Priming the Nation for War: An Analysis of Organizational Origins and Discursive Machinations of the Serb Democratic Party in Pre-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1990–1992

Abstract

This article examines the role of the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SDS BiH) in the constitution of Bosnian Serbs as a palpable political group primed for violence, a process that took place in the two-year period preceding the 1992–1995 Bosnian War. In the November 1990 Bosnian elections, SDS BiH won a decisive majority of the vote of ethnic Serbs. Yet, SDS was not an ordinary political party. In the 16 months that followed the elections, it initiated a series of activities that eroded the power of BiH institutions to which it had been elected. SDS BiH declared its own organs superior to those of BiH and established exclusive control in Serb-majority areas. In early 1992, it united these areas into a single Serb Republic, formed an exclusively Serb armed force, and launched a campaign of murder and expulsion of non-Serbs from the territory under its control. This article examines discursive mobilization of affective sensibilities of ethnic Serbs as an important aspect of SDS's ability to gain a mass following of Bosnian Serbs for its ethno-territorial engineering. It offers a discussion of progressive homogenization of ethnic Serbs by looking at SDS's organizational origins and the evolving rhetorical strategies in the period from the party's inception until the onset of the war.     

Applications of Marshall–Olkin Fréchet Distribution

In this article, we consider the applications of Marshall–Olkin Fréchet distribution. The reliability of a system when both stress and strength follows the new distribution is discussed and related characteristics are computed for simulated data. The model is applied to a real data set on failure times of air-conditioning systems in jet planes and reliability is estimated. We also develop acceptance sampling plan for the acceptance of a lot whose lifetime follows this distribution. Four different autoregressive time series models of order 1 are developed with minification structure as well as max-min structure having these stationary marginal distributions. Some properties of the models are also established.     

The Family and Work in the Post-socialist Transition of Serbia: 1991–2006

For a long period of time, the family and the household have not been considered agents in the economic sphere. However, in contemporary theoretical and research practice we are witnessing a rehabilitation of this aspect of family activity. The importance of the broader social and economic impact of this activity of families and households is legitimated through the concepts of social capital and household strategies in the labor sphere. This paper presents the results of three successive representative empirical studies of households in Serbia between 1991 and 2006. The main goal of these studies was to observe the problems households and families are facing in the transition process. The specific profile of Serbia's transition path, determined by numerous societal disturbances, is emphasized. The relation between the work sphere and the family sphere is viewed through five forms of the working status and activities of household members. Research results show a remarkable proliferation of informal work activities, which enable the survival of households in the circumstances of high unemployment and low wages in the formal labor sector.     

Towards the strategies of modern societies: systems and social processes

While several sociological theories have traditionally dealt with rational action by human actors, little attention has been devoted to the possibilities for rational steering of the entire subsystems of functionally differentiated modern societies in the context of their increasing complexity. Although rational intentional action is clearly limited at the macro-level by the complexity emphasized by Luhmann's social systems theory, strategies are required to approach the normative ideal of active society as defined by Etzioni. Understanding the strategic processes requires micro–macro and agency–structure connections. A possible solution to understanding strategy as a social process in this respect is found in the adaptation of the three-level – individuality, reality and totality – approach of Sztompka's theory of social becoming.     

The falling tide algorithm: A new multi-objective approach for complex workforce scheduling

We present a hybrid approach of goal programming and meta-heuristic search to find compromise solutions for a difficult employee scheduling problem, i.e. nurse rostering with many hard and soft constraints. By employing a goal programming model with different parameter settings in its objective function, we can easily obtain a coarse solution where only the system constraints (i.e. hard constraints) are satisfied and an ideal objective-value vector where each single goal (i.e. each soft constraint) reaches its optimal value. The coarse solution is generally unusable in practise, but it can act as an initial point for the subsequent meta-heuristic search to speed up the convergence. Also, the ideal objective-value vector is, of course, usually unachievable, but it can help a multi-criteria search method (i.e. compromise programming) to evaluate the fitness of obtained solutions more efficiently. By incorporating three distance metrics with changing weight vectors, we propose a new time-predefined meta-heuristic approach, which we call the falling tide algorithm, and apply it under a multi-objective framework to find various compromise solutions. By this approach, not only can we achieve a trade off between the computational time and the solution quality, but also we can achieve a trade off between the conflicting objectives to enable better decision-making.     

Complement to a comparative analysis of heuristics for the <Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis>-median problem

A recent comparison of evolutionary, neural network, and scatter search heuristics for solving the p-median problem is completed by (i) gathering or obtaining exact optimal values in order to evaluate errors precisely, and (ii) including results obtained with several variants of a variable neighborhood search (VNS) heuristic. For a first, well-known, series of instances, the average errors of the evolutionary and neural network heuristics are over 10% and more than 1000 times larger than that of VNS. For a second series, this error is about 3% while the errors of the parallel VNS and of a hybrid heuristic are about 0.01% and that of parallel scatter search even smaller.