Legitimate Players Research Articles

Intellectual Property and the Politics of Public Good during COVID-19: Framing Law, Institutions, and Ideas during TRIPS Waiver Negotiations at the WTO

Context: To facilitate the manufacturing of COVID-19 medical products, in October 2020 India and South Africa proposed a waiver of certain intellectual property (IP) provisions of a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement. After nearly two years, a narrow waiver agreement that did little for vaccine access passed the ministerial despite the pandemic's impact on global trade, which the WTO is mandated to safeguard. Methods: The authors conducted a content analysis of WTO legal texts, key-actor statements, media reporting, and the WTO's procedural framework to explore legal, institutional, and ideational explanations for the delay. Findings: IP waivers are neither legally complex nor unprecedented within WTO law, yet these waiver negotiations exceeded their mandated 90-day negotiation period by approximately 18 months. Waiver opponents and supporters engaged in escalating strategic framing that justified and eventually secured political attention at head-of-state level, sidelining other pandemic solutions. The frames deployed discouraged consensus on a meaningful waiver, which ultimately favored the status quo that opponents preferred. WTO institutional design encouraged drawn-out negotiation while limiting legitimate players in the debate to trade ministers, empowering narrow interest group politics. Conclusions: Despite global political attention, the WTO process contributed little to emergency vaccine production, suggesting a pressing need for reforms aimed at more efficient and equitable multilateral processes.

Revisiting Zuckerman's (1999) categorical imperative: An application of epistemic maps for replication

AbstractResearch SummaryWe revisit Zuckerman's (1999) “The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount,” which theorizes that when organizations are recognized as legitimate players in a category, they perform better. A replication exercise fails to reproduce two of three sets of results. Assisted by data shared by the original author, we find evidence that the inconsistency is due to a coding error in the original and differences between analyst data sets. We illustrate the use of epistemic maps and evaluate the theory's predictive power across a broad set of plausible empirical assumptions and also for a subsequent time period. The results are not robust. We conclude that these data provide little evidence to support strategic recommendations. Challenges and remedies for replication are discussed.Managerial SummaryThis paper replicates a 1999 study “The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount” (Zuckerman, 1999). A key implication of the 1999 study is that firms should actively seek to be covered by analysts who specialize in their industries, and that a failure to be covered by analysts who are industry specialists will lead to lower capital market valuations. Our replication exercise indicates that there is insufficient evidence to recommend actively managing coverage along this dimension.

Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection System in RPL by Applying Stochastic and Evolutionary Game Models over IoT Environment

The rapid development of Information and Communication Technology and the growing number of devices connected to the Internet make the Internet of Things (IoT) as a promising technology for a new breed of applications. The Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a widely applied open standard protocol for IoT networks. The RPL routing is highly vulnerable to routing attacks due to the constrained nodes. The attacks on the RPL aim to disrupt the optimal protocol structure and significantly deteriorating network performance. Secure RPL routing schemes attempt to derive a high-level abstract of RPL operations through network simulation traces and apply it as a reference to differentiate the malicious behavior. The RPL specifications include all the states and transitions with its corresponding statistics. However, the malicious activities around a node enforce it to initiate the unnecessary state transition, and thus, the legitimate nodes are equally treated as malicious in dynamic IoT network scenarios. Hence, this work proposes a game theoretic model based anomaly Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect the RPL attacks and verify and confirm their malicious activities. This study formulates the Game models based Anomaly Intrusion Detection System (GAIDS) for RPL security. The proposed approach consists of two interrelated formulations, such as a stochastic game for attack detection and evolutionary game for attack confirmation. The stochastic game model formulates the activities of the standard RPL rules as a zero-sum stochastic game. The stochastic game estimates the payoff by observing the states, transitions between them, and their statistics. However, there is a possibility to model legitimate players as malicious, due to the nature of RPL. Thus, the proposed GAIDS scheme implements the evolutionary game theoretic framework on clustered network topology for the attack verification. By synchronizing the results of the stochastic game of neighboring players, it differentiates the legitimate players from the suspected list successfully. As a result, the GAIDS isolates the detected attackers and maintains the routing performance. The simulation results demonstrate that the detection accuracy and throughput of the proposed gaming model based anomaly IDS is substantially high and outperforms the existing scheme.

