistication. However, this is evidently not the only warfare charac teristic related to territorial expansion. A further examination of his data indicates that the psychocultural element of aggressiveness or "ferocity," as measured by a tencency of the society to attack, is even more strongly related to territorial expansion than is military sophis tication. A high level of ferocity in a culture may also lead to internal fighting and the disintegration of a society, however. This internal fight ing must be controlled by strong authoritarian measures before the society's aggressiveness will produce territorial expansion.