Power Restructuring Research Articles

Could Justice40 reproduce injustices in the critical mineral sector?

The United States is reprioritizing domestic extraction and processing of critical minerals, with billions of dollars of investments. Because of their uses in low-carbon technologies, the mining and processing of these resources falls under the scope of the Justice40 Initiative, the Biden administration’s flagship environmental justice policy. Justice40 prioritizes green investments to benefit communities deemed disadvantaged, including all recognized Tribes. This can lead to the siting of “green” mineral projects in disadvantaged communities (DACs), which is problematic if such projects are unwelcome or reproduce environmental injustices. These unintended consequences are our focus. We analyze how DACs are defined and operationalized, before examining whether and under what conditions critical mineral projects could be considered beneficial for local communities. We suggest three ways to better align Justice40’s spirit with its (currently problematic) application to critical minerals and other controversial projects – (1) centering free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) and the transparency and power restructuring needed to achieve it; (2) incentivizing community ownership to strengthen economic benefits and democratize decision making; and (3) bringing currently-exempted critical mineral activities within the purview of Justice40, particularly for the Department of Defense.

Law, Colonial-Capitalist Floods, and the Production of Injustices in Eastern India: Insights for Climate Adaptation

AbstractFloods are not merely ‘natural’ disasters; rather, they emerge as socio-natural phenomena shaped by political, social, and economic processes. Law plays a pivotal role in producing and sustaining these processes and contributes to the creation of unjust environments. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, this article analyzes the role of law and its interactions with colonialism and capitalism in the Damodar river valley in Eastern India. The Damodar river valley is an intensely engineered and hazardous region, a site of multiple interventions and developmental and ecological experiments for over a century. Colonial and post-colonial legacies have left a lasting imprint on legal, policy, and institutional frameworks, establishing a path-dependent trajectory for addressing future climate change adaptation challenges. While focusing on a specific case study, the article's approach and findings have broader significance, especially in the context of climate adaptation. The central argument underscores the need to understand the political and legal dimensions of flooding, and reinforces the need for a shift beyond incremental adjustments that do not tackle the underlying structures that produce the injustices associated with floods. It highlights the importance of ‘transformative adaptation’ approaches that address the root causes of climate-related disasters, such as restructuring power relations between actors, reconfiguring governance structures, and scrutinizing ideologies that mediate how water is used and distributed.

Korean Sports Violence from a Philosophical Perspective: Exploration and Critique

This study utilizes critical theory to understand the phenomenon of sports violence in South Korea, specifically examining the tragic case of Choi Sook-hyun. The incident is not viewed as an isolated act, but rather a reflection of power dynamics, societal expectations, and cultural norms. The analysis reveals that such violence results from the abuse of power within sports organizations and a cultural environment that places competition and obedience above athletes’ well-being. It proposes that interventions should focus on restructuring power relations in sports and driving sociocultural shifts through public education and legislations. This comprehensive approach can aid in the prevention of sports violence and promote a culture of respect and fairness. Further research is suggested to examine sports violence in various social and cultural contexts and to evaluate the effectiveness of different intervention strategies.

Random Furrowing for a Stochastic Unit Commitment Solution

The Unit Commitment Problem involves the inherent difficulty of obtaining optimal combinatorial power generation schedules over a future short term period. The formulation of the generalized Unit Commitment Schedule formulation involves the specific combination of generation units at several de-rated capacities during each hour of the planning horizon, the load demand profile, load indeterminateness and several other operating constraints. This largely deterministic schedule continues to find favor with several plant operators, keeping in mind the close operating time-periods involved. However, the deterministic nature of the load profile is sought to be phased out by a stochastic pattern that is realistic and mirrors real-life situations, owing to modern trends in Demand side management. This shift is in tune with the ongoing power restructuring activities of electricity power reforms. The stochastic profile is obtained by a suitably tuned 2-parameter Weibull distribution that uses appropriate shape and scale parameters. The resulting band of generated load profiles are used to evaluate net power and penal costs associated with a set of pervasive randomized probability indices. The exact UCS comprises of a specific unit absolute state corresponding to a certain time period within the planning horizon. Subsequently, regression analysis is applied to establish the correlation between the absolute states and the cumulative randomized load demand against the intervals within the planning horizon. This method is analogous to random furrowing of probabilistic demand profile.