A Battle of Names: Hamas and Israeli Operations in the Gaza Strip

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the phenomenon of military operation-naming, that is, the act of giving names to war practices. Based on the four strategies of War Normalizing Discourse theory, I argue that, like nation-states, violent non-state actors also use the tool of naming to disseminate their wartime perceptions and mobilize public opinion for their own interests. Moreover, I argue that in its war-naming efforts the violent non-state actor seeks to defy and undermine the official names of its enemy state, using its own names to expand the physical battlefield to other fields of war and to present itself as an equal and legitimate player. To establish the above arguments, the article presents the case study of Hamas—specifically, the movement’s naming of rounds of fighting against Israel since the beginning of its rule in the Gaza Strip in 2007.

Quantum secret sharing and Mermin operator

Quantum secret sharing is well known as a method for players to share a classical secret for secret sharing in quantum mechanical ways. Most of the results associated with quantum secret sharing are based on pure multipartite entangled states. In reality, however, it is difficult for players to share a pure entangled state, although they can share a state close to the state. Thus, it is necessary to study how to perform the quantum secret sharing based on a general multipartite state. We here present a quantum secret sharing protocol on an $N$-qubit state close to a pure $N$-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. In our protocol, $N$ players use an inequality derived from the Mermin inequality to check secure correlation of classical key bits for secret sharing. We show that if our inequality holds then every legitimate player can have key bits with positive key rate. Therefore, for sufficiently many copies of the state, the players can securely share a classical secret with high probability by means of our protocol.

The Elusive Sources of Legitimacy Beliefs: Civil Society Views of International Election Observers

When are international election observers viewed as legitimate players by other members of civil society? Motivated by recent work on the legitimacy of international organizations, we evaluate beliefs about international election observer groups, in which both intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) seek to exercise authority, often regarding the same elections. To examine two different perspectives, we compare other non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) responses to information about objective substantive features of organizations to their responses to heuristic shortcuts including isomorphism and prominence. Three survey-based experiments – one in Kenya and the others global – prime NGO respondents with information about both real and hypothetical election observer groups in ways intended to affect their votes for which organizations should be invited to observe the next election in their countries. In general, the primes about the objective substantive sources of legitimacy beliefs failed to produce consistent, measurable changes in responses among NGOs across both the hypothetical and real-world observer groups. However, with hypothetical organizations respondents’ identification mattered: rather than IGOs, NGO respondents preferred other NGOs, suggesting an isomorphism heuristic. Conversely, with real organizations their priors revealed a significant preference for more prominent and well-known intergovernmental organizations. This suggests that the isomorphism and prominence of observer organizations can drive legitimacy beliefs, but it also cautions against using hypothetical actors in survey experiments.

The South African Defence Review (2012) and Private Military / Security Companies (PMSCs): Heralding a Shift from Prohibition to Regulation?

This article discusses the possibility of South Africa enacting a new law regulating private military/security companies (PMSCs) beyond the Prohibition of Mercenary Activities and Regulation of Certain Activities in Country of Armed Conflict Act of 2006. It argues that such a possibility arises from the policy direction expressed in the Defence Review of 2012, and the recent developments at the international level, which indicate a shift towards accommodation of PMSCs as legitimate players in the security sector. The article surveys the current state of national and international law relating to PMSCs and illustrates how the emerging shift from prohibition to regulation has affirmed the need for legislative intervention in this field. It concludes that since the future is on the side of regulation and not prohibition, legislation that furthers the policy agenda envisioned by the Defence Review 2012 may be the best tool to unlock the inhibitions of the past and create a viable climate for reframing the debate on domestic law governing private militarism in South Africa.

Performance of lattice coset codes on Universal Software Radio Peripherals

We consider an experimental setup of three Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs) that implement a wiretap channel, two USRPs are the legitimate players Alice and Bob, while the third USRP is the eavesdropper, whose position we vary to evaluate information leakage. The experimented channels are close to slow fading channels, and coset coding of lattice constellations is used for transmission, allowing to introduce controlled randomness at the transmitter. Simulation and measurement results show to which extent coset coding can provide confidentiality, as a function of Eve’s position, and the amount of randomness used.

