New Type Of Conflict Research Articles

Conflict Theory, Complexity and Systems Approach

Since the end of the Cold War, we have been witnessing the emergence of new types of conflicts. These are progressively more complex, but are, still too often, conceptualised and approached simplistically, using a linear type of reasoning. Complexity is disregarded, and the need for systemic thinking is underestimated, not rarely leading to disastrous results. Feedbacks are most often ignored, and the complex dynamics which make a conflict to change over time, following often unpredictable paths, are rarely taken into account. A shift from a precomplexity mindset to a mindset founded in an understanding of complexity is necessary. In the paper, using concrete examples, we will try to show how a systems thinking approach is essential to analyse today's conflict, to prevent them, and to act so as to make them develop along non violent constructive paths rather than along violent destructive ones. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Betwixt Scylla and Charybdis

Betwixt Scylla and Charybdis

Understanding Road Safety Impact of High-Performance Bus Rapid Transit and Busway Design Features

The design choices made in the planning of a new bus rapid transit (BRT) or busway corridor (e.g., use of a center-lane or curbside configuration, counterflow lanes, and open or closed stations) affect not only the operational performance of the system but also the risks of crashes, injuries, and fatalities on the facility over its lifetime. With data from nine BRT systems and busways around the world (including Bogotá, Colombia; Curitiba, Brazil; Mexico City, Mexico; and Delhi, India), some of the road safety impacts of major BRT–busway corridor design characteristics are illustrated. The approach included a combination of crash frequency modeling, road safety inspections, and interviews with transit agency staff and safety experts. Center-lane systems tended generally to be safer than were curbside systems, and counter flow lanes were the most dangerous possible configuration. Some of the features that provide higher passenger capacity (such as multiple bus lanes and multiple docking bays at stations) may introduce new types of conflicts and crashes. In the planning of any bus system, trade-offs often need to be made between capacity, safety, and pedestrian accessibility along the corridor. This study provides the necessary elements for successfully integrating road safety considerations into the design and operation of future BRT systems and busways.

Optimists, Pessimists or Skeptics: Explaining Variations in Post-Cold War International and Regional Security

With the end of the Cold War, analysts advanced competing expectations about the likely character of the post-Cold War Order. Many expected a far-reaching transformation in the fundamental character of world politics (notably, a decline in the centrality of the state in world politics). Some of these predictions were quite optimistic (esp. Liberals and Constructivists)- believing the changes will lead to more peace and cooperation; some were pessimists-predicting the emergence of new types of conflicts, while others (the realists) remained skeptic regarding the possible transformation (for better or worse) in the fundamental character of international politics, even if taking into account specific changes in the global distribution of capabilities as leading to some important changes in the dynamics of the international system - whether in the direction of a benign hegemon or balance of power politics. While none of these perspectives predicted accurately the nature of the international system, there is a differential application of the predictions of the competing approaches to different regions. Some regions seem to fit the optimistic expectations (Europe, South America), others fit the pessimists’ predictions (South Asia, Africa, Middle East), while still others might accord with realist expectations (East Asia and the post-Soviet). Some other regions went through a transition from fitting the pessimist line to resemble more closely the optimist approach (the Balkans). How could we explain the variations in the level of peace, order, institutionalization and cooperation in the various regions? I’ll argue that the combined effect of two factors-state strength and national congruence - is the most important, although an additional factor can mitigate or aggravate their effects - great power intervention. The two key factors are state strength - the effectiveness of the functioning of state institutions; and national congruence - the extent of congruence between geo-political boundaries and national aspirations and identities in the region. Regions in which the states are strong and nationally coherent will tend to meet the optimists’ predictions. Regions in which at least some of the states are failed states - both weak and incongruent - will follow the pessimist predictions; while regions with strong states but incongruent will tend to produce a revisionist model. Finally, the instability prevalent in regions populated by failed states can sometimes be mitigated by the intervention of a benign hegemon, but in highly fragmented regions such interventions might face a lot of problems and have some de-stabilizing effects.

