This thesis focuses on whether protest affects the levels of repression in electoral democracies and, if so, in what manner. After an overview of the literature, Chapter 2 contains an empirical analysis of the relationship between protest and repression at a global level, using a dataset of 71 democracies over 10 years. The results point to a positive association between protest and repression that is driven primarily by post-1974 democracies. The chapter then develops a theoretical model of the costs and benefits accruing to a democratic leader when deciding whether to repress a protest. The model yields a number of testable hypotheses about which factors will affect the likelihood that repression will be chosen, which are then tested for using cross-national and sub-national data. The impact of constitutional constraints is examined first using the cross-national dataset, which reveals that executives in new democracies centralise power in response to protest. Chapter 4 is a quantitative study of the 27 Brazilian states over a 9-year period using data on the repression of land protesters and political variables. The results indicate that governors with precarious political positions are less likely to promote repressive policing strategies. Chapter 5 uses data drawn from five Brazilian national newspapers to identify whether under-reporting of land protest events might contribute to the level of state repression. Chapter 6 is a qualitative comparison of two states – São Paulo and Pará – and suggests that while tight political control over the police explains repression in the former, the unaccountability of the police and the ideology of the main opposition parties in the state assembly may explain why the latter has a much higher level of repression than would be predicted by political factors alone. Chapter 7 revisits the cross-national dataset of 71 democracies to test whether additional determinants of repression identified in Chapter 6 have an effect at the global level.

This work sets out to critically reconstruct human rights as both an ethical ideal and a political practice. I critique conventional moral justifications of human rights and the related role they play in legitimating political authority, arguing that the pluralism and political content of human rights cannot be eliminated. I reconstruct the relationship between ethics and politics through an engagement with pragmatist and pluralist moral theory, which I then develop into a democratising account of human rights by incorporating work on agonistic democracy. The resulting view of human rights is situated and agonistic, seeing the act of claiming human rights as a political act that makes demands on the social order in the name of a particular ethical ideal. Rather than seeing the political act of claiming rights as undermining human rights as universal moral principles, it becomes essential to global ethics as such. The international political aspect of rights is then examined by looking to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in historical context, and contrasting human rights practice as expressed in popular social movements with conventional state-centric and legalist accounts. In the end the defence of human rights that is offered aims to preserve the transformative power of human rights claims, their democratising content, while undermining their totalising tendency, in which a singular conception of humanity provides certain moral principles to legitimate political authority.

Internet Telephony defined as real time voice or multimediacommunications over packet switched networks dates back to theearly days of the Internet. ARPA's Network SecureCommunications project had implemented, as early as December1973, an infrastructure for local and transnet real time voicecommunication. Two main sets of standards have emerged: H. 323from the ITU-T and the session initiation protocol (SIP) fromthe Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Both includespecifications for value added services. Value added services,or more simply services, are critical to service providers'survival and success. Unfortunately, the service architecturesthat come with the ITU-T and the IETF sets of standards arerather weak. Although they are constantly evolving,alternatives and complements need to be researched. This thesiswhich is made up of a formal dissertation and 6 appendices,proposes a novel mobile agent based service architecture forInternet Telephony. The architecture addresses the issues noneof the existing architectures solves in a satisfactory manner.Furthermore it adds mobile agents to the panoply of servicecreation tools. The appendices are reprints of articlespublished in refereed magazines/journals or under considerationfor publication. The formal dissertation is a summary of thepublications. A consistent and comprehensive set ofrequirements are derived. They are TINA-C flavored, but adaptedto Internet Telephony. They are used to critically reviewrelated work and also used to motivate the use of mobile agentsas the pillars of a novel architecture. The components of thisnovel architecture are identified. The key component is themobile service agent. It acts as a folder and carriesservice(s) to which the end-user has subscribed. Mobile serviceagents need to be upgraded when new versions of service logicare available and when end-users make changes to service data.This thesis proposes a novel upgrading framework. The currentInternet infrastructure comprises a wide range of hosts. Mobileagent platforms are now available for most of thesehosts/clients including memory/processing power constrainedPDAs. Our mobile service agents need to adapt to hostvariability when roaming. A novel adaptivity framework is alsoproposed. These two frameworks are general and can be appliedto any other mobile agent which meets a basic set ofassumptions. A key advantage of a mobile agent based servicearchitecture is that it enables the developement of mobileagent based services. The thesis proposes a novel mobile agentbased multi-party session scheduler. The feasibility and theadvantages of the architecture proposed by this thesis havebeen demonstrated by a prototype on which measurements havebeen made. Future work includes the addition of a securityframework to the architecture, and refinenements to theupgrading and adaptivity frameworks. More mobile agent basedservices, especially mobile multi agent based services willalso be developed. / <p>NR 20140805</p>

