Au cours d’un peu plus de deux décennies, la RDC, située au cœur de l’Afrique, dans la région des grands lacs, a été le théâtre des crimes de masse les plus violents. De nombreux rapports relatent les violations à grande échelle des droits de l’homme et du doit international humanitaire commises dans ce pays démontrent. Ils démontrent l’horreur innommable infligée aux populations civiles dans la partie Est du pays. ll s'agit notamment, de Bukavu, Fizi, Uvira Mugunga, Goma, Bénie, Rusthuru,Lubero, Walikale, Kisangani, Tingi-Tingi, Makobola, Ituri, Kiwanja, Kasai, Maniema, Shaba. Dans un contexte global de conflit et de trouble persistant, d’instabilité socio-économique et de crise politique profonde, la commission des crimes graves se trouve exacerbée par la présence des centaines de groupes armés politico-militaro-affairistes, des Forces Armées de la R.D.C., tous soutenus par des troupes étrangères et multinationales. L'environnement politique et sécuritaire empêche la justice congolaise d'évaluer dans la sérénité la quasi-totalité d’éléments de crimes sur le territoire en vue d’identifier les auteurs, d’établir les responsabilités, procéder à leur répression, assurer la réparation des nombreuses victimes et la réconciliation nationale. L'association d'autres formes de justice serait plus que nécessaire, toujours à travers la logique de la complémentarité de la CPI. / . For almost over two decades, the DRC, located in the heart of Africa, in the Great Lakes region, has benn the scene of the most violent crimes. Tremendous public and non government organizations have reported the large-scale violations international humanitarian law and human rights committed in this country. They display the horror inflicted upon the civilian populations in the eastern part of the country. These include amonsgt others the areas of Bukavu, Fizi, Uvira Mugunga, Goma, Béni, Rusthuru, Lubero, Walikale, Kisangani, Tingi-Tingi, Makobola, Ituri, Kiwanja, Kasaï, Maniema, Shaba. In a global context of conflict and persistent turmoil, socio-economic instability and deep political crisis, the commission of serious crimes is exacerbated by the presence of hundreds of armed politico-military-mercenary groups, the Armed Forces of the DRC, all supported by foreign and multinational troops. The currently political and security environment prevents the Congolese justice system from smoothly assessing all elements of crimes on the territory in order to identify the perpetrators, establish the responsibilities, carry out investigation and prosecution as well as legal proceedings, ensure the reparations to millions of victims and the national reconciliation at large. The combination of other forms of justice would be more than ever necessary through the logic of the complementarity of the ICC.

In this thesis we consider optimization problems with complementarity constraints in infinite-dimensional spaces. On the one hand, we deal with the general situation, in which the complementarity constraint is governed by a closed convex cone. We use the local decomposition approach, which is known from finite dimensions, to derive first-order necessary optimality conditions of strongly stationary type. In the non-polyhedric case, stronger conditions are obtained by an additional linearization argument. On the other hand, we consider the optimal control of the obstacle problem. This is a classical example for a problem with complementarity constraints in infinite dimensions. We are concerned with the control-constrained case. Due to the lack of surjectivity, a system of strong stationarity is not necessarily satisfied for all local minimizers. We identify assumptions on the data of the optimal control problem under which strong stationarity of local minimizers can be verified. Moreover, without any additional assumptions on the data, we show that a system of M-stationarity is satisfied provided that some sequence of multipliers converges in capacity. Finally, we also discuss the notion of polyhedric sets. These sets have many applications in infinite-dimensional optimization theory. Since the results concerning polyhedricity are scattered in the literature, we provide a review of the known results. Furthermore, we give some new results concerning polyhedricity of intersections and provide counterexamples which demonstrate that intersections of polyhedric sets may fail to be polyhedric. We also prove a new polyhedricity result for sets in vector-valued Sobolev spaces.

The evolution of the U.S. skill premium over the past century has been characterized by a U-shaped pattern. The previous literature has attributed this observation mainly to the existence of exogenous, unexpected technological shocks or changes in institutional factors. In contrast, this paper demonstrates that a U-shaped evolution of the skill premium can also be obtained using a simple two-sector growth model that comprises both variants of skill-biased technological change (SBTC): technological change (TC) that is favorable to high-skilled labor and capital-skill complementarity (CSC). Within this framework, we derive the conditions necessary to achieve a non-monotonic evolution of relative wages and analyze the dynamics of such a case. We show that in the short run for various parameter constellations an educational, a relative substitutability, and a factor intensity effect can induce a decrease in the skill premium despite moderate growth in the relative productivity of high-skilled labor. In the long run, as the difference in labor productivity increases, the skill premium also rises. To underpin our theoretical results, we conduct a comprehensive simulation study.