CONFLICTS AND THEIR RESOLUTIONS IN FUZZY RELATIONAL MULTIDATABASES

Database integration is an important discipline for constructing heterogeneous multidatabases on one hand. On the other hand, fuzzy information has been introduced into databases and studied extensively. One of the main problems in integration of multidatabases developed in different sites is resolution of conflicts. This problem becomes very complex when databases contain fuzzy information. Little has been reported on integrating fuzzy multidatabases so far. In this paper, we focus on integrating possibility-based fuzzy relational databases. The new types of conflicts arising in schema level and instance level in the fuzzy multidatabase integration are identified. The resolutions of the new types of conflicts are proposed. In particular, a method for identifying the entities in the fuzzy multidatabase integration with incompatible keys is developed.

Genre on time. Fiction film framings of scandalous politics in Denmark since 2001

In Denmark the political fiction film has not been at the centre of attention for film-makers, and when it has been explored it has in fact not been a very successful genre. However, recently, an interest in the political sphere has emerged among film-makers in Denmark. Simultaneously, the political culture in Denmark since the turn of the century has become less focused on a welfare and solidarity consensus, and it has created new types of conflicts where the population has become more sceptical towards the political system and also towards the journalistic credo. The article shows how the socio-cultural political context developed especially since 2001 interacts with the content and form of political fiction films, and how the films are embedded in a general mediatization of culture which implies that subject matter related to, for example, politics is framed in popular form in news and in fiction films.

Napoleon's Wars: An International History 1803-1815 (review)

Reviewed by: Napoleon's Wars: An International History 1803-1815 Michael V. Leggiere Napoleon's Wars: An International History 1803-1815. By Charles Esdaile. London: Allen Lane, 2007. ISBN 978-0-713-99715-6. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp.622. $58.96. With the passing of David Chandler in 2004, the quill of the long-reigning dean of Napoleonic military history fell silent. By virtue of their various authoritative [End Page 637] works, Rory Muir, David Gates, and Frederick Schneid all can be considered worthy successors. However, Charles Esdaile has clearly emerged as the heir apparent. Esdaile's Napoleon's Wars: An International History 1803-1815 is his most recent addition to an impressive list of publications that includes The Peninsular War: A New History and Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits, and Adventurers in Spain, 1808-1814. As these two titles suggest, Esdaile first achieved prominence as a historian of the conflict in the Iberian Peninsula. With Napoleon's Wars, he sheds his identity as a specialist on the Peninsular War and establishes his reputation as the new authority on Napoleonic military and diplomatic history. In Napoleon's Wars, Esdaile strives to achieve several objectives. Most importantly, he intends to provide "a history of the Napoleonic Wars that reflects their pan-European dimension and is not francocentric." Second, he attempts to examine the Napoleonic Wars within the context of a Europe "whose international history was dominated by events, not in the West, but rather in the East. The focus of attention at the time was above all on Poland and the Ottoman Empire, and the maneuvering that centered on these states. . . . These foci did not alter either for the events of 1789 or for those of 1799" (pp. xiv-xv). Esdaile admits that this approach is not original, citing Paul Schroeder's 1995 "magisterial" work, The Transformation of European Politics, as his model. In addition to these objectives, Esdaile utilizes the study of international relations to answer the question of whether the history of Napoleon was the history of Europe. Finally, he drives home the point that Napoleonic France was not acting in a vacuum and that much of Napoleon's success was due to the fact that the other European powers continued to pursue traditional eighteenth-century strategic and diplomatic goals, all of which predated the French Revolution and its succeeding regimes. Esdaile attempts to achieve his objectives by combining the primary and secondary elements of the book's title: Napoleon's Wars and An International History 1803-1815. As for the former, he forcefully asserts that the wars of 1803-1815 did not stem from an ideological crusade against France, but from Napoleon's own aggression, egomania, and lust for power. Esdaile places blame for the wars of the period squarely on Napoleon. Yet he also argues that structural and systemic factors such as the decline of Sweden, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the colonial and commercial conflict, cannot be ignored. Thus, Esdaile invites us to consider the Napoleonic Wars not "as a new type of conflict that foreshadowed the total wars of the twentieth-century," but "in terms of the dynastic wars of the eighteenth-century" (p. 6). At the root of these dynastic conflicts was a Napoleonic imperium "bent on nothing more than exploitation." Esdaile maintains that the other powers clearly recognized that they faced "complete subjugation to Paris" (p. 4). Even so, he concludes that by 1808 Napoleon could have achieved victory over Great Britain but failed and that to the very end the conflict with Russia that led to Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of 1812 could have been avoided, had the French emperor been willing to compromise with Tsar Alexander over at least one of the issues that divided the two states. [End Page 638] Space does not permit a recital of all of Esdaile's main points, but the author does indeed achieve his objectives in a grand style. That said, a few points do need to be made. While the book certainly is far from being francocentric, the reader may find the detailed accounts of British political history a bit taxing at times. Moreover, neo-Bonapartists and Francophiles...

