Top Advisers Research Articles

The hunger strike as a biopolitical technology: re-reading the 1981 Irish republican prison protest

ABSTRACT This article uses the case of the 1981 Irish republican prison protest to show that indefinite hunger strikes can force Euromodern states to the negotiating table by undercutting their commitment to good government. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of biopower and political reason, I argue that these acts of willed self-starvation exert pressure on state officials by exploiting a tension between the modern state’s juridical claim to sovereignty and its biopolitical investment in fostering life. In the case of the famed IRA hunger strike on the H-Blocks, the archive shows that the Thatcher government experienced more pressure to reach a negotiated settlement than the prime minister or her top advisers publicly acknowledged. Such pressure, however, stemmed not from a moral or humanitarian investment in saving the individual hunger strikers’ lives, but instead from officials’ biopolitical concern that the protest was undermining British attempts to restore ‘life as usual’ in the conflicted region. Ultimately, Thatcher was willing to let ten of the Irish republican strikers die rather than grant them any concessions that might indicate they were political prisoners. The article closes by showing how an indefinite hunger strike’s efficacy is often foreclosed in securitized and postcolonial contexts like that of Northern Ireland, where the protesters can be framed as a ‘biopolitical remainder’ that is allowed to die so that the broader society might thrive.

Tone From the Top: The Role of the General Counsel in the Prevention of Harassment and Abuse in International Sports.

To prevent harassment and abuse in sports, the consensus is that an essential factor is “tone from the top” of the organization. It is key as a catalyst and sustainer of change, whether in the corporate or sports world. An organization's general counsel is one of the go-to top advisors for executive leadership regarding laws and regulations. Additionally, they serve as advisors for issues in other areas, such as public policy, ethical and legal risks, and human rights. With their leadership, general counsels can play a vital role in the prevention of harassment and abuse in an organization. The guidance and leadership of the general counsel should facilitate reviewing and strengthening of the organization's policies and procedures and other strategies helping to prevent and address issues of harassment and abuse. Legal issues become more complex the more global the organization, so more complex strategies are needed to tackle these issues successfully.

David Lloyd George and the American Naval Challenge: Great Britain and the Washington Conference

ABSTRACT The First World War spurred the United States to acquire – in the words of Woodrow Wilson – ‘incomparably the greatest navy in the world’, and amongst the many problems confronting Britain after 1919 was how to avoid an Anglo-American naval arms race. David Lloyd George was determined not to sleepwalk into another struggle for naval mastery. He rejected the expert opinion of his top naval advisers that building capital ships would enhance Britain’s security. Instead, he showed restraint in responding to the American naval build-up, while doggedly pursuing arms control talks with Washington. He thus prevented an escalation of the naval arms competition that emerged after the war, and so created the favourable conditions for a negotiated settlement of the naval rivalry with the United States and provided for Britain’s security at sea.

NATO Enlargement and the Problem of Value Complexity

Some of the recent literature on negotiations at the end of the Cold War regarding German reunification and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has deflected attention from an important policy problem that arose during subsequent deliberations about whether to enlarge the membership of NATO. Newly released U.S. and Russian archival materials highlight this problem very clearly, namely, how leaders manage tradeoffs and uncertainty. Pursuing one set of interests can harm the achievement of other interests. At times, policies take a while to form, adding to uncertainty in relations between countries. This article highlights the ways U.S. President Bill Clinton and his top advisers convinced themselves that they could both enlarge NATO and keep Russia on a Western-oriented track, despite Russian President Boris Yeltsin's repeated warnings to the contrary.

Public Infrastructure Project Tendering Through Public Private Partnerships (PPP) – A Literature Review

Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in Malaysia have been inundated by various controversies and criticisms from the very beginning. Many of the constraints that occur in PPP projects is due to the failure in tendering stage. Bidding or tender for a PPP project is usually much more complex than a traditional public-sector project involving the appointment of top advisers and designers at a great fee in the preparation of detailed design, comprehensive planning, extensive bid documentation, and lengthy clarifications. These problems as being the reason behind several high-profile withdrawals during the early PPP tenders, resulting in some preferred bidders being selected by defaults as other competitors withdrew. Base on the above premise, this study attempts to propose PPP tendering process improvement in Malaysian construction industry. This paper aims at providing an overview about literature on tendering process in PPP/PFI. The objectives of the research are to identify and understand the PPP implementation practices in Malaysia; to determine issues and challenges in PPP tendering stage; and to propose PPP tendering improvement. The approach is based on the analysis of the pertinent publications on the theme. Three main interest areas can be found in the literature which is; tendering procedure, issues and challenges, and strategies that could be enhance PPP tendering process in the Malaysian construction industry.

