<p> America&rsquo;s longest war will end in defeat, but it is still possible to achieve a tolerable outcome to the war in Afghanistan. The United States must decide the best alternative for ending the war and it must decide now. The U.S. has limited time to make meaningful progress on the negotiation front before completing its withdrawal from Afghanistan. This study analyzes whether or not the U.S. should negotiate with the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan and the defense policy implications this decision has on U.S. national security. </p>

No description available.

<p> This dissertation focuses on the effects of a third-party mediator in protracted conflict settings. I primarily use formal models based on game theory and mechanism design, employing case studies and empirical work to further my analysis. The question of mediation effectiveness in the literature is still an open one, addressed empirically but with little theoretical support. While some work has emphasized the important role of enforcement, there is no consensus as to whether, how and why these tactics work. I use formal modeling to examine the mediator's enforcement ability and show the ways in which manipulative mediation can in fact improve upon bilateral results. </p><p> The first chapter examines the use of different types of enforcement in conflict mediation. This paper compares potential outcomes of bilateral negotiations with the outcomes achievable with the help of a mediator capable of various levels of enforcement, seeking to gain insight into how to end ongoing war using a signaling framework. I find that a mediator with sufficient enforcement capabilities can improve on the bilateral outcome, perhaps creating peace that would not have been possible bilaterally. However, while exhibiting enforcement capabilities can help a mediator to mandate peace in the short term, there can sometimes be a lower likelihood of lasting results, consistent with stylized facts about mediation. </p><p> The second chapter models conditions for efficiency gains from third-party conflict mediation when concessions are risky. Each party engaged in a conflict can indicate its interest in peace through costly signaling, or concessions. Through a formal model, I explore ways in which a mediator can act as a guarantor that promised concessions will be delivered, thereby reducing inefficiencies and increasing the potential for peace. In this process, I open up a rationale for mediation: to remove the inefficiencies of signaling in the pre-play round of negotiations. </p><p> The third chapter uses a game-theoretic framework to explain the persistence of de facto independent states that are not internationally recognized. This paper uses a four-player, game-theoretic framework to model the stalemates that often arise between the secessionist elite and home state central government and leverages this model to explore paths to settlement. We emphasize the pivotal role of an outside patron in sustaining unrecognized statehood as a stable equilibrium, but we also argue that the international community is capable of inducing peaceful settlement in these conflicts if it is sufficiently motivated to do so.</p>

The Royal Society of London, the English scientific society founded in 1660, was involved in a number of disputes in the seventeenth century concerning who was the first person to make an invention or discovery. These priority disputes had a significant effect on the careers of most of the prominent figures in the early Royal Society, including Newton, Boyle and Hooke. Inventions and discoveries were the foundation of the Royal Society?s reputation, and thus needed to be claimed and protected in priority disputes. The subjects of these disputes ranged from solutions to mathematical problems to high-profile experiments. Such disputes frequently pitted Fellows of the Royal Society against intellectuals from the Continent. They were occasions for polemics framed in nationalistic terms, despite the collaborative spirit with which the transnational Republic of Letters purported to operate. This thesis examines how the Royal Society?s priority disputes began, how they functioned once underway, and how they concluded. It focuses on disputes between the Royal Society and its continental rivals, seeking to determine the extent to which nationalism was a factor. It argues that Society members, who were always guided by multiple loyalties, valued their loyalties to themselves, to the Society and to the English nation more than their loyalty to the Republic of Letters. Other social factors that motivated the disputants are also explored, including honour, credibility, and the Society?s ideal of aversion to conflict. This thesis highlights patterns in the behaviour of the participants of seventeenth-century priority disputes. It draws on methodology used in the sociology of science to analyze these patterns, examining the social construction involved in invention and discovery. Case studies are used to illustrate how the participants in priority disputes redefined several entities in ways that suited their own claims to priority: the invention or discovery being disputed, the etiquette of the Republic of Letters, the distinction between invention and innovation, and priority itself. Particular attention is paid to the activities of Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, who communicated on behalf of the Royal Society through his correspondence network and the journal he edited, the Philosophical Transactions. This thesis argues that the Royal Society valued Oldenburg in part for his role in instigating priority disputes with non-English intellectuals, a role to which he was well-suited on account of his many contacts in England and on the Continent, his rhetorical skills, and his experience as a diplomat. It also analyzes the roles of experts like John Wallis and Timothy Clarke in priority disputes, arguing that Oldenburg could call upon them to defend English priority. However, it is noted that these figures (especially Wallis) sometimes abandoned the façade of English unity in favour of causes that affected them more personally, including their own priority claims. Accordingly, they employed the same polemical style in domestic priority disputes that they did in international ones. This study concludes with the suggestion that the polemics of figures like Oldenburg, Clarke and Wallis were crucial to the program of the seventeenth-century Royal Society because conflict, the idea of aversion to conflict notwithstanding, was an acknowledged and valued part of early Royal Society culture.