Culture, Models, and Games: Incorporating Warfare's Human Dimension

Increasingly, modern conflict and military activity require soldiers to carry out their missions within foreign cultures in which the civilian populace rather than a battlefield becomes the focal point. So, from the commander to the soldier on the street, the warfighter must understand the society's values and the motivations of the groups within it. Gaming can help the military train soldiers for this new type of conflict.

NEITHER AUTHORIZED NOR PROHIBITED? SECESSION AND INTERNATIONAL LAW AFTER KOSOVO, SOUTH OSSETIA AND ABKHAZIA

The flexibility mechanisms introduced by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change promote the realization of climate change related investment projects which aim to contribute both to the fight against climate change as well as to foster sustainable development patterns in host countries. At first glance, the flexibility mechanisms seem to represent paradigmatic examples of green economy instruments which have numerous potential benefits. However, the implementation of such mechanisms may give rise to some negative environmental externalities which have the consequence of creating a new type of investment versus environment conflict, characterized by a new form of conflict with an internal environmental dimension. This “internal environmental conflict” seems to represent an evolution of the traditional investment versus environment conflict in which the presence of climate change related interests has the potential to paradoxically reinforce the investment side of the controversy and reduce the strength of the opposed environmental side. These new internal environmental conflicts cannot be properly managed by the traditional criteria and instruments that have so far been used to deal with traditional investment versus environment conflicts. Therefore, it seems that in order to efficiently manage and solve such new types of conflicts, a new interpretative paradigm must be adopted which consists of the concept of ecological sustainability. The use of such a new interpretative paradigm should ensure the ecological sustainability of climate change related investments by making sure that they can promote global climate change related goals while, at the same time, not endangering the local environment where the relevant projects are located.

Democracy and European Integration: A Legacy of Tensions, a Re-Conceptualisation and Recent True Conflicts?

This paper seeks to synthesise two concerns which are usually discussed separately. One concerns the much discussed democracy of the European polity. In this respect, it is considered that the democratic quality of the EU needs to be discussed in conjunction with Europe's potential to enable European citizens to see themselves as the sovereigns of the economic and order. The decoupling of Europe's economic constitution from the constitutions of Member States by the 1957 EEC Treaty has created a social deficit of the European construction which needs to be overcome if the EU is to gain full democratic legitimacy. The second concern is with the modes of governance that Europe has established in order to respond to irrefutable regulatory needs, including the quests for a European model. Here, Europe is, especially in areas of policy, resorting to soft law and non-legal governance techniques, which seem hardly reconcilable with Europe's commitment to the rule of law. Before paying the high price of de-legalisation, Europe should try out the alternative of re-conceptualising European law as new type of conflict of laws. This law would seek to attain what the Constitutional Treaty had called the motto of the Union, namely, a reconciliation of unity and diversity; it would not only help to rescue the rule of law but also serves to enhance Europe's chances of coping with the unresolved substantive tensions, including the deficits of the European polity.