An Illusion of Empowerment? A Twenty-Year Review of United Nations Reports on Localization in Iraq

ABSTRACT Localization has emerged as a dominant reform paradigm guiding humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts on a global scale. It signals a commitment to shift power to local actors by recognizing, valuing, and strengthening their role in humanitarian or peacebuilding interventions. Despite this commitment, a noticeable reorientation of power to local actors has not occurred. This article contributes to the critical scholarship on localization by analysing 22 United Nations reports to examine their understanding of local actors and their envisaged contributions to missions in Iraq since 2003. The study engages with the UN's perspectives on localization across its key mission areas: development, stabilization, and humanitarianism. The findings show a lack of consistency in the Unites Nations’ perception of local actors and their contributions, with different sub-sectors presenting disparate views. The reports predominantly emphasize the instrumental use of local actors to achieve pre-defined mission objectives. Consequently, this article shows that the case of Iraq exposes a disconnect between the progressive and normative scholarly framing of localization as a political project aimed at restructuring power dynamics, and its on-ground implementation, which often simplifies localization as mere involvement of local actors.

Allocation and Evolution of Government Attention in China’s Electric Power Industry: An Analysis Based on Policy Text

This study aimed to identify a viable solution for the development of China’s electric power industry in line with “dual carbon” objectives. Accordingly, we collected and analyzed 2230 policy documents spanning 25 years to track the Chinese government’s focus on the electric power sector over time using latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling. Our results reveal that the government’s area of emphasis differs across different stages of development. By analyzing the evolution of policy implementation, we identified the actions taken by government agencies at the policy level to promote the electric power industry. We then distilled the key themes of government attention and challenges facing the green transition of electricity in the context of “dual carbon”. Based on this analysis, we propose practical recommendations for restructuring power energy, enhancing power security, and improving power market efficiency. These findings hold important implications for China to achieve an environmentally sustainable electric power transformation.

미·중·러 삼극체제와 인도-태평양 지역의 에너지 안보

This study comparatively analyzes the capabilities and national interests of the US, China, and Russia in the field of natural gas and nuclear power using Randall Schweller’s tripolarity as the analytical framework. Through this comparative analysis, this study aims to infer how the structure of the US-China-Russia tripolarity will affect energy security in the Indo-Pacific region. Based on the results of a comparative analysis of the capabilities and national interests of the three superpowers in the natural gas and nuclear power fields, this paper argues that the structure of the US-China-Russia tripolarity can further accelerate power restructuring in the Indo-Pacific region through energy. It is predicted that in both the natural gas and nuclear power fields, where none of the three superpowers has an overwhelming advantage, there is room for energy security issues to be used as a means to accelerate power restructuring, as the wills to revise the status quo are colliding. This is also a warning that the energy issues may eventually escalate into a factor that could shake peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.

A platform for underclass youth: Hanmai rap videos, social class, and surveillance on Chinese social media

With increasing influence on everyday social interactions and cultural practices, social media platforms do not just represent but also profoundly reproduce various forms of social inequalities. This essay investigates what role social media have played in the emergence of an underclass habitus among Chinese youth. By focusing on the rise and fall of a participatory hanmai culture on Kuaishou, an underclass-centric social media platform in China, the study identifies social media platforms as key actors in restructuring power relations. Chinese social media platforms, particularly Kuaishou, produce contemporary relationships of power by simultaneously incorporating algorithm design, profit-seeking strategies, underclass users’ expressions, and state surveillance. The overall effect is to mediate, regulate and buttress social inequalities in the process of sustaining Chinese class stratification. This analysis necessarily problematizes and debunks the myth of technological neutrality claimed by social media platforms. The result is that Chinese underclass youth (individual and unexpected acts of human agency aside) are routinely subjected to and reproduced through the logic of both capitalist accumulation and state authoritarianism via their participation on these social media platforms.

