Europe’s Role in China’s Transition to Superpower Status

What can Western powers do today to ease an eventual global power shift resulting from the rise of superpowers such as China? This paper suggests that part of the answer lies in the same power-binding institutions that allowed the US to rise post WWII without threatening its allies. Continuity in the rules of the global system during a great power transition would promote stability by reducing uncertainty, as well as the extent to which material power can be used coercively. I argue that current superpowers, the EU among them, have an interest in ensuring an equitable distribution of the gains from cooperation. While distributional issues are usually treated in normative terms, they take on very real, material meaning in the context of a great power transition. With this in mind, I look at three aspects of the current global institutional framework that would benefit from reform: international trade and aid, institutional design, and institutional proliferation. In all three cases, a more equal distribution of the gains from institutions today increases the odds that those institutional arrangements will remain in the future.     

中美中东石油关系解析

作为居世界前两位的石油进口和消费大国,中美都离不开中东石油。中美在中东必然因石油而发生关系,这种关系具有双重性——事实上的竞争与合作关系。在中东石油领域,如果两国展开过度竞争甚至恶性竞争,双方可能走向“零和”或两败俱伤的“负数”结局;如果两国开展对话、合作或实现竞争下的合作,则完全可以在中东石油甚至其他能源领域实现互利双赢。     

Stretching the borders: how international business travel affects the work–family balance

This study examined the consequences of international business travel for the balance between work–family domains by exploring how international business travellers and travellers’ partners manage the boundaries between work and family in order to maintain the balance. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used in analysing the semi-structured interviews of 10 male travellers and 10 partners. Because of its irregular nature, international business travel affects the personal life and the family of business travellers. Work-related travel also has an impact on how travellers and their partners construct, manage and negotiate borders between work and family in order to avoid an imbalance between these domains. Integration of work and family is usually inevitable in international business traveler families. Integration may lead to role blurring and thus lead to imbalance.     

The relationship between the community participation of disabled youth and socioeconomic factors: mixed-methods approach in rural Sri Lanka

Mixed methods were applied to examine the association of community participation by disabled youth with socioeconomic factors in rural Sri Lanka. There was a significant association between community participation and socioeconomic factors in the quantitative survey (n = 116): participants living in socioeconomically disadvantaged conditions had lower levels of community participation than those living without these disadvantages. Consistent with the findings of the survey, previous educational experiences, household economic conditions, and perceived resource information were common themes in the qualitative study (n = 26). The dynamics of these factors, including marginalisation of disabled youth within the household, were also observed.     

The Global Politics of Forced Labour

This article examines the politics of governing forced labour. It develops and applies an approach drawing on Marx’s conception of the historical formation of ‘free’ labour in the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ and Gramsci’s conception of the ‘relations of force’. Viewed through this lens, rather than representing discrete ontological categories, the boundary between ‘free’ and ‘forced’ labour is repositioned as largely a contested and ambivalent artefact of governance. The concept of the ‘political relations of force’ highlights the ways in which such constructions are shaped by complex intersections between a diversity of different social forces. This approach is subsequently applied in an analysis of an International Labour Organization project on dealing with ‘traditional slavery’ in Niger.     

Theory and methods for partitioned Gini coefficients computed on post-stratified data

The Gini coefficient is used to measure inequality in populations. However, shifts in the population distribution may affect subgroups differently. Consequently, it can be informative to examine inequality separately for these segments. Consider an independently and identically distributed sample split based on ranking and compute the Gini coefficient for each partition. These coefficients, calculated from post-stratified data, are not functions of U-statistics. Therefore, previous theoretical and methodological results cannot be applied. In this article, the asymptotic joint distribution is derived for the partitioned coefficients and bootstrap methods for inference are developed. Finally, an application to per capita income across census tracts is examined.     

Progressively Type-II censored conditionally N-ordered statistics from a unified elliptically contoured copula

Progressively Type-II censored conditionally N-ordered statistics (PCCOS-N) arising from iid random vectors X_i = (X¹_i, X²_i, …, X_i^p), i = 1, 2…, n, were investigated by Bairamov (2006 Bairamov, I. (2006). Progressive Type II censored order statistics for multivariate observations. J. Mult. Anal. 97:797–809.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), with respect to the magnitudes of N(X_i), i = 1, 2, …, n, where N( · ) is a p-variate measurable function defined on the support set of X₁ satisfying certain regularity conditions and N(X_i) denotes the lifetime of the random vector X_i, i = 1, …, n. Under the PCCOS-N sampling scheme, n independent units are placed on a life-test and after the ith failure, R_i (i = 1, …, m) of the surviving units are removed at random from the remaining observations. In this article, we consider PCCOS-N arising from a vector with identical as well as non identical dependent components, jointly distributed according to a unified elliptically contoured copula (PCCOSDUECC-N). Results established here contain the previous results as particular cases. Illustrative examples and simulation studies show that PCCOSDUECC-N enables us to analyze the lifetime of several systems, including repairable systems and systems with standby components, more efficiently than PCCOS-N.     

Asymmetric learning in a short-term,macro-oriented international students’ exchange: an exploratory study

International social work organizations’ call for a Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development emphasizes promotion of social justice-oriented policies. A major challenge for international student exchange programs, especially when the visitors are from affluent countries, is to overcome the asymmetric process of the relative lack of power, in student hosts’ in comparison to student visitors’ relationships, as well as to focus on macro-practice orientation. Through analyzing a case study of student exchange, we propose a set of pedagogical strategies that may help to overcome these challenges through using processes of mirroring to address this asymmetric situation. This exploratory research is based on a three-year assessment of a short-term, macro-oriented MSW travel study course between graduate students from two universities (in the US and in Israel) using an exchange framework. It includes a comparison of joint experiences of students using both written and arts-based data. The findings demonstrate that the use of relationship building and mirroring enables both hosts and guests to learn about their own macro-reality through the eyes of the others and helps diffuse asymmetry and create relationships not only on the micro-, but also macro-levels. Implications for teaching methods in international courses are discussed.