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Une jeune femme handicapée est retrouvée morte à son domicile. Sa mesure de protection arrivée à son terme n'avait pu être renouvelée. Or cette personne par ses déficiences était incapable de subvenir à ses besoins les plus élémentaires. C'est pourquoi se retrouvant sans appui extérieur d'un tuteur, elle s'était laissée mourir de faim. On pourrait donc se demander légitimement par quelle aberration la mesure de cette majeure avait pris fin. La réponse en est un véritable leitmotiv : le manque de moyens des tribunaux pour assurer le suivi et le contrôle des mesures de protection et notamment leur renouvellement. Un manque de moyens que rencontre finalement tous les acteurs de la tutelle qui en dépit de cela doivent faire face aux impératifs imposés par la réforme du 5 mars 2007 : le respect des libertés et des traits fondamentaux de la personne. Presque un impossible défi quand on sait qu'il n'y a pas de protection sans contrainte. La protection et - c'est le plus grand risque pour l'individu - peut enfermer, avilir, nier la personne. La réforme avait pour objectif de remettre la personne au centre du dispositif, de rechercher son épanouissement, d'assurer l'effectivité de ses droits. Y est-on parvenu? Le bilan est plutôt mitigé. Les pratiques et la vision parfois ancestrale du traitement de la déficience demeurent bien ancrés ouvrant la porte à la spoliation et à la maltraitance. A l'heure, où l'on fêtera les dix ans de la loi ne pourrait-on se saisir de l'occasion pour faire de la loi le rempart contre les atteintes aux plus faibles ? Il faut l'espérer car le phénomène concernera bientôt un million de personnes. Il sera dans un premier temps analysé comment, par l'élaboration d'un statut général de protection et la recherche de l'autonomie du majeur vulnérable, la loi n° 2007-308 du 5 mars 2007 a permis une avancée certaine en termes de primauté de la personne et de ses droits. Dans un second temps, seront envisagées les limites à apporter à la protection afin que celle-ci ne se retourne pas contre le majeur vulnérable. / A young disabled woman is found dead at her home. Her measure of protection concluded could not be renewed. However this person by her disabilities was unable to meet her basic needs. That's why finding themselves without outside support of a tutor, she was left to starve. We wonders therefore legitimately by what aberration this measure as had been terminated. The answer is a real leitmotiv: the lack of resources of the courts to ensure the monitoring and contrai of protection measures and including their renewel. A lack of resources meet finally everyone in the guardianship who nevertheless face the imperatives imposed by the reform of March 5, 2007: respect for freedoms and fundamental rights of the person. Almost an impossible challenge when we know that there is no protection without constraint. Protection and - this is the biggest risk for the individual - can Iock up, debase, deny the person. The reform was intended to surrender the person to the center of the device, search for its development, to ensure the effectiveness of its rights. ls it managed? The record is actually a half tint. Practices and sometimes ancestral vision of the treatment of disability remain entrenched opening the door to plunder and abuse. Time, where you will celebrate ten years of the Act cou Id we not seizing the opportunity to make the Bill the bulwark against attacks on the weakest? lt was hoped because the phenomenon will soon be a million people. lt therefore seemed interesting at first to analyse how by the development of a general status of protection and research of the autonomy of the major vulnerable, the law No. 2007-308 of 5 March 2007 helped a certain advance in terms of primacy of the individual and his rights. However in a second time, it will be necessary to focus on the limits the protection so that it does not turn against the major vulnerable.