“Mislike Me Not for My Complexion…”: Ira Aldridge in Whiteface

Ira Aldridge, the first important black American Shakespearean actor, had an odd but remarkable theatrical career. Born in New York City in 1807, educated for a few years in the second Free School in lower Manhattan, employed in his youth at various menial jobs in the city, including a brief stint as a costume carrier for a visiting British actor, and then involved in several small dramatic productions put on by ragtag black acting companies at a short-lived establishment called the Theatre, Aldridge fell in love with the stage and aspired to become a professional actor. Since he could fulfil this ambition in the United States, which had proven not yet ready to accept black actors in the legitimate drama (Hill 17), he emigrated to the British Isles, where he was fortunate enough to secure his first engagement with top billing at London's Royal Coburg Theatre (now the Old Vic) in October 1825, when he was only eighteen years old. In those days it was customary to hail a talented young performer as a a name alluding to the great Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus. Garrick had been the first English Next came Mr. Betty, the phenomenally successful juvenile thespian who was heralded as the Young and thereafter the name was linked to theatrical precocity. Master Grossmith, a seven-year-old, was introduced on the stage as the Celebrated Infant and Miss Lee Sugg, another child prodigy, as the Young Roscia. Inevitably, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and several American Roscii and Rosciae, including a Kentucky Roscius, soon appeared. Since Aldridge was both young and black, he was quickly dubbed the an honorific title given extra resonance when theater managers began to spread the word that he was the son of a Christian Fulani prince from Senegal. Aldridge, whose staple role was Shakespeare's Othello, could be said to have made a career out of playing a Moor playing a Moor. This may have been an adroit theatrical strategy, given the obstacles a black neophyte would have had to overcome to be accepted as a legitimate player on a foreign stage. But at the outset this was an easy way to make a living. Though he could depend on his novelty value to draw people to the theater, there were only a limited number of roles a black performer could take on, and in the first half of the nineteenth century the normal practice in British theaters was to perform at least two plays each night and to change the bill every day. Long runs of a single play were common until later in the century, and then only in London. For Aldridge to be employable, he had to be able to offer a reasonable number of well-known roles and to keep moving from place to place. He could find a permanent position in one of the London theaters, nor could he secure engagements outside London for more than a week or two at a time. So he turned into a perpetually touring player, an exotic star who made his rounds principally in the provinces week after week, month after month, year after year after year. But first he had to establish a reputation as a performer. Being an African was enough; he also had to prove his credentials as a Roscius. One way he did this was to draw upon anti-slavery sentiments by playing long-suffering slaves in abolitionist melodramas set in the New World. Gambia in Thomas Morton's The Slave, Oroonoko in stage adaptations of Aphra Behn's eponymous novel, and Christophe in J. H. Amherst's The Death of Christophe, King of Hayti were the principal tragic roles he assumed early in his career to supplement his performances of Othello. He also played dark strangers, some of whom were villains: Zanga the Moor in Edward Young's The Revenge, Rolla the heroic Peruvian army commander in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro, and Hassan the vengeful Moor in Monk Lewis's gothic thriller The Castle Spectre. These heavy roles helped to establish his competence as a tragedian. …

Lattice Codes for the Wiretap Gaussian Channel: Construction and Analysis

We consider the Gaussian wiretap channel, where two legitimate players Alice and Bob communicate over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, while Eve is eavesdropping, also through an AWGN channel. We propose a coding strategy based on lattice coset encoding. We define the secrecy gain as a design criterion for wiretap lattice codes, expressed in terms of the lattice theta series, which characterizes Eve's confusion as a function of the channel parameters. The secrecy gain is studied for even unimodular lattices, and an asymptotic analysis shows that it grows exponentially in the dimension of the lattice. Examples of wiretap lattice codes are given.

