关于提高新疆南疆地区双语教育质量的思考

南疆双语教育发展的突出优势是政府高度重视,政策制度落实到位;受众积极性空前高涨,汉语学习氛围浓厚。但由于缺乏双语师资和汉语学习环境,双语教育质量较低。需要调整进度目标;完善层级师资培训机制,促进中青年教师快速成长;深化区内师资激励机制,切实发挥骨干教师力量;建立区内师资疏通机制,引导部分老教师转岗;进一步加大内高班、特培计划等订单式培养力度;拓宽高校双语师资培养输送渠道;积极推行"寄宿制"办学形式;营造汉语学习环境。     

Gender,feminism and food studies

Policy research and scholarship on food has rapidly increased in recent decades. The attention to ‘gender' within this work appears to signal important practical and academic efforts to mainstream gendered understandings of food consumption, distribution and production into expansive conceptualisations of human security. This article argues that the gender-related work on food has wide-ranging and often troubling political and theoretical foundations and implications. Often growing out of knowledge regimes for managing social crises and advancing neo-liberal solutions, much gender and food security work provides limited interventions into mainstream gender-blind work on the nexus of power struggles, food resources and globalisation. A careful analysis of knowledge production about gender and food is therefore crucial to understanding how and why feminist food studies often transcends and challenges dominant forms of scholarship and research on food security. This article's critical assessment of what food security studies in South Africa has entailed at the regional level and in global terms also focuses on the methodological and theoretical feminist interventions that can stimulate rigorous conceptual, research and practical attention to what has come to be understood as food sovereignty.     

India's Evolving Nuclear Posture

This article analyzes India's nuclear doctrine, finding it to be critically flawed and inimical to strategic stability in South Asia. In pursuing an ambitious triad of nuclear forces, India is straying from the sensible course it charted after going overtly nuclear in 1998. In doing so, it is exacerbating the triangular nuclear dilemma stemming from India's simultaneous rivalries with China and Pakistan. Strategic instability is compounded by India's pursuit of conventional “proactive strategy options,” which have the potential to lead to uncontrollable nuclear escalation on the subcontinent. New Delhi should reaffirm and redefine its doctrine of minimum credible nuclear deterrence, based on small nuclear forces with sufficient redundancy and diversity to deter a first strike by either China or Pakistan. It should also reinvigorate its nuclear diplomacy and assume a leadership role in the evolving global nuclear weapon regime.     

The Requirements of Nuclear Stability in South Asia

While recent history arguably demonstrates a high level of nuclear stability in South Asia, this article argues that this stability has historically been a function of India's relative weakness. It argues that, as India becomes stronger, attention must be paid to the technical and political requirements of nuclear stability: the reliability of weapons and command and control and the political conditions that underpin stable relations between nuclear-armed states. It concludes by recommending the United States aim to modify the perceptions of regional elites about their various intentions and decision-making processes and the role of the United States as crisis manager.     

China's Nuclear Forces and Their Significance to India

The Indian nuclear program is a response to a perceived politico-strategic threat from China as opposed to a military-operational one that New Delhi began after perceiving an “ultimatum” from China in 1965. Consequently, India is in the process of acquiring an assured second-strike capability vis-à-vis China to meet the requirements of general deterrence. While India has always been concerned about the Sino-Pakistani nuclear/missile nexus, China has become wary of the growing military ties between the United States and India in recent years, especially because of the military implications of the US-India civil nuclear deal. Given the growing conventional military gap between the two states, India is not lowering its nuclear threshold to meet the Chinese conventional challenge. Instead, India is upgrading its conventional military strategy from dissuasion to deterrence against China. While the overall Sino-Indian nuclear relationship is stable, it will be challenged as China acquires advanced conventional weapons that blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear conflict.     