Abu al-Huda al-Sayadi 1849-1909 in historical thought Modern Arabic

This person was one of the affective personalities in his period. His effectiveness was on the Ottoman & Arabic Countries, also Kurds they had their own opinion, so that we choose it for our research. He was one of the top advisors for Sultan Abdul Hameed Second. But after the collapse in year 1908 was treated badly. He had so many writings and most of parts goes back to that, he was considered himself as one of grandsons of Prophet Muhammed (P). There are different opinions and discussions about the personality of the person in his lifetime and after his death, the value of support to value-neutral and criticism. In general the research divided in two parts: First part talks about this person’s Biography through historical views. Second part talks about the historical views on personality for Abu-Huda Al-Sayadi, in this part we talk about his lived part of his life in the Levant. Then a trip to Istanbul and the change that happened on his personality, and has been mentioned period Altsov and its impact on his life in the time of the Ottoman Empire and its effective role in the life of Abu Mahdi Sayadi, as especially Altsov famous Rifai, as well as the Sultan Abdul Hamid was one of the supporters of Altsov.

Obama and Putin

In the spring of 2012, soon after Vladimir Putin returned to the Russian presidency following four quiet years as prime minister, Barack Obama sat down with a few of his top advisers in the White House Situation Room to discuss the way forward. Obama had invested a lot in the “reset” with Russia, and believed it had achieved some meaningful wins. But he had no illusions about the Russian leader—having first met Putin during a tense 2009 meeting in Moscow, when Obama was subjected to one of his customary harangues about the West’s betrayals—and understood that U.S.-Russian relations were likely to get worse. “The main challenge is to put him in a box to stop making mischief,” Obama asserted. Yet he wondered what leverage the United States had to influence Putin, and struggled with how to send this message in a way the Russian leader would understand. “We have to look him in the eye,” the president said—knowingly referring to George W. Bush’s infamous statement in 2001 that he had looked into Putin’s eye and got a sense of his soul—“to tell him, ‘don’t think you can screw around without consequence.’”1

Comments: Volatility Trumps Stability

Editor's column Last month, OPEC received another warning that the battle for market share in the global oil market was not over. “It’s not beneficial for OPEC to deepen their cuts because prices will go up and shale oil producers and others will take OPEC’s market share,” Abdullah al-Attiyad, the former oil minister of Qatar, said in an interview with the Bloomberg news agency. “The problem is that there is someone waiting in the dark corner for OPEC—it’s shale oil producers and whenever prices rise, they raise production.” Al-Attiyad’s remarks came after the International Energy Agency reported that the oil market was not balancing as quickly this year as some had predicted. OPEC output rose to its highest level of the year in June and its compliance with production cuts slumped to 68%. Meanwhile, oil prices meander in the USD 45–50/bbl range and remain under pressure as US production remains strong. The oil market has historically been an interplay between supply and demand. But a new book by a consultant and former top energy adviser to US President George W. Bush argues that oil boom-and-bust cycles are here to stay and will likely be more volatile than those in the past. Periods such as from 2004 to 2008—when oil rose to USD 147/bbl and then dropped to USD 33/bbl—or what has happened between June 2014 and the present—prices falling from USD 107/bbl to USD 26/bbl and then back to around USD 50/bbl—could be the new norm. “Recent oil fluctuations mark the return of a new and unfettered market for crude oil and, as a consequence, boom-bust oil prices are making a return after 8 decades,” Robert McNally, who is also a fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, writes in his new book Crude Volatility. Contradicting the current general consensus that US shale producers have replaced Saudi Arabia as the market’s swing producer—increasing supply as the market tightens and prices rise, and decreasing production as the market dictates—McNally argues that Saudi Arabia abandoned that stabilizing role in the mid-1980s, except for some occasional tinkering with global oil supplies in the 1990s, and shale producers are not cohesive enough to fill that role. The lack of a true swing producer explains the dramatic ups and downs of oil prices since 1998. McNally divides oil price history into 5 eras: the severe boom-bust cycles after oil’s discovery in Pennsylvania in the late 1800s; John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly that enriched him but stabilized prices; the return of volatility after the Standard Oil breakup and the discovery of huge quantities of oil in Texas, Venezuela, California, and Mexico beginning in the 1920s; price stabilization by the Texas Railroad Commission from the mid-1930s to 1972; and OPEC’s attempts to control the market. But OPEC has never had sufficient spare production capacity to truly control prices, McNally believes, and non-OPEC discoveries from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere have undercut the cartel’s attempts. McNally believes that price swings in the range of USD 30/bbl to USD 100/bbl may be likely, playing havoc with governments that depend on oil revenues and companies trying to plan expensive projects. Oil cycle volatility is caused by basic economics—imbalance in supply and demand, which fuels price swings, which causes further sup-ply fluctuations. And because the industry is often surprised—whether it be the sharp growth in Asian demand in the early 2000s or the recent incredible growth in shale production in the US—it will be impossible to stabilize prices in the short term.