OTC Asia Sessions Discuss Region’s Role in Price Downturn, Recovery

As the oil and gas industry weathers a transitional phase brought on by a drop in oil prices, burgeoning markets in Southeast Asia stand poised to establish themselves as legitimate players in the future. Attendees of the recent Offshore Technology Conference Asia in Kuala Lumpur saw the myriad ways in which the region’s potential could make it into an industry stronghold. In a series of sessions devoted to individual countries in the Asia Pacific region, representatives from national oil companies, multinational operators, and service companies presented their thoughts on the roles they will play in the overall development of the region and the global oil market. China Panel speakers at the China country session described a country flush with natural resources but unable to exploit them to the fullest extent. Led by its national oil company, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the country is eager to acquire the tools needed to increase production from its oil and gas reserves. While the Chinese market is still in a nascent developmental stage, Zhang Xiaofeng said the CNPC is optimistic about its progress in developing specific types of reservoirs. Zhang, a project manager at CNPC, cited volcanic reservoirs as a particular source of optimism. China has one of the largest collections of proven volcanic reserves in the world; 900 billion m3 of the country’s 3 trillion m3 (Tcm) total proven reserves is in volcanic reservoirs. However, Zhang said there are some technical difficulties CNPC faces in actualizing these resources. He said the company must improve its reservoir prediction techniques, as well as its crack detection. Zhang was equally optimistic about shale gas prospects in China, but operational costs must continue to decline in order for the country to increase development of the resource. CNPC estimated that in 2015, the cost of drilling a horizontal well in shale formations in the Sichuan Basin ranged between USD 11.3 million and USD 12.9 million per well, representing a 23% cost reduction from 2013. “Of course, shale gas is an important resource for China,” Zhang said. “It is a rich gas area, and hopefully some of our successful projects will push shale.” China’s focus on shale gas has been driven in large part by its inability to develop its coalbed methane (CBM) resources. The country’s total resource of CBM is approximately 36.8 Tcm, but the coal depositional structure in China is too complex for the existing technological infrastructure to exploit. Overcoming this complexity will be critical for the country in the near future. Zhang said there is, at present, no large-scale commercial production of CBM in China. Xiangyu Wang, a professor of construction management at Curtin University and the moderator of the session, said renewables should play a larger role in China’s energy policy, even as the country continues to develop its oil and gas economy. Coal made up 65.7% of China’s total energy consumption in 2013, compared with 18.9% for oil and 5.5% for gas.

Persian Gulf War: Strategic Effectiveness of American Plans for the Ground Offensive

On August 2, 1990, Iraq alarmed the world by invading Kuwait. The United States quickly seized the opportunity to empower the United Nations and establish itself as a legitimate player in the Middle East both diplomatically and militarily in the process of ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and weakening Saddam’s war machine. This paper provides an analysis and assessment of whether the coalition’s ground offensive was effective in achieving those desired strategic effects.

The concentration of the global alcohol industry and its penetration in the African region.

To describe the penetration and expansion of the global alcohol industry into the African region, as a context for exploring the implications for public health. Source materials for this study came primarily from market research and the business press. This was supplemented by industry sources (from websites, company annual reports), World Health Organization reports and the scientific literature. Drinking in Africa is characterized by high rates of abstention and a high prevalence of heavy episodic consumption among those who drink. Much of the region is currently experiencing a rapid rise in consumption. Rising populations and income and the rapid pace of urbanization make Africa very attractive to the global alcohol industry, and industry leaders have identified Africa as a key area for growth. The shift from collaboration to competition in Africa among the global alcohol companies has prompted increasing alcohol production, promotion, new product development, pricing schemes and stakeholder lobbying. Beer consumption has increased across most of the continent, and global brewers view themselves as legitimate players at the alcohol policy table. Weak alcohol policy environments may be compromised further in terms of public health protections by alcohol industry opposition to effective measures such as marketing regulations, availability controls and taxation.

The Public Sphere and Literary Journals: An Investigation of the Discursive Formation of New Fiction's Utopian Imagination in Late Qing

This article considers New Fiction's utopian imagination in the Late Qing period as a product of Foucauldian discursive formation, an important element of which is the channel of production through literary journals in the Chinese public sphere. Developing Jürgen Habermas's concept of a bourgeois public sphere during eighteenth- and nineteeth-century Europe, Rudolf Wagner's notion of a Chinese public sphere stresses that the participants came from the top and bottom of society, and that the Qing court was an important and legitimate player. In applying that notion, this article shows how fiction could be a means of public opinion and how a literary journal could be a platform in the public sphere. Monthly Fiction and Racing Independent Club Fiction Monthly, and their publication of utopian novels, are two examples that demonstrate their reactions to political issues and their vertical relationship with the court in the Chinese public sphere. By examining these two case studies, the processes by which the narratives of a new China(s) were produced by this utopian discourse are shown.

