82 research outputs found
ELITE CONFLICTS AND THE CHALLENGE OF DEVELOPMENT IN IDOMALAND 1900-2000
No full textThe work examines the role of Idoma elite on the question of development in the area against the background of the high level of poverty and underdevelopment that the land has and is still witnessing. Having produced reputable sons and daughters who have held and are holding several esteemed administrative and political positions both in the state, and Nigeria at large, Idomaland is expected to be among the most developed societies in Nigeria. However, with the combination of both oral interviews, personal observations and consultations of Newspapers, magazines, articles and books, the work submits that, Idomaland is at its level of underdevelopment and abject poverty because its elite who are suppose to serve as agents of development, turned out to be agents of mass deprivation, because of constant misunderstanding among themselves, as a result of ideological differences and thought patterns which has derailed them from forming a coherent formidable force to pursue agendas that will attract development to the land.. To this end, the work contends that: although absolute eradication of conflicts from and among societal elites is unattainable, its management in terms of forgiveness, unity of purpose, redistribution of power etc is suggested to enhance societal development which Idomaland is in dire need of. particularly in the emergent democratic governance in Nigeria
African traditional system of government and its efficacy in governance: A comparative analysis of Idomaland Ojira and Igboland Aladinma/Oha
No full textEmerging trends in governance particularly in post-Colonial Africa have continued to show a display of a high level of inefficiency in the adopted and practiced Western system of government. While much has been suggested as lead factors for these inefficiencies, little or nothing has been done concerning the strangeness of these adopted European systems of Government in Africa. This paper examines the two traditional systems of governance: Ojira and Aladinma/Oha to explore their differences, practices, and efficiency in the administration of pre-colonial Idomaland/Igboland of present-day Nigeria. Adopting the use of historical qualitative methodology, this paper holds that: although these pre-colonial African systems of governance had their challenges, their efficacy in administering the populace before European incursion cannot be overemphasized. To this end, the paper suggests that rather than continue in these European-styled systems of governance that have led Africans nowhere, attempts should be made to incorporate the indigenous African system of governance into modern government to increase and accelerate good governance and development
Know this: today's most interesting and important scientific ideas, discoveries, and developments
No full textToday's most visionary thinkers reveal the cutting-edge scientific ideas and breakthroughs you must understand. Scientific developments radically change and enlighten our understanding of the world -- whether it's advances in technology and medical research or the latest revelations of neuroscience, psychology, physics, economics, anthropology, climatology, or genetics. And yet amid the flood of information today, it's often difficult to recognize the truly revolutionary ideas that will have lasting impact. In the spirit of identifying the most significant new theories and discoveries, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website" -- The Guardian), asked 198 of the finest minds What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important? Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond on the best way to understand complex problems * author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics Carlo Rovelli on the mystery of black holes * Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the quantification of human progress * TED Talks curator Chris J. Anderson on the growth of the global brain * Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall on the true measure of breakthrough discoveries * Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on why the twenty-first century will be shaped by our mastery of the laws of matter * philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on the underestimation of female genius * music legend Peter Gabriel on tearing down the barriers between imagination and reality * Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson on the surprising ability of small (and cheap) upstarts to compete with billion-dollar projects. Plus Nobel laureate John C. Mather, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, psychologist Alison Gopnik, Genome author Matt Ridley, Harvard geneticist George Church, Why Does the World Exist? author Jim Holt, anthropologist Helen Fisher, and more
Public Inflation Aversion and the Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policymaking
No full textDo the macroeconomic priorities of citizens differ across countries? If so, what accounts for this variation and what are its consequences for explanations of the choice of monetary institutions, macroeconomic policy, and international monetary cooperation? This article uses survey data from twenty advanced economies to examine individual preferences about macroeconomic priorities. The analysis establishes three key findings. First, the results suggest that economic context, defined by inflation and unemployment performance, has a substantial impact on the public s economic objectives in a way that is broadly consistent with the specification of utility loss functions in the theoretical political economy literature. Second, the results suggest that there is significant cross-country variation in inflation aversion, controlling for economic context. Third, some of this variation is accounted for by national-level factors affecting the aggregate costs of inflation and unemployment. These results have significant implications for optimal monetary policymaking, the explanation of variation in economic outcomes, and for accounts of the choice of institutional frameworks for policymaking.I thank the Bank of England, the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies for research support, and Jim Alt, Andrew Bailey, Bill Bernhard, Lawrence Broz, John Freeman, Jeff Frieden, Jim Granato, Shigeo Hirano, David Lake, Jeff Lax, Simon Price, Rose Razaghian, Ron Rogowski, David Stasavage, Gabriel Sterne, Mike Tomz, Jim Vreeland, the editor, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. All views expressed are those of the author and do not represent those of the Bank of England.
Women's life writing 1760-1830 : spiritual selves, sexual characters, and revolutionary subjects
No full textPhDThis thesis uses print and manuscript sources to analyse and interpret women's life
writing at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I
explore printed works by Catharine Phillips, Mary Dudley, Priscilla Hannah Gurney,
Ann Freeman, Elizabeth Steele, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, and Charlotte West and discuss the
manuscripts of Mary Fletcher, Mary Tooth, Sarah Ryan, and Elizabeth Fox. Of these
sources, five have never been analysed in the critical literature and six have received
little attention. Considered as a group, this large corpus of texts offers new insights
into the personal and political implications of different models of female selfhood and
social being.
In chapter one, I compare the religious identities presented in the spiritual
autobiographies of Quakers and Methodists. For these women, religious identification
provides a powerful sense of social belonging and enables public participation.