Non-State Actors 'Under Color of Law:' Closing a Gap in Protection Under the Convention Against Torture

The prohibition against torture is one of the most universally accepted principles of international law. Yet, the world is experiencing a global restructuring that poses a serious threat to international efforts to prevent and protect against torture. The rise of powerful transnational non-State actors such as gangs, drug cartels, militias, and terrorist organizations is challenging States’ authority to control and govern their territory. Many of these non-State actors commit torture with alarming impunity. This global power restructuring is testing the ability of U.S. laws to protect those fleeing torture, especially in light of the fact that State actors (as opposed to private or non-State actors) are the primary subject of most of our international and domestic torture jurisprudence. In the U.S., those seeking protection against deportation under the Convention Against Torture (the “CAT”) must establish a likelihood of torture at the instigation of or by consent or acquiescence of a public official acting in an official capacity or other person acting in an official capacity. For example, if an individual faces torture by a police officer or other government official for non-lawful purposes, this person must not be returned to that particular country. CAT protection is still warranted even if a private actor (such as a gang member) will likely torture the individual as long as the torture is done with the actual knowledge, consent or acquiescence of a state actor, such as a police officer. However, what is meant by “other person acting in an official capacity” such that torturous acts by non-State actors fall under Torture Convention protection remains unclear under U.S. CAT jurisprudence. In other words, to what extent might actions by non-State actors become “State-like” such that the CAT should apply. What if private actors are de facto controlling certain areas of a country untouchable by State actors? Or, what if non-State actors’ authority and presence are so significant and intertwined with State authority such that torture is occurring with impunity? Indeed, for the latter scenario, the applicant may establish CAT eligibility by showing a State actor’s acquiescence or consent. However, such cases are difficult to prove if the State excuses its inaction on its inability to protect victims from harm perpetrated by private actors. This is particularly true under current U.S. jurisprudence on government acquiescence, in which some federal courts have found that a mere inability to protect victims is not enough to meet acquiescence to the torture. This article identifies a major chasm in U.S. CAT jurisprudence that allows individuals to be deported back to countries where they face likely torture. This article argues that resolving failures in U.S. CAT acquiescence jurisprudence addresses part of the problem as it relates to torture by private actors. However, this is only half of the bridge across the chasm. The other half requires a look at when non-State actors are acting State-like such that they should fall within the separate CAT provision of “other person acting in an official capacity.” While many aspects of the CAT has been litigated, clarified, and developed through case law since the U.S. ratified the CAT, the question of whether and when a non-State actor can be deemed an “other person acting in an official capacity” under the CAT within the United States jurisprudence lacks scholarship or case law. We make the novel argument that courts and agencies should apply factors employed in civil rights claims (also known as 1983 claims) to assess whether a non-State actor can act in an official capacity or under color of law. Doing so will help fill a critical gap in U.S. CAT protections, and thereby prevent the refoulement of individuals facing likely torture.

Institutional Mechanisms of the Turkish Foreign Policy: The Case of Russia - Turkey High-Level Cooperation Council