Politics 2016: A Children’s Story

A few weeks ago, in an interlude bizarre even in this time of badly broken politics in the Western world, one of President Barack Obama’s top advisers explained boastfully how he had managed to fob...

Chinese interpreting studies: structural determinants of MA students’ career choices

During the last 30 years, the growth of the interpreting industry in China has been outstanding. Increasing economic and political collaboration has driven the demand for interpreters to bridge the linguistic and cultural divides that exist between China and the West. With the creation of master's and bachelor's degrees in interpreting and translation all over China, hundreds of graduates from various universities have since undertaken distinctly different career paths. Using an exhaustive corpus of Masters' theses and a combination of logistic regression and Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation to establish causalities, this paper focuses on some of the structural determinants of graduate students' career choices. The paper examines to what extent university affiliations, thesis advisors, research methodology and thesis content influence the choice to pursue an academic career. The research reveals that graduating from a top university makes students less likely to become academics, and studying under a top advisor does not necessarily increase an individual's chances of securing an academic post. By contrast, writers of empirical theses or ones that are about training are more likely to enter the academic sphere.

Outer Mongolia and the Changing Dynamics of UN Representation: Impacts on U.S. China Policy, 1961

In 1961, the Kennedy administration confronted wides-pread domestic and foreign anticipation that significant changes would be made to existing U.S. China policy. Although the new administration proposed to liberate the United States from past policies and offer fresh, innova-tive solutions to problems confronted worldwide, the major issues that characterized and defined the American relationship with both the Chinese Communists on the mainland and the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan posed a challenge for the new President and his top advisers. This study examines the Kennedy administration’s deli-berations at the United Nations with regard to the Outer Mongolian representation matter and mounting interna-tional pressures from U.S. allies and other nations for the United States to assume a more flexible posture toward Communist China. Despite the lack of a major departure from existing policies, initiatives proposing a reappraisal of U.S. China policy during the Kennedy administration precipitated discussions and debates that contributed sig-nificantly to the eventual transformation of Sino-Ameri-can relations.

Book Review: The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade against Smut, by Douglas M. Charles

The FBI's Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau's Crusade against Smut. Douglas M. Charles. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. 200 pp. $24.95 hbk. plank: Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced. Indeed, in July of that year, the Daily Caller reported that a top adviser for Mitt Romney promised Patrick Trueman, current head of Morality in Media and former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, that if elected president, Romney would ramp up federal obscenity prosecutions after years of relaxed oversight.If Romney had prevailed and, in turn, made good on his promise, it certainly would not have been the first time that politicians, moralists, and federal law enforcement officials triangulated around sexually explicit expression during times of sociocultural shifts. Douglas M. Charles makes that abundantly clear in his fascinating and wellwritten new book, The FBI's Obscene File.Charles, assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who describes himself in the preface as an FBI scholar, charts, in chronological fashion, a century of involvement and intervention by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with all varieties of sexual materials. These range from filthy images on playing cards to nudity in plays like Oh! Calcutta to sexual acts in movies like Deep Throat and even to the generally unintelligible lyrics of the Kingsman's song Louie Louie. Some of the more notable public figures who play prominent roles in The FBI's Obscene File include J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Charles Keating, the last of whom gained widespread attention in the 1980s not for his assault on sexual content, but for his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association scandal.The centerpiece of the documentation from which Charles draws much of his material is the administrative portion of the FBI's Obscene File, which Charles obtained in redacted form via a Freedom of Information Act request. The other portion of the Obscene File, which was created in 1942 and eventually abandoned during the administration of President Bill Clinton and FBI head Louis Freeh, consisted of a vast library of sexually explicit material housed in the FBI's vaunted crime laboratory. The fact that the FBI possessed its very own large collection of pornography-it was so large that, on several occasions, parts of it had to be incinerated to make way for newer material-was always a source of potential embarrassment for the Bureau. One of the primary purposes of this collection of content was as a reference point against which to compare new specimens of obscene material to identify their sources.But the Obscene File was often misused and abused over the years by the FBI, from cracking down on the of African Americans during the 1940s-so-called race music featuring suggestive lyrics-to ferreting out gays in government service. …

Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis

In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the U.S. response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy’s decision to impose a blockade was based on hours of discussions with top advisers (the so-called ExComm), yet decades of scholarship on the crisis have missed the central puzzle: How did the group select one response, the blockade, when all options seemed bad? Recently released audio recordings are used to argue that the key conversational activity was storytelling about an uncertain future. Kennedy’s choice of a blockade hinged on the narrative “suppression” of its most dangerous possible consequence, namely the perils of a later attack against operational missiles, something accomplished through omission, self-censorship, ambiguation, uptake failure, and narrative interdiction. The article makes the very first connection between the localized dynamics of conversation and decision making in times of crisis, and offers a novel processual account of one of the most fatef...

Widjojo Nitisastro and Indonesian development

Widjojo Nitisastro (2010) Pengalaman Pembangunan Indonesia: Kumpulan Tulisan dan Uraian Widjojo Nitisastro [The Experience of Development in Indonesia: A Collection of the Writings of Widjojo Nitisastro], Penerbit Buku Kompas [Kompas Book Publishing], Jakarta. Widjojo Nitisastro is one of Indonesia's best-known economic policy makers. Much has been written by others about his role as a top adviser over more than three decades. This collection of his own essays helps fill out the picture. Seven main policy themes may be identified: the role of economic growth in helping overcome mass poverty; the need for economic policy makers to pay close attention to risk management and be constantly ready to respond to economic shocks; the importance of strong leadership and discipline in government; the need to scrutinise investment programs closely; the high priority to be given to borrowing programs and debt management; the role of the price mechanism; and the management of Indonesia's relations with the international community. Strong messages about growth, leadership and stability permeate the essays. The collection is a valuable contribution to the literature on economic policy making in developing countries.

The manuscript reviewing process: Empirical research on review requests, review sequences, and decision rules in peer review

In peer review research, no study has been performed to date that has opened the “black box” of manuscript reviewing and dealt with the internal mechanisms of the process. Using as an example the peer review system of Angewandte Chemie International Edition (AC-IE), this study investigates which review requests are assigned by the editors to external reviewers, which sequences of review steps typically occur, and which rules are used by the editors to decide whether to accept or reject a manuscript for publication. For the investigation, information has been used on a total of 1899 manuscripts that were reviewed in the year 2000. The results show that in the majority of the manuscripts, the editors follow a so-called “clear-cut” rule: A manuscript is only accepted for publication if it has been positively assessed beforehand by two independent reviewers with regard to the importance of the results and the suitability of publication of the manuscript. For about a fifth of the manuscripts, the editors (a) consulted a top adviser for manuscript review, (b) asked a reviewer to review a manuscript revised by the author, or (c) asked a reviewer to read an appeal that an author filed against the rejection of his/her manuscript.

Advocates for action on global warming chosen as Obama's top science advisers

Advocates for action on global warming chosen as Obama's top science advisers

Richard Nixon, Russell Train, and the Birth of Modern American Environmental Diplomacy

In the spring of 1972, Russell E. Train, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality under President Richard Nixon, invited Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to lunch at Washington's tony Metropolitan Club. Train had already developed a friendly relationship with the powerful diplomat but this was no casual social call. Train had an agenda that his own boss, John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's top advisers, had cleared prior to the meeting. The United States and the Soviet Union, Train suggested, should work together to improve environmental quality. Despite Cold War tensions, the nations shared the world's ecosystem and both had a stake in fighting threats such as air and water pollution. The two nations might cooperate in eleven areas, from land use to wildlife protection, and a joint commission might regularly meet to guide the process. Neither country benefited from arguments over which economic system was the worst offender, Train continued, perhaps anticipating objections. “Capitalists and socialists are in the same boat and will survive or flounder together.”1 Dobrynin listened politely, struggling to follow Train's lead and eat soft-shell crabs, which he had never tasted before. “The picture is indelibly fixed in my mind,” Train later wrote, “of the distinguished ambassador with almost an entire crab in his mouth, the legs protruding out to either side and wiggling as he tried to chew and speak.” Having survived the crabs, Dobrynin agreed the idea had merit and promised to raise the matter with the Kremlin. He would have to move quickly, Train admitted; Nixon needed “tangible visible evidence of progress under the agreement prior to the [1972 presidential] election.”2

Evolving Visions of Waterfront Development in Postindustrial Philadelphia: The Formative Role of Elite Ideologies

This article seeks to illuminate the role of elite ideologies in understanding how cities have sought to transform their waterfronts during the postindustrial era. A case study of Philadelphia's long-term efforts to develop Penn's Landing, a valuable thirty-five-acre site along the Delaware River at the eastern edge of Center City, reveals how shifting perspectives among mayors, their top advisors, and leading activists with respect to the proper scope of government and the appropriate source of political power have resulted in significant changes in the city's approach to waterfront planning and policy making.