However, it may also lead to a loss of self in the demand for religious conformity and
self-abnegation. In chapter two, I consider the life writing of late eighteenth-century
courtesans. These women adapt available models of femininity and female authorship
in order to establish themselves as socially connected subjects. However, their
narratives also reveal that dependence on the sexual and literary marketplace puts
female selfhood under pressure. In chapter three, I explore the eyewitness accounts of
British women in the French Revolution. I argue that, for these writers, connecting
personal identity to political history is an enabling source of self-definition but it also
exposes them to the risks of self-fragmentation.
In my focus on the social function of women's life writing, I present an alternative to
the traditional alignment of the eighteenth-century autobiographical subject with the
autonomous self of individualism. These narratives allow us to reconsider the
productive and problematic dialectic between personal expression and representative
selfhood, self-authorship and collective narratives, and individualism and social
being. They suggest that women's life writing has the potential to be both the self-expression
of a unique heroine and the self-inscription of a politicised subject
'Beyond, both the Old World, and the New': Authority and Knowledge in the works of Francis Bacon, with special reference to the New Atlantis
No full textPhDThis study investigates the role of authority in the works of Francis Bacon,
arguing that the issue of authority provides not only an interpretation of New
Atlantis, but an important structural component of his body of works. From
the first manifestation of his philosophical project to his last works of natural
history, authority is an all-pervasive issue - the authority of nature, of
scripture, of the named author, and how authority functions in the
dissemination of natural knowledge. Chapter one argues that the publication
of New Atlantis alongside Sylva sylvarum in 1626/7 was more the result of
William Rawley's need to assert his own authority as the protector and
disseminator of Bacon's textual legacy than an appreciation of the work's own
qualities. Chapter two considers Bacon's views of history and time,
suggesting that Bacon not only conceived of a new, progressive mode of
historical time which would allow for the assertion of a textual authority based
on the records of a civilisation unbroken by the vicissitudes of time, but that
he figured these theories in New Atlantis. Chapter three argues that Bacon
used theology both as defence and imperative to his intellectual programme,
while his attempt to move beyond the deterministic, Calvinist world-view to
allow for multiple possible futures, or `chance': Bacon could then present
experiment as the way of eliminating chance, in order to accelerate the rate of
new discovery. Chapter four investigates Bacon's manipulations of textual
authority, from the early rehearsals of the Instauratio magna to the
performance of reliability in print in Sylva sylvarum. Finally, the afterword
seeks to suggest that the New Atlantis hinges on the issues of authority with
which Bacon engaged throughout his career and writings: in the issue of
authority, Francis Bacon found the beginning and the end of his philosophy
Engendering global democracy
No full textThe inadequacies of hegemonic liberal democratic ideas and institutions have been exposed by feminist theorists focusing on the marginalisation of women and by global theorists examining the impact of globalisation. These theorists have developed two distinct sets of reconstructive strategies that, until very recently, have remained in ignorance of each other. Further, both feminist and global democratic schemes have been dogged by problems in terms of their theorisation of power, politics, agency and change. Recent feminist arguments about citizenship and governance go some way to bringing together concerns about gender inequality and globalisation, but they remain centred on states and the states-system as vehicles for democratic representation and participation. This article argues that a more radical reconstructive strategy can be derived from debates about the democratisation of feminism itself. Drawing on the responses of black and third world feminists to racism in the white-dominated feminist movement, and examining their influence on efforts to organise transnationally, the article points to innovative ways of thinking about power, politics, agency and change. Together these amount to a democratic framework which has applicability beyond feminist organising and which confronts the marginalisations of both gender and globalisation
Returning culture to peacebuilding : contesting the liberal peace in Sierra Leone
No full textThis thesis investigates the advantages and limitations of applying culture to the analysis of violent conflict and peacebuilding, with a particular focus on liberal peacebuilding in Sierra Leone. While fully aware of the critique of the concept of culture in terms of its uses for the production of difference and ‘otherness,’ it also seeks to respond to the critique of liberal peacebuilding on the account of its low sensitivity towards local culture, which allegedly undermines the peace effort. After a careful examination of the terms of discussion about culture enabled by theoretical approaches to conflict in Chapter 2, the thesis presents a theoretical framework for the analysis of cultural aspects of conflict and peace based on the processes and effects of meaning-generation (Chapter 3), developing the conceptual apparatus and vocabulary for the subsequent empirical study. Instead of bracketing out the recursive nature of cultural theorising, the developed approach embraces the recursive dynamics which arise as a result of cultural ‘embeddedness’ of the analyst and the processes which s/he seeks to elucidate, mirroring similar dynamics in the cultural production of meaning and knowledge. The framework of ‘embedded cultural enquiry’ is then used to analyse the practices of liberal peacebuilding as a particular culture, which shapes the interaction of the liberal peace with its ‘subjects’ and critics as well as framing its reception of the cultural problematic generally (Chapter 4). The application of the analytical framework to the case study investigates the interaction between the liberal peace and ‘local culture,’ offering an alternative reading of the conflict and peace process in Sierra Leone (Chapter 5). The study concludes that a greater attention to cultural meaning-making offers a largely untapped potential for peacebuilding, although any decisions with regard to its deployment will inevitably be made from within an inherently biased cultural perspective
Considerations on a revision of the quality factor
No full textA modified analytical expression is proposed for the revised quality factor that has been suggested by a liaison group of ICRP and ICRU. With this modification one obtains, for sparsely ionizing radiation, a quality factor which is proportional to the dose average of lineal energy, y. It is shown that the proposed relation between the quality factor and lineal energy can be translated into a largely equivalent dependence on LET. The choice between the reference parameters LET or y is therefore a secondary problem in an impending revision of the quality factor
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