Questa tesi si compone di due capitoli indipendenti, ciascuno dei quali analizza il ruolo giocato dall’informazione pubblica endogenamente determinata in situazioni caratterizzate da decision-making decentralizzato e da complementarietà strategica. Il primo capitolo analizza un regime-change game, in cui un governo autoritario può influenzare il consenso popolare attraverso l’implementazione di uno strumento di policy. A policy implementata, i cittadini possono tentare di destituire il governo in carica attraverso una rivolta popolare, la cui probabilità di successo è proporzionale al numero di partecipanti, quest’ultimo proporzionale al livello medio di malcontento. Per migliorare l’efficacia del policy-making, il governo necessita di informazioni affidabili sul consenso popolare, tipicamente difficili da reperire. Tali informazioni sono potenzialmente destabilizzanti, poiché aiutano i cittadini a coordinare meglio la loro azione collettiva. I risultati suggeriscono che maggiore trasparenza è desiderabile ex ante per quei regimi che, in equilibrio, hanno maggiore probabilità di implementare delle politiche di consensus-building. Maggiori livelli di libertà di informazione dovrebbero quindi essere osservati in regimi né troppo deboli, né troppo forti. Il secondo capitolo propone un modello di bank run, in cui la presenza di un mercato secondario efficiente dal punto di vista informativo destabilizza una istituzione a priori solida, tramutando uno shock temporaneo di liquidità in una spirale di fire-sales. Gli investitori di un fondo open-ended posso richiedere la liquidazione anticipata delle proprie quote dopo aver ricevuto informazioni private riguardo alla qualità degli asset in portafogli. Per rimborsare le quote, il fund manager vende una quota di asset sul mercato secondario. I potenziali acquirenti estraggono informazione dall’osservazione dell’offerta aggregata: maggiori volumi d’offerta corrispondono ad un maggior numero di investitori pessimisti, e suggeriscono quindi che gli asset potrebbero essere di scarsa qualità. Temendo una spirale discendente dei prezzi, anche gli investitori meno pessimisti sono indotti, ex ante, a liquidare le proprie quote, ulteriormente sostenendo il feedback negativo. Quando l’informazione privata è sufficientemente imprecisa, complementarietà strategica nelle azioni degli investitori del fondo emerge endogenamente. / This dissertation consists of two essays, aimed at providing a sound theoretical investigation of the signaling role of (observed) collective behavior in environments characterized by incomplete information and strategic complementarity. The effects of both endogenous signaling and (the disclosure of) exogenous public information on the degree of coordination failure that arises from decentralized decision-making are analyzed in-depth. In the first chapter I analyze a regime-change game, where an authoritarian government can influence popular support via the implementation of costly policies. Citizens can challenge the government via a riot, whose chances to succeed increase with the unknown average popular discontent. In order to fine-tune its policy-making, the regime needs reliable information about popular consensus. Such information, however, improves the ability of citizens to coordinate their revolt. I show that public information is ex ante beneficial for those regimes which are more likely to build consensus via policy-making in equilibrium. Higher levels of media freedom should therefore be observed in regimes that are neither too weak, nor too strong. In the second chapter I study a bank run model, where the informational efficiency of a (secondary) financial market pushes into insolvency an a priori solvent institution after a temporary, non-fundamental liquidity shock. The most pessimistic investors of an open-ended fund are allowed to ask for the early liquidation of their share after receiving private information about the economic fundamentals of the fund’s portfolio of assets. Some of the assets in portfolio are sold in the secondary market to meet those investors’ requests. Higher volumes of early redemptions decrease both the current price, via a standard law-of-demand effect, and the future price, by signaling bad news to the market. Anticipating such effect, less pessimistic investors, too, opt for early liquidation, thus further exacerbating the price spiral. Strategic complementarity arises endogenously when investors’ private information is sufficiently poor. In this case, a spiral of fire sales is observed in equilibrium.

