Safety in international security: a view point from the practice of accident investigation

While security points to a deliberate harming of humans and/or the environment, safety refers to unintended damage. In this view point, I will analyse how the distinction between safety and security matters in the practice of accident investigation and I will argue that the division between the fields is problematic for the assessment of security-related safety risks. Drawing on the case of the our accident investigation into the downing of flight MH17 above Ukraine in 2014, I highlight key dilemmas the Dutch Safety Board dealt with.     

Estimating the probability that a simulated system will be the best

Consider a stochastic simulation experiment consisting of v independent vector replications consisting of an observation from each of k independent systems. Typical system comparisons are based on mean (long‐run) performance. However, the probability that a system will actually be the best is sometimes more relevant, and can provide a very different perspective than the systems' means. Empirically, we select one system as the best performer (i.e., it wins) on each replication. Each system has an unknown constant probability of winning on any replication and the numbers of wins for the individual systems follow a multinomial distribution. Procedures exist for selecting the system with the largest probability of being the best. This paper addresses the companion problem of estimating the probability that each system will be the best. The maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) of the multinomial cell probabilities for a set of v vector replications across k systems are well known. We use these same v vector replications to form v^k unique vectors (termed pseudo‐replications) that contain one observation from each system and develop estimators based on AVC (All Vector Comparisons). In other words, we compare every observation from each system with every combination of observations from the remaining systems and note the best performer in each pseudo‐replication. AVC provides lower variance estimators of the probability that each system will be the best than the MLEs. We also derive confidence intervals for the AVC point estimators, present a portion of an extensive empirical evaluation and provide a realistic example. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 341–358, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10019     

Unsolved murders and the investigative failures of the Nigerian police force: Security and sociopolitical implications

This article focuses on the systemic failures of the Nigerian police force to unravel the mysteries surrounding homicides in the country, along with the security, social and political implications of the ongoing trend. The article draws on documented pieces of evidence of high-profile murders, along with the causes of the upsurge in murder incidences and the inhibitive factors relating to the investigative procedures of the police. The suitability of the theory of subaltern realism and the concept of third-world security predicaments in explaining the peculiarities of Nigeria’s internal security challenges is examined, along with the problems of the legitimacy of political regimes and weak borders. There is a need for the National Assembly of Nigeria to exercise its constituted powers in reawakening and supervising investigations into dormant cases of murder through its committees on police affairs, public safety and national security. The police should check its organisational failures, which may be related to using the wrong investigative approaches, low levels of information, limited resources, corrupt practices, and pressure to obtain quick results.     

Demand shuffle—A method for multilevel proportional lot sizing and scheduling

This contribution acquaints the reader with a model for multilevel single-machine proportional lot sizing and scheduling problems (PLSPs) that appear in the scope of short-term production planning. It is one of the first articles that deals with dynamic capacitated multilevel lot sizing and scheduling, which is of great practical importance. The PLSP model refines well-known mixed-integer programming formulations for dynamic capacitated lot sizing and scheduling as, for instance, the DLSP or the CSLP. A special emphasis is given on a new method called demand shuffle to solve multilevel PLSP instances efficiently but suboptimally. Although the basic idea is very simple, it becomes clear that in the presence of precedence and capacity constraints many nontrivial details are to be concerned. Computational studies show that the presented approach decidedly improves recent results. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 44: 319–340, 1997     

Leaderless Global Jihadism: The Paradox of Discriminate Violence

Jihadist violence is typically associated with being particularly indiscriminate. Often, as in variations of the ‘new terrorism’ thesis, this characteristic is proposed to correspond in some way to its other attributes such as its globalised, decentralised and ‘postmodern’ religious nature. Recent work appears to give more substance to such claims, by claiming to show a relationship between indiscriminate violence and decentralised group organisation. However, in this paper we show, based on an analysis of jihadist targeting in Western Europe and America from 2001 to 2013, that targeting choices by jihadists unconnected to organised militant groups have in fact been consistently more, rather than less discriminate in their targeting choices than their better-integrated peers. Drawing on this finding, as well as a broader reading of jihadist targeting discourses, we argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between radicalisation, extremist ideology, decentralisation, and targeting choice.     

Military Expenditures and Natural Resources: Evidence from Rentier States in the Middle East and North Africa

It has been argued that the discovery of a new natural resource greatly increases the risk of conflict. This research aims to study the effect of natural resources on military spending, using the data from rentier states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries from 1987 to 2012. In considering the ‘resource curse,’ the types of natural resources matter. Our empirical results demonstrate that the ‘resource curse’ arising from the abundance of certain natural resources, particularly oil and forest resources, leads to increases in military spending. In contrast, the rent from coal and natural gas has a negative impact on military spending, while the rent from minerals has no impact on military spending, controlling for GDP growth and per capita income.     

Preemptive parallel‐machine scheduling with a common server to minimize makespan

We consider parallel‐machine scheduling with a common server and job preemption to minimize the makespan. While the non‐preemptive version of the problem is strongly NP‐hard, the complexity status of the preemptive version has remained open. We show that the preemptive version is NP‐hard even if there is a fixed number of machines. We give a pseudo‐polynomial time algorithm to solve the case with two machines. We show that the case with an arbitrary number of machines is unary NP‐hard, analyze the performance ratios of some natural heuristic algorithms, and present several solvable special cases. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 388–398, 2017