The article aims to examine and explore with pros and cons of High-Level (“Strategic”) Cooperation Councils (HLSCC) mechanisms in Turkish foreign policy and evaluate its effectiveness in foreign trade, foreign policy cooperation, and crisis management capacity of Turkey concerning the relations with Russia. Turkey has already started to establish High-Level Cooperation Councils to build institutional infrastructure for strategic partnerships in foreign policy and strengthen institutional power in the bilateral cooperation after 2006. The study of Turkish foreign policy is an academically attractive topic mostly in terms of its geopolitical dimensions. The institutional mechanisms that enable the country to interact with other states in a dynamic regional and international environment remain less researched heretofore. The article attempts to highlight the evolution of Turkish foreign policy in terms of institutional changes in the bilateral and multilateral mechanisms. The article applies a case study method with descriptive analysis examining Councils’ functions such as foreign policy coordination and determination of collective commitments and official bilateral targets in the case of Russia - Turkey High-Level Cooperation Council. The article found out that these institutional mechanisms partly justified themselves as a coordination mechanism, but they were relatively weak for achieving the pledged commitments. The Councils were flexible and innovative cooperation mechanisms of the foreign policy to develop bilateral and multilateral ties in the age of the global power restructuring and the volatile conjuncture in world politics.

The Rights of Ethno-Cultural or Political Minorities and Development in Nigeria

In Nigeria, the concept of minority has been misconceived and misapplied. The colonialist classificatory scheme of identifying cultural or ethnic minorities and majorities has been excessively adhered to and politicized. This has produced politics of exclusion and the concomitant denial of rights, especially to groups considered political minorities. This can be couched as the ‘minoritazation’ of cultural, ethnic or even locational groups. In Nigeria, such politics of marginalization translates to exclusion from participation of human resources that cannot be ignored in the development agenda of the country. To reposition these minorities, a constitutional review aimed at restructuring power relations in the country needs to be undertaken. Any honest desire for development of Nigeria must cultivate the courage to undertake this politico-social engineering such as other countries like India have successfully done. This paper establishes a strong connection between the rights of ethno-cultural and political minorities and development in Nigeria through an empirical cataloguing of contribution of minorities to the political process in Nigeria. Keywords: Ethnic minorities, National development, Political minorities, Political participation, Political exclusion DOI: 10.7176/DCS/10-6-02 Publication date: June 30 th 2020

Reprofiling today for a sustainable tomorrow: a unilateral Italian debt restructuring

Italy should unilaterally extend maturities for its domestic government securities to facilitate an orderly and streamlined restructuring that provides Italy with necessary debt relief. Italy’s domestic government securities are issued as decrees under a 2003 Consolidated Act (the “Act”). Article 3 of the Act explicitly grants Italy the power to unilaterally extend maturities for all domestic government securities. To exercise this restructuring power, the Ministry of Economy and Finance (the “Ministry”) must issue a framework decree that authorizes the Treasury to unilaterally reprofile Italy’s debt. In 2011, Edelen et al. first proposed that Italy had the authority under its existing laws to unilaterally reprofile its sovereign debt. The following proposal expands upon and updates the Edelen et al. proposal. It demonstrates that the inclusion of the Collective Action Clauses (“CACs”) in some of its bonds does not foreclose the use of Italy’s Article 3 power. The proposal also describes the mechanics by which Italy would exercise its right to extend maturities. Unilaterally extending maturities does not require any retroactive utilization of the local law advantage. Nor does it expose Italy to significant legal risks in its domestic courts or under European treaties and conventions.

Critical science agency and power hierarchies: Restructuring power within groups to address injustice beyond them

AbstractPromoting critical science agency (CSA) may be one way to promote educational justice. CSA is using science with other powerful forms of knowledge to address issues of injustice. However, the process of enacting CSA is always embedded within a sociopolitical context, which positions some students with more power than others. Drawing upon a social practice theory analytical lens with a focus on power and using critical participatory ethnography methods, this study investigated the ways middle school students restructured power hierarchies as they worked to complete the design challenge of making their classroom community more sustainable, and how power hierarchy restructuring impacted students' opportunities to enact CSA. Findings show as the students enacted collective CSA, they were responding to unmet students' needs grounded in systems of power operating within their classroom. Throughout the engineering design process, students' understandings of their defined issue of injustice was both refined and critical to their technical and social design considerations. Finally, as the groups enacted CSA, power hierarchy disruptions, though incomplete, through the recognition of students' expertize and distributing roles, supported their efforts to address their class‐wide concerns. These findings highlight how restructuring power hierarchies supported youth enacting collective CSA, which then further supported them in reshaping their classroom community to be more justice‐oriented.