'Deliberative Supranationalism' Revisited

Legal and political science cannot merge, but they should, at the very least, 'listen to each other'. This working paper is a further step in an ongoing interdisciplinary cooperation which seeks to make sense out of Louis Henkin's famous admonition. This co-operation had begun with a research project on the European comitology system in 1995 and the publication, inter alia, of two articles on deliberative supranationalism in 1997. The present article is an effort to go beyond the scope of our original analyses and to explore the potential of our guiding ideas at a more general level of integration research. In Part I of this paper, Jurgen Neyer summarises strands of normative and positive political theory on which deliberative approaches to international and European governance can build. These approaches not only support coherence, social acceptance and normative recognition, they also have in important potential for the design of empirical studies. They seem to be particularly promising for the understanding of the institutional design and the political process in the EU. In Part II, Christian Joerges first summarises the objections against deliberative suprantionalism and comitology in legal science. He then presents a conflict-of-law's approach to European law which builds upon the 1997 articles and seeks to develop their normative-legal perspectives further. European law is interpreted as a new type of conflict of law which constitutionalises a European unitas in pluralitate. Comitology is interpreted as a cognitive opening of the legal system which institutionalises a second order of conflict of laws.

The adaptation of the electoral system to the ethno-linguistic evolution of Belgian consociationalism

Complying with the idea that institutions could be used “to manage conflict democratically in divided societies” (Belmont et al., 2002, p. 3), the Belgian state has reformed its institutions in the past 40 years to accommodate ethno-linguistic tensions between Dutch-speakers and French-speakers. While less frequently mentioned, electoral rules have also been adapted to this ‘ethnicization’ of Belgian politics. Interestingly, changes made to the electoral system for managing tensions between the two linguistic communities followed the core principles of consociationalism. This observation supports the idea that, when an existing pattern of conflict resolution has existed in a country for decades, it tends to remain the guiding line to accommodate tensions even when new types of conflicts emerge.

Addressing Norm Conflicts in a Fragmented Legal System: The Doctrine of Lex Specialis

AbstractThe increased fragmentation of international law has been accompanied by a more problematic phenomenon: institutional fragmentation that has strengthened the role of specialised regimes (e. g., WTO, EU, human rights and environmental regimes) within the international legal system. "The emergence of seemingly independent subregimes has given rise to a number of legal concerns – among these is the existence of normative conflicts between regimes." In a recent report by the Chairman of the ILC Study Group on Fragmentation of International Law, Martti Koskenniemi, dealt with the role of the lex specialis maxim as a means of addressing the relation between selfcontained regimes and general international law. This article argues that an application of lex specialis, although widely accepted, is impeded by its conceptual vagueness. Lex specialis may be well-suited to resolve certain types of normative conflicts, such as conflicts within sub-regimes, which may be viewed as a more traditional manifestation of normative conflicts. The fragmentation of international law, however, has also created new types of conflicts, namely those between different, seemingly independent normative orders. The article suggests that the lex specialis maxim is a less-suitable approach to normative conflicts between such unrelated normative orders. In a fragmented legal system such as that of international law, these types of conflicts may, accordingly, prove a particular challenge.

Genetic engineering and biological weapons. New technologies, desires and threats from biological research.

Rapid developments in biotechnology, genetics and genomics are undoubtedly creating a variety of environmental, ethical, political and social challenges for advanced societies. But they also have severe implications for international peace and security because they open up tremendous avenues for the creation of new biological weapons. The genetically engineered ‘superbug’—highly lethal and resistant to environmental influence or any medical treatment—is only a small part of this story. Much more alarming, from an arms‐control perspective, are the possibilities of developing completely novel weapons on the basis of knowledge provided by biomedical research—developments that are already taking place. Such weapons, designed for new types of conflicts and warfare scenarios, secret operations or sabotage activities, are not mere science fiction, but are increasingly becoming a reality that we have to face. Here, we provide a systematic overview of the possible impact of biotechnology on the development of biological weapons. The history of biological warfare is nearly as old as the history of warfare itself. In ancient times, warring parties poisoned wells or used arrowheads with natural toxins. Mongol invaders catapulted plague victims into besieged cities, probably causing the first great plague epidemic in Europe, and British settlers distributed smallpox‐infected blankets to native Americans. Indeed, the insights into the nature of infectious diseases gained by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the nineteenth century did not actually represent a great breakthrough in the use of infectious organisms as biological weapons. Similarly, the development of a bioweapon does not necessarily require genetic engineering—smallpox, plague and anthrax are deadly enough in their natural states. But the revolution in biotechnology, namely the new tools for analysing and specifically changing an organism's genetic material, has led to an increased risk of biowarfare due to several factors. First, the expansion of modern biotechnology in medical and pharmaceutical research and …

