Economic sanctions and official ethnic discrimination in target countries, 1950–2003

Conventional studies on the consequences of sanctions tend to focus on the target society as a whole without specifying how foreign economic pressures might affect the well-being of vulnerable groups within target countries – the same groups who often disproportionately bear the burden of sanctions. This study explores the extent to which sanctions increase the likelihood of discriminatory government practices against one of the globally most vulnerable groups, ethnic groups. It is argued that sanctions contribute to the rise of official ethnic-based economic and political discrimination through contracting the economy and creating incentives for the target government to employ ethnic-based discriminatory policies. Using data on over 900 ethnic groups from 1950 to 2003, the results lend support for the theoretical claim that sanctions prompt the government to pursue ethnic-based discriminatory economic and political practices in multiethnic countries. The findings also indicate that multilateral sanctions are likely to be more harmful to the well-being of ethnic groups than sanctions levied by individual countries. Further, the negative effect of comprehensive sanctions appears to be greater than that of sanctions with moderate and limited impact on the target economy. The regime type of the target state, on the other hand, appears to have a significant role only in conditioning the hypothesized effect of sanctions on economic discrimination. Overall, this study’s focus on a vulnerable segment of the target society – ethnic groups – offers a greater understanding of the consequences of sanctions. It also provides additional insight as to how, in multiethnic countries, political elites might domestically respond to external pressures to retain power.     

Defensive weapons and star wars: a supergame with optimal punishments

We model the perspective faced by nuclear powers involved in a supergame where nuclear deterrence is used to stabilise peace. This setting allows us to investigate the bearings of defensive weapons on the effectiveness of deterrence and peace stability, relying on one-shot optimal punishments. We find that the sustainability of peace is unaffected by defensive shields if the latter are symmetric across countries, while asymmetric endowments of such weapons have clear-cut destabilising consequences.     

YN／变压器负序电流和谐波电流的分析

考虑二相负荷大小、功率因数变化,分析了ＹＮ／联结平衡变压器用于铁道牵引电站时一次侧的负序和谐波电流的变化规律。通过与ＹＮ／△接线变压器比较,说明ＹＮ／联结平衡变压器在减小电网负序和谐波电流方面具有很大优势。在牵引电站中使用该变压器能显著地提高牵引供电系统的技术和经济性能。     

Missile Strategy in a Post-Nuclear Age

While the arrival of nuclear weapons coincided roughly with the development of short, medium, intermediate, and eventually intercontinental missiles, the contribution of missile technology to the deterrence equation is often lost. If nuclear weapons were eliminated, even new generation missiles with conventional payloads could struggle to render effective deterrence. But some of the physical and psychological effects commonly ascribed to nuclear weapons could still be in play. And in a world without nuclear weapons, thinking about the use and control of force from the nuclear age would also deserve renewed attention.     

新疆少数民族高等教育与人口就业——基于二进制响应模型的实证检验

新疆少数民族高等教育和人口就业的关系是一个异常重要,却少有学者关注的研究领域。本文利用二进制响应模型实证检验了新疆少数民族高等教育对就业的影响。研究结果显示,新疆少数民族高等教育是促进人口就业的Ganger原因,少数民族高等教育对促进就业具有显著的滞后效应,当期少数民族在校大学生占比超过其中位数,一年后就业人口占比超过其中位数的概率将增加23.13%,两年后全疆就业人口占比超过其中位数的概率将增加57.95%。为此,本文提出了进一步提高少数民族高考升学率,继续巩固基础教育阶段成果和高度重视少数民族职业教育和培训等三方面的建议。     

A model of dynamic conflict in ethnocracies

We model an infinitely repeated Tullock contest, over the sharing of some given resource, between two ethnic groups. The resource is allocated by a composite state institution according to relative ethnic control; hence the ethnic groups contest the extent of institutional ethnic bias. The contest yields the per-period relative influence over institutions, which partly spills over into the next period, by affecting relative conflict efficiency. Our model generates non-monotone evolution of both conflict and distribution. Results suggest that external interventions, when effective in reducing current conflict and protecting weaker groups, may end up sowing the seeds of greater future conflict.     

Choosing the Right Sidekick: Economic Complements to US Military Grand Strategies

ABSTRACT

Scholars and practitioners of grand strategy agree that the use of military force should be supplemented by appropriate economic policies. However, strangely few accounts of economic complements to military grand strategies have been presented in recent discourse on US grand strategy. This paper takes a first step to fill this information gap. I first assess the role that could be played by economic measures under two types of grand strategies – one focusing on the balance of power and the other emphasising influence and order. Second, I introduce what I call ‘the influence-capability dilemma’ and discuss tradeoffs in adopting certain economic policies in order to help the US sustain pre-eminence in the international system. Third, I discuss how the US should address this dilemma of economic means in dealing with the rising China.     

Winston Churchill and the third front 1

The premise of most Western thinking on counterinsurgency is that success depends on establishing a perception of legitimacy among local populations. The path to legitimacy is often seen as the improvement of governance in the form of effective and efficient administration of government and public services. However, good governance is not the only basis for claims to legitimacy, especially in environments where ethnic or religious identities are politically salient. Some experience in Iraq suggests that in environments where such identities are contested, claims to legitimacy may rest primarily on the identity of who governs, rather than on how whoever governs, governs. This article outlines the intellectual foundations of existing policy and doctrine on counterinsurgency, and argues that development and analysis of counterinsurgency strategy would benefit from a greater focus on the role of ethnic and religious identity in irregular warfare.     

ON ETHNIC CONFLICT AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM

Using the ITERATE dataset, we explore the origins of transnational terrorist activity, from 1982 through 1997, in 118 countries. We model terrorism, not as a function of a nation’s ethnic, religious or linguistic fractionalization, but as an independent measure of perceived ethnic tensions. When we control for institutional quality, evidence that political rights and civil liberties mitigate the terrorism‐producing effects of ethnic tensions exists only since 1990. Economic freedoms, on the other hand, robustly reduce the number of terrorist attacks originating in ethnically tense societies.     

一种鲁棒的场地球类视频中的球门探测方法

在场地球类视频中,球门常常会伴随着精彩片段而出现。因此,球门探测是体育视频的基础,同时也是视频高层语义概念探测的研究热点。目前,利用机器学习方法进行视频中的对象探测是非常有前途的研究领域。基于此,提出一种基于模糊决策树的球门探测算法,用来探测场地球类视频中球门帧的出现,为了提高分类准确性,在模糊决策树训练的过程中加入了平衡处理。实验结果表明,与基于阈值和决策树的算法相比,该算法可以得到更好的分类结果(F-measure>95%),并且我们可以从所建立的树中推导出模糊规则来解释分类模型。