School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemDemocracy in Reverse: The 2016 General Election in Zambia(SAGE Publications, 2016-12)On 11 August 2016, Zambia held elections for the presidency, National Assembly, local councillors, and mayors. Concurrently, a referendum was held on whether to enhance the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of Zambia. The elections were significant for several reasons: It was the first contest under a newly amended Constitution, which introduced important changes to the electoral framework. It also marked a break with Zambia's positive historical record of arranging generally peaceful elections. Moreover, the election featured an electoral playing field that was notably tilted in favour of the incumbent party. Ultimately, the incumbent president, Edgar Lungu of the Patriotic Front, edged out opposition challenger Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development. The election was controversial and the opposition mounted an unsuccessful legal challenge to the final results. The 2016 elections represent a reversal in the quality of Zambian democracy and raise questions about the country's prospects for democratic consolidation.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIAEA Non-Compliance Reporting and the Iran Case(Arms Control Association, 2016-01)Agreement by Iran in Vienna on 14 July 2015 to roll back and constrain its nuclear program handed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) its greatest non-compliance reporting challenge yet. As the multilateral organization charged with determining compliance with nuclear safeguards agreements, the IAEA has had experience with eight significant non-compliance cases, including that of Iran prior to this latest agreement. But none matches the procedural complexity, technical intricacy and political sensitivity of the Comprehensive Joint Plan of Action concluded by Iran with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. To fulfil its role the IAEA’s Secretariat and Director General, Yukiya Amano, will need to draw on the Agency’s extensive experience with past non-compliance cases, exploit the latest verification technology promised by the agreement, marshal its finest report-crafting expertise and steer an impartial, balanced, sensitive path through treacherous political waters.
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ItemManaging the Global Nuclear Security Architecture After the Summits(International Atomic Energy Agency, 2016)
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ItemNuclear Security Diplomacy Beyond Summitry 1(Taylor & Francis, 2016)This chapter assesses the role of multilateral diplomacy in strengthening nuclear security after the nuclear summit process ends in 2016. Nuclear security diplomacy is taken to mean communications, discussions, and negotiations among states, especially through high-level gatherings of government representatives, and other stakeholders, notably industry and civil society. Diplomacy may, at first glance, seem to be a laughingly fey response to the threat of nuclear terrorism. One of the challenges in ensuring comprehensive nuclear security is the array of institutions, mechanisms, and arrangements that deal with the issue, either at a broad policy level or in more substantive terms. The Council would also likely play a critical role in reacting to a major nuclear terrorism incident. However, both UNGA and the Council have comprehensive agendas that only allow episodic attention to nuclear security and cannot therefore be expected to play a regular, attentive diplomatic role in this field.
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ItemThe IAEA's Organizational Culture: Myths and Realities(RJISSF, 2016)in his classic work Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein, the guru of organizational culture studies, identifies three levels of culture, “from the very tangible overt manifestations that one can see and feel to the deeply embedded, unconscious, basic assumptions.”1 He designates these as artifacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions. Artifacts are an organization’s visible structure, processes, and symbols. Espoused values are those that an organization publicly proclaims. Underlying assumptions are those unlikely to be articulated publicly, but taken for granted as ‘the way we do things around here.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSustaining the Nuclear Watchdog with a Grand Budgetary Bargain(Taylor and Francis Group, 2016-05-11)On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake struck the east coast of Japan. Fifty-six minutes later the seismic safety experts at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded that the event, and its accompanying tsunami, could damage nuclear power plants in the region. The Agency’s Incident and Emergency Centre was activated, declared to be in “full response mode” and staffed continuously 24 hours a day for the following 54 days. Approximately 200 agency personnel were diverted from their normal activities to the Fukushima disaster response, keeping in touch with Japanese authorities, advising concerned member states and coordinating offers of assistance. Fukushima-related activities ended up consuming all unencumbered funding in the agency’s safety and security budget for 2012 as well as requiring a one-off transfer of funds from other major programs. This incident illustrates graphically the hand-to-mouth existence of what is popularly known as the “nuclear watchdog.”
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Item[Review of the book Is the American Century Over? by J.S. Nye Jr.](Cambridge University Press, 2016-08-01)
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ItemWho Is the Subject of Queer Criminology? Unravelling the Category of the Paedophile(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)In the foreword to a recent special edition of Critical Criminology, Ball, Buist, and Woods write that queer criminology ‘can speak to a number of people and communities. It can take us down multiple paths, and it can remain an open space of intellectual and political contestation’ (2014: 4). Using this observation as a starting point, this chapter examines the subject to which queer criminology speaks. As this book attests, queer criminology is a comparatively new orientation. While criminology has addressed issues of sexual difference, it has generally posited a particular kind of ‘queer’ subject — predominantly those who identify as gay, lesbian, and more recently bisexual or trans. Compounding this shortcoming are the scenarios in which sexual difference has traditionally been interrogated. For example, victimisation has overwhelmingly been preoccupied with prejudice-motivated crime and interpersonal violence. On the other hand, research examining scenarios of queer criminality have typically pivoted around sexual deviance and sex work. Peterson and Panfil insightfully observe that the consequence of this tradition has been to produce a narrow frame of sexed and gendered difference within criminological scholarship (2014: 3)
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ItemCanada, Australia and New Zealand and the Islamic State(ROUTLEDGE, 2016)
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ItemForeign Fighters, Human Rights and Self-Determination in Syria and Iraq: Decoding the Humanitarian Impact of Foreign Fighters in Practice(MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBL, 2016)Foreign fighters have become inextricably linked to perceptions of human rights abuses in the Syria and Iraq wars, particularly since the Islamic State group founded its caliphate. This paper explores the human rights impact of foreign fighters in the conflicts, noting that while foreign fighters have been involved in grave human rights abuses, such behavior has not been uniform and must be differentiated by group and role. In this regard, it is argued that while foreign fighters have overwhelmingly had a negative impact on most human rights indicators, fighters in some groups have positively impacted the Right to Self-Determination. Further, the paper notes that while foreign fighters have been large-scale perpetrators of human rights abuses, one must also consider the propaganda value of such acts because foreign fighter-led violence is more newsworthy globally than local-led violence.