Reimagining Communities as Sustainable Means to a More Environmentally and Socially Just World

Reimagining Communities as Sustainable Means to a More Environmentally and Socially Just World Carlrey Arroyo (bio) My addition to the round table comes from my involvement in activism both inside and outside the classroom on social and environmental issues. I have learned to maneuver spaces such as the hard sciences and humanities but also those of the academic ivory tower and the larger communities that I am a part of. I also want to acknowledge my undergrad experience as a queer person of color in an "ecogroovy" institution that is mainly white and middle-class. My analysis stems from my environmental studies lens and also from similar experiences I have shared with many other students of color and activists whom I have organized with and worked alongside on the Humboldt State University campus and in the greater Humboldt community and California statewide student coalitions. My first exposure to the study of climate change was in sixth grade. I felt hopeless and instantaneously blamed humanity for the destruction of the planet. At the end of the year, my teacher gifted me a book called Guide to Fight Global Warming, which included solutions to climate change such as taking shorter showers, changing light bulbs, and going vegetarian. I held on to that book closely, and soon after, I engaged in animal-rights activism. I held on to the ideology that everything that was both nonhuman and "natural" was to be protected from humans. This separation of people and nature has become the mainstream environmental [End Page 21] movement's rhetoric, promoting solutions that individualize action rather than pushing toward systemic structural shifts that have larger impacts. I now understand and believe that climate change activism should be just as human centered and intersectional as nature centered, as there is a cosmic relationship between humans and the rest of nature. A justice-oriented pedagogy within the environmental fields looks at who and what communities are being the most impacted by the same systems that are causing environmental collapse. We can begin by expanding the definition of the environment to force the dominant "environmental" discourses to look at human conditions and engage with political systems at play. As a historically underrepresented student, I can speak to the frustrations of sitting in an environmental course where the professor and surrounding students have more empathy for a tree than they do for Black and brown children being poisoned, imprisoned, and murdered on the street by the same state that upholds environmental degradation. It is no longer enough for environmentalists just to know the science or how to analyze literature. There needs to be an understanding of existing policy, but in my opinion, there is also a need to learn community engagement as a means to fighting climate change. Within academia, this means having more interdisciplinary curricula, with an intersectional analysis not only in the humanities but in the sciences. This includes looking critically at who has historically been championed as environmentalist and at what we currently value as environmental commentary. The erasure of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) within the environmental movement is a problem. Ways to implement these narratives within curricula can include poetry and music such as Indigenous hip hop. It also means restructuring power dynamics within the classroom as more students with diverse backgrounds enter higher institutions and challenge traditional white, middle-class, male environmentalism. BIPOC continue to get pushed out of environmental sciences by tenured white faculty unwilling to diversify their teachings. The voices of BIPOC have always been there; it is now time to listen. Over the course of my studies, the facade that individual consumer choices were going to reverse climate change shattered in front of me. I became empowered to engage in community-based work, understanding [End Page 22] that we need to dismantle the structures causing climate change, for the next generation. Learning about what is causing an injustice that has a direct impact on you and your community feels as though there is little time and need to theorize on the issue itself. I understand that the study of theory is essential in action, but professors teaching these issues need to understand students' need to...