One-Round Affiliation-Hiding Authenticated Asymmetric Group Key Agreement with Semi-trusted Group Authority

Affiliation-Hiding Authenticated Asymmetric Group Key Agreement (AH-AAGKA) protocol can be utilized by the members of a group to authenticate each other secretly. The participants affiliated to the group can execute the AH-AAGKA protocol to establish a common encryption key. Any legitimate participant can compute its own decryption key corresponding to the encryption key. Particularly, every legitimate player's affiliation information is only revealed to other legitimate players. In this paper, we present a one-round AH-AAGKA protocol. Compared with previous work, in our protocol, Group Authority (GA) does not need to be fully trusted (we call it semi-trusted). Therefore, GA cannot impersonate any honest user to execute the protocol. Meanwhile, GA can trace group members through analyzing the communication flows. Our protocol holds the affiliation-hiding property and detectability. Additionally, our scheme exhibits Perfect Forward Secrecy for both GA and outside attackers.

On the Edge of War and Society: Canadian Pentecostal Bible School Students in the 1940s

During World War II the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada put forth arguments on behalf of bible college students concerning military service exemptions, chaplaincy appointments, and veterans’ benefits. The paper deals specifically with the Rev. J.E. Purdie, Principal of the Western Bible College in Winnipeg, his efforts on behalf of his students, and one particularly complex case where attempts were made to have the student exempted from serving, and failing that, to have him appointed as a military chaplain. After the young man’s premature release from service, Purdie argued that he should be entitled to veteran’s benefits to pay for his bible college training. What initially appeared as a bid to protect the individual rights of one young conscript was in fact part of a much larger effort as Pentecostals asserted their right (and by extension the right of other marginal religious groups) to be included in the broader liberal framework in Canada. This case study is significant because it addresses themes of public religion, specifically how Pentecostals challenged the ‘liberal order framework,’ by attempting to carve out recognition for themselves among the religious groups that were acknowledged as legitimate players in Canada’s public affairs.

The South African Defence Review (2012) and Private Military / Security Companies (PMSCs): Heralding a Shift from Prohibition to Regulation?

This article discusses the possibility of South Africa enacting a new law regulating private military/security companies (PMSCs) beyond the Prohibition of Mercenary Activities and Regulation of Certain Activities in Country of Armed Conflict Act of 2006. It argues that such a possibility arises from the policy direction expressed in the Defence Review of 2012, and the recent developments at the international level, which indicate a shift towards accommodation of PMSCs as legitimate players in the security sector. The article surveys the current state of national and international law relating to PMSCs and illustrates how the emerging shift from prohibition to regulation has affirmed the need for legislative intervention in this field. It concludes that since the future is on the side of regulation and not prohibition, legislation that furthers the policy agenda envisioned by the Defence Review 2012 may be the best tool to unlock the inhibitions of the past and create a viable climate for reframing the debate on domestic law governing private militarism in South Africa.Keywords: Defence policy (South Africa), Regulation of Private Military/Security Companies (PMSCs), South African Defence Review (2012), UN Working Group on Mercenaries, AU Mercenary Convention, UN Mercenary Convention, Montreux Document, Prohibition of Mercenary Activities and Regulation of Certain Activities in Country of Armed Conflict Act 26 of 2006 (SA).