Les travaux menés sur les actifs et capacités marketing démontrent l'importance de ces ressources pour la performance des entreprises. Cependant les facteurs susceptibles de favoriser leur présence et les mécanismes par lesquels les entreprises organisent les ressources disponibles sont peu ou mal connus. Sur le plan théorique, ces deux questions de recherche relèvent d'une problématique commune visant à consolider les micro-fondations de la RBV. Sur le plan opérationnel, ces sujets revêtent une importance toute particulière pour les PME compte tenu des spécificités structurelles et organisationnelles de cette catégorie d'entreprises. L’objectif de la recherche consiste à étudier la présence et l'organisation de deux actifs marketing (la réputation et le capital relationnel clients) et de deux capacités marketing (les capacités support et spécialisées) au sein d'un échantillon représentatif de PME françaises. Les résultats issus de la première étude sur l'influence des facteurs de contingence internes et externes sur la présence de ces quatre ressources permettent de nuancer le poids du déterminisme des facteurs structurels (taille et âge) et confirment l’influence positive du capital humain et du profil stratégique. La deuxième étude porte sur les relations de complémentarité causale entre les quatre ressources marketing étudiées. Un modèle global de causalité permet de comprendre les mécanismes organisationnels sous-jacents à la création de la performance. Les résultats démontrent l'importance de certains couplages organisationnels et le rôle central qu’occupent les capacités support. L'identification de manière inductive de trois configurations-types de ressources marketing complète ces conclusions en permettant (a) d’approcher de manière plus contingente et plus réaliste l’organisation des actifs et capacités marketing étudiés et (b) de comparer la performance des trois configurations issues de la taxonomie. Sur le plan méthodologique, la recherche contribue à la littérature existante (a) via le développement et la validation d’un nouvel instrument de mesure et (b) via la mise en œuvre d’une méthode de segmentation PLS pour la réalisation de la classification inductive. / The importance of assets and marketing capabilities on performance is largely acknowledged but questions remain regarding the resources endowments and complementarities, especially within SMEs. On a theoretical level, these two research questions stem from the same efforts to solidify the micro-foundations of the RBV. These topics are of particular importance for SMEs given their structural and organizational specificities. The present study therefore studies the presence and the organization of two marketing assets (the reputation and the customer relationship capital) and two marketing capabilities (the support and specialized marketing capabilities) within a representative sample of French SMEs. The study of the influence of internal and external contingency factors on the presence of these four resources does not confirm the determinism of the structural factors (such as size and age) but confirms the crucial role of factors such as the human capital characteristics and the strategic profile. The study of the causal relationships complementarities among the four resources demonstrates the importance of certain organizational linkages and the crucial influence on performance of the architectural marketing capabilities. In order to better contextualize these conclusions, an inductive classification of three marketing configurations is proposed and discussed. This research contributes to the existing literature through the development and the validation of several new scales and the innovative use of a PLS Path Modeling approach to identify three classes of marketing resources configurations.

Real-time optimization (RTO) is a supervisory strategy in the hierarchical industrial process automation architecture in which economically optimal set-point targets are computed for the lower level advanced control system, which is typically model predictive control (MPC). Due to highly volatile market conditions, recent developments have considered transforming the conventional steady-state RTO to dynamic RTO (DRTO) to permit economic optimization during transient operation. Published DRTO literature optimizes plant input trajectories without taking into account the presence of the plant control system, constituting an open-loop DRTO (OL-DRTO) approach. The goal of this research is to develop a design framework for a DRTO system that optimizes process economics based on a closed-loop response prediction. We focus, in particular, on DRTO applied to a continuous process operation regulated under constrained MPC. We follow a two-layer DRTO/MPC configuration due to its close tie to the industrial process automation architecture. We first analyze the effects of optimizing MPC closed-loop response dynamics at the DRTO level. A rigorous DRTO problem structure proposed in this thesis is in the form of a multilevel dynamic optimization problem, as it embeds a sequence of MPC optimization subproblems to be solved in order to generate the closed-loop prediction in the DRTO formulation, denoted here as a closed-loop DRTO (CL-DRTO) strategy. A simultaneous solution approach is applied in which the convex MPC optimization subproblems are replaced by their necessary and sufficient, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions, resulting in the reformulation of the original multilevel problem as a single-level mathematical program with complementarity constraints (MPCC) with the complementarities handled using an exact penalty formulation. Performance analysis is carried out, and process conditions under which the CL-DRTO strategy significantly outperforms the traditional open-loop counterpart are identified. The multilevel DRTO problem with a rigorous inclusion of the future MPC calculations significantly increases the size and solution time of the economic optimization problem. Next, we identify and analyze multiple closed-loop approximation techniques, namely, a hybrid formulation, a bilevel programming formulation, and an input clipping formulation applied to an unconstrained MPC algorithm. Performance analysis based on a linear dynamic system shows that the proposed approximation techniques are able to substantially reduce the size and solution time of the rigorous CL-DRTO problem, while largely retaining its original performance. Application to an industrially-based case study of a polystyrene production described by a nonlinear differential-algebraic equation (DAE) system is also presented. Often large-scale industrial systems comprise multi-unit subsystems regulated under multiple local controllers that require systematic coordination between them. Utilization of closed-loop prediction in the CL-DRTO formulation is extended for application as a higher-level, centralized supervisory control strategy for coordination of a distributed MPC system. The advantage of the CL-DRTO coordination formulation is that it naturally considers interaction between the underlying MPC subsystems due to the embedded controller optimization subproblems while optimizing the overall process dynamics. In this case, we take advantage of the bilevel formulation to perform closed-loop prediction in two DRTO coordination schemes, with variations in the coordinator objective function based on dynamic economics and target tracking. Case study simulations demonstrate excellent performance in which the proposed coordination schemes minimize the impact of disturbance propagation originating from the upstream subsystem dynamics, and also reduce the magnitude of constraint violation through appropriate adjustment of the controller set-point trajectories. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