Strategic Demand Response to Dynamic Pricing: A Lab Experiment for the Electricity Market

Despite the efforts of restructuring power markets over the last decades, the lack of demand response in the retail electricity markets remains a significant concern. Possible demand response would help to reduce prices and volatility by better matching supply and demand through improved price signals. In this paper we develop a laboratory tool to experimentally investigate the demand response in the electricity market. The baseline treatment constitutes a two-period ‘wait-or-buy’ game with an exogenous first period, an automated supplier, and twenty subject buyers. While the seller offers a fixed number of a product in the market, consumers decide on purchasing the product immediately or waiting until the next period, taking (i) price uncertainty and (ii) inventory risk into account. This treatment captures demand response in the retail market with scarce products. We design an additional treatment by removing the inventory constraint and introducing a devaluation rule, where consumers only bear the price risk – thus mimicking the demand response in the electricity market. We find that in both retail and electricity market treatments consumers play on average the equilibrium predictions and buy strategically. However, there are systematic deviations from rationality in both settings, i.e., consumers buy too soon or wait too long.

Shifting Political Discourse


 
 
 In March 2018, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica (CA), a former United Kingdom-based data company used data from several million Facebook users to specifically target individuals with political ads. CA’s data mining operation can be argued to have engaged in restructuring power through the online discourse between people and groups, granting certain actors and their movements increased power. This reflects a shift to the 5th generation of warfare. 5G warfare, as it’s colloquially known, is the assumption that groups vie for power against other groups, and not necessarily the state. Furthermore, 5G warfare is enabled by shifts of political and social loyalties to causes rather than nations (Kelshall, 2018). Indeed, warfare has become virtual and seeks to influence people, and not states. Through CA’s use of psychographic research and its ability to reshape the opinions of the public, power has shifted from the physical to the digital, and from the state to the people. Therefore, the question this essay presents is “How did Cambridge Analytica make power available to those who did not otherwise have it?”
 
 

Science, Public Health and Nation Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia by Vivek Neelakantan

168 BOOK REVIEWS This book has direct appeal for Antipodean readers too. In tracing the political imaginings of Britain’s imperial medical market, the book offers insight into the changing influence of British medicine and its regulatory authority over former colonies and dominions. This was particularly apparent in the era of decolonisation as Haynes recognises and examines. However, the appeal goes beyond historical interest. According to a recent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) report, Australia and New Zealand are among the top five contemporary destinations for overseas-trained doctors. Therefore, Hayne’s study has contemporary relevance, provoking reflections on the historical processes through which Australia and New Zealand have constructed who is ‘fit to practise’. FALLON MODY UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE Vivek Neelakantan, Science, Public Health and Nation Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). ISBN 978-1-4438-8654-3 (HB). 237pp. The post–World War II era was an exciting, yet trying, time for people across the sprawling archipelago east of the Indian Ocean that would become Indonesia. The Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies colony in 1942 ended with its ignominious surrender after three years. Two days later, on 17 August 1945, at the urging of young revolutionaries, Soekarno and Mohammad Hatta seized the moment to declare Indonesia’s independence and Soekarno assumed the presidential office. The political, administrative, and military events highlighting Soekarno’s presidency have been well observed. In contrast, the process of redefining public health and science in the framework of an Indonesian nation was more incremental and has been less scrutinised. Vivek Neelakantan’s dissertation-turned-book, Science, Public Health and Nation Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia, marvelously unveils these processes, setting out how defining the new nation’s public health concerns was an essential part of Indonesia’s consolidation as a distinct, independent polity. Health & History ● 20/1 ● 2018 169 Neelakantan begins by presenting the medical figureheads responsible for the period’s push and pull of paradigms in social medicine issues. His description of their religious and moral stances, experiences in education and training, and the official positions they eventually took illuminates the various (and sometimes contending) principles that inform nationalist approaches to public health in Indonesia. Their influence is still observable and reproduced today. Building on this beginning, Neelakantan subsequently explores how the interaction between nationalist approaches to public health and the influence of global power restructuring (due to the wave of decolonisation and ideological competition between postwar superpowers) manifested in the Indonesian health system. The author elegantly centres this analysis on Johannes Leimena, a multi-period minister of Health and ‘architect of the “Bandung Plan”’(p. 68), an idealistic pilot project in Java’s Bandung Regency for a health governance influenced by principles of rural health. This plan soon unravelled, but aspects of the design withstood the test of time and are still recognisable in the organisational structure of Puskesmas (Pusat Kesehatan Masyarakat, the sub-district community health centre). Another chapter explains the pressures from competing demands for health care, not only geographically but also between holistic (horizontal) and disease-specific (vertical) approaches to public health. The latter, with a technocratic flair, was in part a result of the soft power strategy that the United States—through the United Nations and its agencies—employed in developing countries worldwide to gain moral leadership during the Cold War. Neelakantan uses four cases of disease-specific programs (namely those concerned with malaria, tuberculosis, yaws, and leprosy) to unearth the complex array of successes and failures in the public health arena. To a large extent the public health outcomes were also influenced by the Indonesian regime’s desire to put its own nationalistic twist on these ‘foreign’ programs. Neelakantan also provides readers with an in-depth description of the transformation of Soekano-era medical education in Indonesia. The enterprise had one goal: to produce more Indonesian doctors. Whereas the Dutch medical school lecturers grew increasingly irrelevant, the US medical academics became influential, challenging the few surviving lecturers and the struggling under-prepared students. The heart of this chapter lies in its telling of the micro-tensions within and between the established 170 BOOK REVIEWS and newly...