A Special Issue on New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond

A Special Issue on New Approaches to Eliza Haywood:The Political Biography and Beyond Amanda Hiner (bio) and Patsy S. Fowler (bio) The scholarly and critical treatment of Eliza Haywood’s work ranges from tidy nineteenth-century accounts of her reformation from a writer of scandalous amatory fiction to a writer of demure domestic fiction; to mid-twentieth-century relegations of her work to a subcategory of inferior, feminine, amatory fiction; to late-twentieth century reclamations of Haywood as a prolific, professional writer of diverse literary genres; to more recent, expansive interpretations of her as a “slippery, fluid, multifarious, strategic, opportunistic, chameleon-like, and performance-driven writer keenly attuned to the evolving circumstances of literary commerce” (King, Political Biography 195). Yet throughout these varied treatments, Haywood has remained what Kathryn R. King calls an “uncooperative biographical subject” (Political Biography 1) who, as David Erskine Baker famously reports in his 1764 The Companion to the Play-House, instructed her companions to keep any biographical details of her life out of the public sphere (Baker 321). These companions, as it turns out, were both very loyal and very successful. In fact, it is likely that this dearth of biographical information tempted early Haywood scholars toward apocryphal speculation and indeed, helped to create an enduring myth surrounding Haywood’s life. In part as an effort to correct biographical and interpretive errors in Haywood scholarship and in part as an effort to recast Eliza Haywood as a complex, market-savvy, and prolific author of wide-ranging literary genres, King [End Page 1] recently produced a thematically-focused, comprehensive political biography of Haywood titled A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood.1 This deliberate decision to analyze Haywood’s literary oeuvre strictly through the lens of political, historical, and cultural criticism effectively ended Haywood’s designation as a mere amatory novelist and modeled a potently effective method for the critical exploration of eighteenth-century literary texts. Even as it acknowledges the monumental contributions of previous Haywood scholars such as Patrick Spedding and Christine Blouch, King’s biography succinctly and effectively rejects many of the speculative claims about Haywood in order to demythologize the more scandalous narrative and recast it as a “compelling story… of a young woman’s journey towards literary professionalism and ultimately oppositional political engagement” (Political Biography 17). Over the past several decades, feminist scholars have successfully reclaimed Haywood as a legitimate literary subject, and many have focused their attention on her amatory novels in their examinations of female subjectivity and agency and of cultural constructions of sensibility, gender, and domesticity; Haywood’s work undoubtedly has been fruitful ground for this important critical work. Although fewer in number, others have carefully examined Haywood’s plays, periodicals, and overtly political writings, emphasizing her role as what Patsy Fowler has called elsewhere a “legitimate player within the literary marketplace” (179) and envisioning her as an intelligent and calculating participant in the public sphere who strove to secure patrons, dismantle her critics, and control her own image (her personal “brand,” we would say now). King’s comprehensive, detailed, and nuanced treatment of Haywood’s public life and political writings considerably advances this critical exercise, providing readers with the first full-length biography of Haywood in almost a century and offering readers a serious and attentive examination of Haywood’s fearless political engagement in the public sphere. King develops in her monograph a “long view” of Haywood, examining her writings over the course of forty years, and contending that, though Haywood “engaged energetically and at times vehemently in anti-ministerial satire and journalism,” her “political positions were complex and shifting, [and] to some degree situational” (Political Biography 7), especially during the early years of her literary career. In adopting such a nuanced view, King persuasively argues against the rather simplistic perception of Haywood as a Tory propagandist doggedly forwarding a party line. King’s meticulous examination of both Haywood’s literary and personal associations and [End Page 2] patrons and her rhetorical allusions and references reveals that Haywood was astute, calculating, and fluid in her political associations. When studied attentively, Haywood’s political writings reveal a public participant who fearlessly satirized and criticized both ministerial and Tory factions...

The Cypriot Civil Society movement: A legitimate player in the peace process?

Efforts to resolve Cyprus's frozen conflict have frustrated the international community for nearly forty years. One of the causes of this lack of progress is a fundamental ‘democratic deficit’ in previous efforts at peacebuilding. In response to this deficit, a civil society movement for peace has slowly but inexorably emerged in the last few decades, engaging in a wide range of reconciliation efforts. In light of an ever-evolving enabling environment, this paper asks if this civil society movement has acquired the capacity and the constituency that could establish it as a legitimate interlocutor within an expanded peace process.

Civil Society Mappings by Government: A Comparison of Ecuadorian and Colombian Cases

Scholars argue that we cannot see civil society organizations (CSOs) as legitimate players in policy if we have no clear ways to define them and if we lack information explaining their functions. Thus, scholars and practitioners alike have encouraged the ‘mapping’ of civil society. Mapping civil society consists of gathering and collating information on CSOs and often making it publicly available. There is little scholarship about such mapping efforts implemented by government. This article compares new mapping efforts in two countries—i.e., registries of CSOs created by governments in Ecuador and Colombia. The article examines the intentions of civil society mapping by government, identifying three key goals: to collect data, to regulate, and to foster collaboration. It discusses the differences across civil society mappings by government and in comparison with other mapping projects. The article argues that registries are increasingly positioned as a link between government and civil society not only to collect data for transparency but also to implement regulatory measures and to foster various degrees of collaboration. Thus, greater research attention to civil society mappings by government and their possible implications on civil society development and civil society/state relations is needed.