Chinese UN Representation at the Crossroads: International Pressures for Change in U.S. China Policy, 1961

In 1961, the Kennedy administration confronted widespread domestic and foreign anticipation that significant changes would be made to existing U.S. China policy. Although the new administration proposed to liberate the United States from past policies and offer fresh, innovative solutions to problems confronted worldwide, the major issues that characterized and defined the American relationship with both the Chinese Communists on the mainland and the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan posed a challenge for the new President and his top advisers. This study examines the Kennedy administration’s deliberations with regard to the Chinese representation matter at the United Nations and mounting international pressures from U.S. allies and other nations for the United States to assume a more flexible posture toward Communist China. Despite the lack of a major departure from existing policies, initiatives proposing a reappraisal of U.S. China policy during the Kennedy administration precipitated discussions and debates that significantly contributed to the evolution towards the eventual transformation of Sino-American relations.

Winning or losing: where are we in the fight against HIV and AIDS?

Recently, news headlines around the world rang out with the message that the world is losing the fight against AIDS. Those headlines were inspired by a talk given by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and US President George W. Bush’s top adviser on HIV and AIDS, at the 4th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment, and Prevention held in Sydney, Australia, at the end of July. During the talk Fauci said that the world faces a serious problem because “for every one person that you put on therapy, six people get infected [with HIV]” (1). This fact, he said, made him concur with UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, who recently stated that the discrepancy between the number of individuals being put on therapy and the number becoming infected “is not sustainable” and means “that we are losing the battle [against HIV and AIDS]” (2). However, the negative nature of the news headlines generated by the talk did not reflect the overall message Fauci meant to convey, because, as he commented to the JCI, “much of what I said during the talk was positive.” And while Fauci does feel that the world is “losing the numbers game” and that there is still “much to do” before we can say that we are winning the battle, he does believe that much has been accomplished. Indeed, Fauci highlighted to the JCI that during his talk he discussed the huge advances that have been made in treating and preventing HIV and AIDS in recent years. For example, in 2003 only a couple of hundred thousand people in the developing world were receiving HIV therapy, most of whom were wealthy individuals, whereas in 2007 more than 2 million people in these regions of the world were receiving therapy. However, to provide a balanced outlook, Fauci told the JCI that although this is a huge advance, there is a long way to go, as this represents only 28% of individuals in the developing world who need HIV therapy. Fauci also told the conference delegates that there have been scientific advances that the research community should be proud of. One of the most recent of these advances is the demonstration that male circumcision substantially reduces the risk of acquiring HIV (3, 4). Another important step forward that he highlighted was the identification of a conserved structural epitope on the HIV-1 envelope protein gp120 (5), because he believes that it gives hope that a vaccine can be developed that would induce truly neutralizing antibodies specific for multiple HIV strains and thereby provide individuals with protection against infection with HIV-1. Another prominent HIV researcher, Robert Doms of the University of Pennsylvania, told the JCI that he shares Fauci’s feelings that there have been some major steps forward in the fight against HIV and AIDS in recent years, but that there is still a lot to do. On the positive side, Doms stressed to the JCI the importance of the considerable array of antiretroviral drugs at the disposal of clinicians treating individuals with HIV and the increasing (although still far from ubiquitous) availability of these drugs in the developing world. On the downside though, Doms noted that “vaccine development is progressing slowly, despite major efforts in this area” and the fact that the number of individuals becoming newly infected with HIV continues to rise “is depressing.” Doms also noted that because HIV is a sexually transmitted virus, prevention is the best way to control the HIV pandemic. However, as he pointed out, changing human behavior is a major challenge to this cost-effective approach to curbing the crisis. A related barrier to prevention is the considerable stigma surrounding the disease, due to which many individuals are not aware of their HIV status; more than 80% of people with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa do not know their status. In a bid to address this, and to thereby increase the number of individuals receiving treatment and decrease the number of individuals engaging in unsafe sexual practices, the governments of several countries, including Malawi and Tanzania, are advising all sexually active residents to take an HIV test. Indeed, in a bid to promote the campaign in his country, the president of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete, recently took an HIV test publicly. So, as Fauci stated in the title of his talk, much has been accomplished, but much remains to do: although the battle against HIV and AIDS has not been won, it certainly has not been lost.