Political networks and the 2014 Afghan presidential election: power restructuring, ethnicity and state stability

This article examines power dynamics in political groupings during the 2014 Afghanistan presidential election and assesses the impact on political stability and order. The focus is the power dynamics of local political-economic and identity networks that have come to underpin and constitute the state in post-2001 international state-building. The article first seeks to understand how the complex relationships between the two leading presidential candidates, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, and key powerbrokers were negotiated and subsequently influenced electoral outcomes. Second, focusing on negotiations over the appointment of the Cabinet ministers, advisers and staff, and governors, the study maps the restructuring of political networks within the Afghan state. The analysis reveals the impact of the election on the redistribution of power and resources, and the consequences for political order and state stability in the post-2014 period.

21st-Century Northeast Asian Order and America's Choice

The emerging new order in Northeast Asia in the 21st century is attributable to a few factors. First, the relative decline of the United States as the hegemonic power contributes to it. Second, the rise of China is also responsible. Buttressed by remarkable economic growth over the past 20 plus years, China is eager to regain its traditional influence and status as the regional hegemon. Third, the relative decline of Japan leads to Northeast Asian power restructuring. Fourth, North Korea is another major factor leading to instability in Northeast Asia. Finally, the rise of South Korea is also responsible for Northeast Asian power restructuring. In the intermediate and long-run, the US policy toward Northeast Asia will be centered on China, and its China policy will be characterized by engagement and/or hard balancing. To pursue the goal, the United States should further develop close ties with its allies, such as South Korea and Japan, and pursue improved relations with Vietnam and the Philippines. At the same time, the United States should persuade China that cooperating with its neighboring countries would be in its intermediate and long-term interests. In other words, the United States should firmly and persistently pursue the policy of the “Asianization of China.”

Eco-efficiency considering the issue of heterogeneity among power plants

One of the main objectives in restructuring power industry is enhancing the efficiency of power facilities. However, power generation industry, which plays a key role in the power industry, has a noticeable share in emission amongst all other emission-generating sectors. In this study, we have developed some new Data Envelopment Analysis models to find efficient power plants based on less fuel consumption, combusting less polluting fuel types, and incorporating emission factors in order to measure the ecological efficiency trend. We then applied these models to measuring eco-efficiency during an eight-year period of power industry restructuring in Iran. Results reveal that there has been a significant improvement in eco-efficiency, cost efficiency and allocative efficiency of the power plants during the restructuring period. It is also shown that despite the hydro power plants look eco-efficient; the combined cycle ones have been more allocative efficient than the other power generation technologies used in Iran.