This dissertation presents an analytical literature study regarding the relationship between the International Criminal Court and the proposed International Criminal Law Section of the African Court. The realisation of the International Criminal Law Section of the African Court will place itself and the International Criminal Court within the same jurisdictional sphere with regard to the adjudication of international customary law crimes with respect to its African member states. It is noteworthy to point out that this complexity is fraught with political turmoil regarding Africa, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations Security Council. This complex issue has been acutely recognised by numerous academics and law experts. Neither the Rome Statute nor the Protocol makes any reference towards each other, leaving its respective African member states with the daunting and ambiguous task of navigating through this complexity in isolation. This dissertation aims to investigate, analyse and ultimately offer a plausible solution to this immediate concern. In order to accomplish the aforementioned, this study will firstly investigate and evaluate both constitutional treaties of both international courts, respectively. The issue pertaining to the endowment of immunity will also be separately evaluated, considering the conflicting approaches followed by both judicial institutions. Ultimately, all previous sections will be analysed in order to recommend amendments to the Protocol to align itself with international law and settled international practice. A complementarity scheme will be introduced on the basis of the progressive interpretation of positive complementarity to harmonise both courts within the same jurisdictional sphere. Lastly, this dissertation will be concluded by remarks recapitalising the main findings. / LLM, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This dissertation presents an analytical literature study regarding the relationship between the International Criminal Court and the proposed International Criminal Law Section of the African Court. The realisation of the International Criminal Law Section of the African Court will place itself and the International Criminal Court within the same jurisdictional sphere with regard to the adjudication of international customary law crimes with respect to its African member states. It is noteworthy to point out that this complexity is fraught with political turmoil regarding Africa, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations Security Council. This complex issue has been acutely recognised by numerous academics and law experts. Neither the Rome Statute nor the Protocol makes any reference towards each other, leaving its respective African member states with the daunting and ambiguous task of navigating through this complexity in isolation. This dissertation aims to investigate, analyse and ultimately offer a plausible solution to this immediate concern. In order to accomplish the aforementioned, this study will firstly investigate and evaluate both constitutional treaties of both international courts, respectively. The issue pertaining to the endowment of immunity will also be separately evaluated, considering the conflicting approaches followed by both judicial institutions. Ultimately, all previous sections will be analysed in order to recommend amendments to the Protocol to align itself with international law and settled international practice. A complementarity scheme will be introduced on the basis of the progressive interpretation of positive complementarity to harmonise both courts within the same jurisdictional sphere. Lastly, this dissertation will be concluded by remarks recapitalising the main findings. / LLM, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

In this dissertation I shall give a brief historical survey of Black Theology and the African Independent Churches (AI Cs). The study focuses mainly to the developments of the two trends in South Africa. This was done after realising that Black Theologians often ignored the history of Black people, including that of the AI Cs which has in the end stymied their efforts. The immediate effects were negative in that little results were produced. ATCs and Black Theology have interesting histories which complement each another. I will present the current state of affairs and give some guidelines on how the future debate can be carried out. The two theological trends have weaknesses and strengths which are clearly identifiable. In chapter four I give guidelines for future debates and possible new developments. This study is also carried out to expand the scope of dialogue and constructive debate among the two. / Missiology / M. Th. (Missiology)