This thesis extends our understanding of a ‘puzzle of participation’ (Brody 1978). Across established Western democracies, turnout in elections has been steadily falling - at the same time, society is modernising. Central to this latter phenomenon is educational expansion, a process in which there is increased higher education (HE) enrolment, rising attainment levels, and even wider citizenship education. Under classic civic education hypotheses, such factors are anticipated to increase political literacy, raise electoral interest, and provide encouraging environments for political participation. Hence, the patterns we observe in turnout present as paradoxical. This is especially evident among the very youngest electors, who comprise arguably the most educated generation yet but are also the least likely to vote. The thesis thus poses the question: Why is the comparatively higher level of education enjoyed by young people today not associated with a higher level of voter turnout? My response takes inspiration from Norris’s ‘critical citizens’ (1999, 2011) and combines this with repertoire replacement (Dalton 2008; Norris 2003) and sorting model (Nie et al 1996) theories to develop an argument based on a multiplicity of education effects on turnout. Specifically, I present a thesis which contends that higher levels of education today encourage the emergence of a non-voting disaffected citizenry, characterised by two distinct dimensions. The first, a dissatisfied-disaffection is thought to be present among growing student populations. It is this demographic group which, in response to its members’ HE experiences, is challenging established political processes, becoming more demanding of an active role in politics, and turning to alternative participation activities when opportunities arise. Within this I posit two non-voter types: (a) frustrated electors, committed to voting yet exasperated by the responsiveness of political actors and their policy offers at elections, and (b) engaged activists, pointedly rejecting voting in favour of more direct and ongoing influencing activities. The second dimension reflects alienated-disaffection. Here, individuals who lack HE experience are seeing their status and position decline in line with educational inflation, and, as a consequence, experience limited political network mobilisation, find their confidence for participation falling, and so withdraw from politics altogether. They are marginalised citizens. Meanwhile, a number of young people will continue to vote, receiving encouragement from their social networks and partisan attachments; mobilised voters. This thesis makes its contributions in testing and refining these propositions in the case of the British electorate using data from the British Election Study, British Participation Survey, and the Citizens in Transition Survey. Through a range of statistical techniques (including logistic regression, latent class analysis, and structural equation modelling) I devise new ways of operationalising disaffection, and assess its varied impact on turnout. This thesis progresses to explore typologies of participation repertoires, within which combinations of disaffection attitudes and turnout behaviours exist. It then examines in more detail the educational mechanisms through which these occur.

TITLE: Videoconference at school AUTHOR: Petr Karadžos DEPARTMENT: Department of technical and informatics education SUPERVISOR: doc. RNDr. František Lustig, CSc. ABSTRACT: The theoretical goal is based on overview of videoconferencing solutions regarding to usage in educational process and overview of application videoconferencing solutions. Moreover, theory part is also focused on how videoconferences are working according to technical background. The descriptions of signaling process between two or more ending points and how are multimedia data transmitted during videoconference calls. The topic of practical part is to analyze how videoconferences can be used as technical educational tools in learning environment based on videoconferencing pilot project. KEYWORDS: Videoconferencing, H.323, SIP, webinar, multimedia, ICT, Multicast, Moodle, GoToWebinar

Although studies in scholarly journals suggest that corporate philanthropic activities may enhance corporate reputation, little systematic research on this effect exists. In fact, our knowledge of consumer responses to corporate philanthropic initiatives is limited. While corporate success relies on the support of customers, business benefits from corporate generosity - such as improved corporate reputation - are lacking. This dissertation investigates consumer perceptions of corporate philanthropy. Specifically, it explores the congruence among consumer perceptions of different philanthropic cause types, their geographical deployment, and the company-cause fit. Moreover, it aims to provide an understanding of the link between corporate philanthropy and corporate reputation by highlighting the role of ethnocentrism in shaping this relationship. The empirical research draws on balance theory, the sociological concept of ethnocentrism, and cultural dimensions to provide a framework and model for the relationship between consumer Attitudes toward Corporate Philanthropy and Customer-based Corporate Reputation. I employ three methodological approaches (interpretive, experimental, and survey-based) to investigate three sets of research questions. Firstly, an exploratory design is employed to uncover consumer and corporate perceptions of corporate philanthropy. Secondly, an experimental design is used to shed light on consumer evaluations of different corporate philanthropic causes and their dimensions by testing three propositions. Finally, a survey design is applied to test six hypotheses, and consequently to provide an understanding of the link between corporate philanthropy and corporate reputation in two distinct cultural contexts. The latter consists of two large-scale surveys in which two leading telecommunication companies, one in Austria and one in Egypt, are examined. Data is analyzed by applying qualitative computing, nonparametric tests, regression analyses, and structural equation modeling. Three consumer views emerge from the interviews: egoistic, altruistic, and pragmatic. The corporate view, in contrast, is largely of strategic nature (i.e. gaining sustainable competitive advantage by means of responsible management). Some weak ethnocentric tendencies appear in terms of consumer preferences for domestic philanthropic support as opposed to distant support. Furthermore, findings point toward congruence in the perceived importance of social causes by consumers, with health-related causes favored most and art-related causes least. The geographical focus of corporate philanthropy (i.e. domestic versus distant) is perceived differently for the education-related cause across all seven industries examined in the experiment. For other causes, however, such as health- or environment-related causes, a significant difference is found in the oil and consulting industries, respectively. This indicates that consumers' evaluation of corporate philanthropic activities is partially dependent on the geographical focus. Additionally, results confirm the existence of weak industry-specific preferences. The support of causes with a close fit to the core business is favored by consumers unless another cause type (less industry-related) is perceived as more worthy of support. In terms of corporate reputation, corporate philanthropy has a small to medium impact on perceptions of the corporation in Egypt and Austria, respectively, varying by respondent subgroup. Consumer Ethnocentrism impacts upon Attitude toward Corporate Philanthropy negatively in Egypt, while in Austria, the absence of Consumer Ethnocentrism moderates the relationship between Attitude toward Corporate Philanthropy and Customer-based Corporate Reputation positively and more strongly than moderate Consumer Ethnocentrism. The research presented in this dissertation advances the extant literature in three important ways. First, it focuses on a relatively neglected area of corporate social responsibility, namely corporate philanthropy - an unconditional contribution by a corporation to a social cause. Second, it embraces corporate reputation as a multidimensional construct (as opposed to a unidimensional construct) and thus contributes to the relatively few studies within reputation measurement that exclusively address the consumer stakeholder group (e.g. Walsh et al. 2009). Furthermore, to best of my knowledge, no scholarly research has examined the relationship between corporate philanthropy and Customer-based Corporate Reputation to date. Third, by examining real customers and real-life companies, this work aims to overcome the limitations of the laboratory settings that have traditionally been preferred in this area of research. For managers, the findings offer valuable consumer insights into corporate philanthropy and indicate strategies to improve business outcomes from philanthropic activities. Suggestions for how corporate philanthropic activities should best be communicated through various channels are provided. In this context, the role of word-of-mouth and social media in disseminating philanthropic information is discussed. (author's abstract)