No description available.

<p>The objective of this study was to examine and review the main features and works of the arbitration and conciliation working group of UNCITRAL while demonstrating their impact on international trade.</p>

Metaphors have long shaped the way pure translation studies describe and justify the translation phenomenon by discovering and consolidating underlying principles. Ultimately, by means of metaphor, something that dwells on the interaction of two seemingly distinct things, translation theorists have obtained a better understanding of the category of translation. Human beings are gregarious, and disputes are inevitable in every society, ancient or modern, primitive or civilized. In fact, conflict is one iron law of life that mankind has had to improvise ways of resolving, from such formal ones as litigation to private ones such as self-help. We may not be able to eliminate dispute altogether, but we can, however, resolve it through creative and civilized means. Translation can be approached in a similar context, except it concerns a metaphorical dispute between cultures and/or languages—and probably on a more intangible and subtle platform. Disparate cultures, religions and languages in a clash can be brought closer to each other with skillful translation, and hence, translation is a variation of dispute resolution. That never went totally unnoticed. Over the years, countless translation metaphors have been constructed and exploited with very different results, which indicates how interdisciplinary a subject translation studies really is. Yet, apparently, translation is most often metaphorized as mediation and negotiation but rarely as arbitration or litigation, and one cannot but wonder whether this happened out of sheer coincidence or because of some misunderstanding. Thus, much as I appreciate what theorists have accomplished with translation metaphors, in regard to didactics and heuristics, my primitive observation is that translation theorists and practitioners have never made full use of metaphorization in that they might have had an incomplete idea of dispute resolution theory in general. After all, a metaphor is, ideally, meant to facilitate active learning and full integration of new knowledge, but there still remains a missing piece that is part and parcel of our metaphorization of translation. Specifically, translators have always embraced the amicable terms of negotiation and mediation, distancing themselves from non-mainstream ones such as arbitration and litigation. To that end, in my thesis, I will explore and examine translation through slightly renewed lenses, demonstrating how and why our metaphor schema and mapping should originate in dispute resolution, and why litigation, and perhaps even arbitration as dispute resolution mechanisms, would serve as good a metaphor—if not a better one—for translation. It is my resolute belief that the translator is more qualified as a judge, a respectable professional vested with immense judicial power, than as a mediator, who is but a third-party neutral facilitating dialogue between two disputants. Only in this way can metaphors do translation theory a great service by furnishing it with a renewed and objective description of translation.

This thesis investigates the potential and emerging roles of the Social Economy at the level of global governance by examining how transnational civil society (TCS) has organized in an attempt to influence global policy-making. One of this study’s principal aims is to glean insights into the dynamics of civil society coalitions, gaining a better understanding of how they combine the collective knowledge, resources and strengths of members and drawing out some of the “best practices” and challenges inherent in past civil society alliances. This study seeks to explore the complex nature of the relationships that exist among civil society actors and the unique challenges such groups face in forming partnerships by examining these relationships through the lens of Inter-Group Conflict Theory. A Case Study of one TCS partnership, the Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign, is conducted and an Inter-Group Dispute Resolution Analysis of MPH is carried out.

No description available.

<p>The main aim of the research was to determine the viability of retaliation as a trade remedy under the Dispute Settlement Understanding. It was to establish whether retaliation as a remedy is beneficial to the entire WTO membership and system. The specific objectives were: to examine the feasibility of damages as an alternative remedy to retaliation / to determine whether there is a need to revise the Dispute Settlement Understanding, for it to adopt a more development friendly approach to dispute resolution / to make recommendations regarding the improvement of the Dispute Settlement Understanding.</p>