Pakistan's Evolving Nuclear Weapon Posture

This essay provides an overview of the ongoing quantitative and qualitative changes in Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and their impact on deterrence stability vis-à-vis India. Prominent among these trends is a major expansion in fissile material production that enables the manufacture of lighter and more compact warheads optimized for battlefield missions; the development of cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles possessing dual-use capabilities; and a greater emphasis in doctrinal pronouncements on the need for strike options geared to all levels of conflict. Although these trends pose problematic ramifications for the risks of unauthorized and inadvertent escalation, deterrence stability in South Asia is not as precarious as many observers fear. The challenges of fashioning a robust nuclear peace between India and Pakistan cannot be lightly dismissed, however, and policy makers would do well to undertake some reinforcing measures.     

Is the Indian Nuclear Tiger Changing Its Stripes?

Sixteen years after stepping out of the nuclear closet, India's nuclear posture, some of its operational practices, and hardware developments are beginning to mimic those of the original five nuclear weapon states. Several proliferation scholars in the United States contend that India's national security managers are poised to repeat the worst mistakes of the superpowers’ Cold War nuclear competition, with negative consequences for deterrence, crisis, and stability in South Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. This article takes a contrarian view. It dissects the best available data to show why the alarmist view is overstated. It argues that not only are the alarmists’ claims unsupported by evidence, their interpretation of the skeletal and often contradictory data threatens to construct the very threat they prophesize.     

Combating Islamist radicalisation in South Africa

Is radical Islamism spreading in South Africa? The answer has to be an emphatic ‘yes’. When discussing issues of radicalisation in Africa, commentators often examine the case of Somalia's al-Shabaab or al-Qaeda's North African franchise, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Very little attention is paid to radicalisation amongst South Africa's Muslim population. Yet, there is growing evidence that South Africa has come to play an important role in global jihadi networks, from the provision of safehouses and identity documents to the movement of funds and the existence of paramilitary camps for local and foreign jihadis. This paper aims to briefly examine radicalisation and its attendant sources in the country, as well as seeking ways to combat it utilising lessons learned from other countries. ‘Institutional socialisation’ by means of the sources of radicalisation, as well as the concept of what could be termed ‘the democratisation of jihad’ are discussed. The author also proposes ways to combat radicalisation in South Africa utilising lessons learned from other countries, concluding that issues of radicalisation and deradicalisation have to be dealt with on the part of both government and the South African Muslim community.     

Size Still Matters: Explaining Sri Lanka’s Counterinsurgency Victory over the Tamil Tigers

The military effectiveness literature has largely dismissed the role of material preponderance in favor of strategic interaction theories. The study of counterinsurgency, in which incumbent victory is increasingly rare despite material superiority, has also turned to other strategic dynamics explanations like force employment, leadership, and insurgent/adversary attributes. Challenging these two trends, this paper contends that even in cases of counterinsurgency, material preponderance remains an essential—and at times the most important—factor in explaining battlefield outcomes and effectiveness. To test this, the paper turns to the case of the Sri Lankan state’s fight against the Tamil Tiger insurgency, a conflict which offers rich variation over time across six periods and over 25 years. Drawing on evidence from historical and journalistic accounts, interviews, memoirs, and field research, the paper demonstrates that material preponderance accounts for variation in military effectiveness and campaign outcomes (including military victory in the final campaign) better than strategic explanations. Additionally, a new quantitative data-set assembled on annual loss-exchange ratios demonstrates the superiority of materialist explanations above those of skill, human capital, and regime type.     

Brinkmanship,not COIN,in Pakistan’s post-9/11 Internal War

Politics is critical to making sense of Pakistani successes and failures in dealing with non-state armed groups. This includes domestic political currents; regional political currents; and the global impetus of the post-9/11 era. How these currents overlap renders to any reading of insurgency in Pakistan real complexity. This article engages with this complexity rather than shirking from it. Its hypothesis is that while the insurgency bordering Afghanistan has been an epicentre of Pakistani military efforts to fight the Taliban, this theatre is in of itself insufficiently inclusive to grasp the nature of Pakistan’s security challenges and its consequent responses.