The demand for natural gas has been growing much faster than the demand for other primary resources and it is expected that the European Union (EU)&amp / #8217 / s dependency on natural gas will continue to grow. For this reason gas supply security policy has been more important lately than before on the European political agenda in securing a smooth supply of gas. According to the EU external policy directives, EU natural gas energy security can be enhanced by diversifying geographical origin as well as transit routes. Turkey in that concept was assumed as one of the important transit hub countries to reach the new sources in the Azerbaijan and Central Asia region as well as in the Middle East. However, the transportation of gas from this region to Europe through the new route via Turkey has become very complex issue in terms of technical and political point of view arising from suppliers within their export policy and from the U.S&amp / #8217 / s bilateral sanctions. This dissertation argues that under the present circumstances especially due to the difficulties in the supplier side being a major transit gas hub country will be very difficult for Turkey combined with the increasing internal gas demand in the next decade.

Die grundlegende Annahme der Arbeit lautet, dass nicht, wie bei der Mehrzahl der Konzepte in der Wirtschaftsethik angenommen, ein fundamentalen Antagonismus zwischen ökonomischer Rationalität und Moral existiert, sondern, dass Ethik und Ökonomik zwei Systeme sind, die zwar unterschiedliche Codes aufweisen, sich jedoch ineinander übersetzen lassen. Auf der wissenschaftstheoretischen Basis des Kritischen Rationalismus und einer nonkognitivistischen Ethik-Konzeption werden folgende Thesen herausgearbeitet: Erstens: (&amp;quot;Starke&amp;quot; These): Moralisch erwünschtes Handeln resultiert allein aus Handeln gemäß ökonomischer Rationalität. Zweitens: (&amp;quot;Schwache&amp;quot; These): Lässt sich die erste These nicht oder nicht durchgehend nachweisen, so ist, neben ökonomischer Rationalität, lediglich eine Norm, nämlich die der Ausgangsgleichheit aller Menschen, erforderlich, um moralisch erwünschtes Handeln zu implementieren. Mit Hilfe von Erkenntnissen der Evolutionsbiologie und Analyseinstrumenten der Ökonomik, wie beispielsweise der Principal-Agent-Theorie, gelangt der Verfasser zu folgenden Ergebnissen: Unter idealen Bedingungen benötigt Moral im Ergebnis keine Moral in der Intention, um implementiert werden zu können - ausreichend ist allein die ökonomische Rationalität. Unter realen Bedingungen liefert die Ökonomie alle notwendigen Instrumente, um die ökonomische Rationalität so zu transformieren, dass moralisch wünschenswerte Ergebnisse erreicht werden. Nur wenn diese Instrumente versagen, benötigt Moral im Ergebnis zusätzlich die Gleichheitsnorm, um implementiert werden zu können.