Globalized conflicts of discourse: the type of conflict of proxies*

The article describes a new form of transnational environmental conflict that developed in the wake of globalisation. Activist in this new type of conflict still act as proxies of groups under pressure but in contrast to transnational environmental conflicts hitherto the target of their protests is rather their own society at home than the location of the pressured group. Despite these conditions it is claimed that this type of metaphorical conflict is going to become more frequent as alliances are built along the oppostion to a dominant discourse. According to the model, conflicts of values are easier to transfer on stages abroad or across the Atlantic than conflicts of interests and motivation for activists is higher as the return is affecting their home society. Dynamic and features of this type of conflict are explained with help of discourse theory.

Resource conflict in the lower Mekong

The end of the Cold War did not bring an end to conflict, much less a peace dividend. Ten years after the wall fell, at the turn of a new millennium, this is increasingly apparent even with regard to traditional security issues. In addition, the last decade's growing efforts to convert what the former Thai Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan (now deceased) called “the battle field into a market place” have created new types of conflict that cannot easily be explained in traditional security terms. These new types of conflict are intrinsic to the dominant economic patterns and processes of globalization emerging in the wake of the Cold War. The anatomy of these new conflicts differs in important respects from Cold War security concerns: they affect more directly people‐centered security than state‐centered national security; they are often more politically and socially complex than conventional conflicts; and they are likely to stay with us, and even grow and escalate well into the twenty‐first century.

Subpolitics

A conventional view of politics is oriented toward the rule-directed struggle between parties for privileges and levers of power. The ecological issue underlines the need for a more differentiated analysis of politics. In the world risk society, politics is made in various realms of subpolitics, whether it is in the finn, the laboratory, at the gas station, or in the supermarket. New types of conflict emerge and new coalitions become thinkable. Subpolitics thus questions the status of existing systems, calls for a rethinking of the various schemes of classification according to which people are accustomed to perceive their organizational environment, and asks for the invention of new institutional ways to deal with environmental risk.

HUMAN RIGHTS, DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY

ABSTRACT This article is an encouragement to examine the relationship between human rights, economic, and democratic development from a theoretical and policy perspective. The authors argue that sustainable, long-term democracies are characterized by an absence of ideological extremism in which political and economic discourse is dominated by the “middle road”. They posit that almost all societies have conflict resolution models but that they have been upset through processes extraneous to those societies. The challenge of the international community is not to try to impose upon those societies new types of conflict of resolution, but to discover what has worked in the past and to remove the obstacles to their effective performance in the future.

Industrial Democracy and Managers An Explanatory and Critical Perspective

Despite the substantial corpus of knowledge on the question of industrial democracy, our understanding of the effects of the main intemational experi ments upon managerial personnel within the enterprise remains deficient. The essential argument of this paper, moreover, is that contrary to popular im pression managerial influence in the workplace would not appear to have been circumscribed by these major developments of the twentieth century. The analysis itself commences with an outline of a general model of industrial democracy in which structural and environmental conditions, subjective factors and the distribution of power are all countenanced. These, then, form the analytical boxes from which a series of more specific forces which have affected actual managerial attitudes and behaviour in key experiments may be readily identified. Thus the principal factors include, at a structural level, the growth of the state, industrial concentration, the social composition of managerial per sonnel, technology, pace of change, economic movements and the institutional structure of trade unions. Secondly, the subjective forces (which encompass the notion of choice) embrace egalitarian-democratic values and the strategies of particular labour movements, the goals of productivity and efficiency, human growth and development theories and the concern to integrate disparate social and occupational groups. Finally, the power factors include not only changing balances amongst the main industrial groups but also new types of conflict in the enterprise itself. The respective impact of these forces are then analysed in terms of four main classes of industrial democracy: (1) managerially-initiated ventures, (2) co-determination, (3) workers' councils and (4) producer co- operatives. Moreover, notwithstanding the varying impress of these factors, we were still able to demonstrate how the role of managerial personnel would appear to be secure in every major instance of the phenomenon under review.