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Lost in a Sandstorm: The U.S. attempt to win the war in Afghanistan
No full textAbstract
Why did the U.S. lose the war in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021? Why did the U.S. fail there, after we poured hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign aid into the country, and had tens of thousands of advisers working for decades trying to improve the country? Dozens of nations, in Europe, Asia, and Oceania, sent troops and gave aid to Afghanistan. Why did things utterly fall apart?
The U.S. government had successfully fought a counterinsurgency war in El Salvador from 1980 – 1993 against the communist FMLN guerillas. A combination of increased aid, highly motivated American military advisors and constant U.S. intelligence support enabled the El Salvadorian Armed Forces to defeat the FMLN and forced them to agree to an armistice in 1993. Why did a similar military strategy fail in Afghanistan?
My thesis will argue that the failure of the U.S. to create a combat capable Afghan National Army led to the eventual collapse of Afghanistan, and the capture of Kabul and all of the Afghan provinces by the Taliban in the summer of 2021
Political Violence
No full textThis chapter explores the phenomenon of political violence in its many forms. It focuses on distinctions among physical, structural or cultural, and symbolic violence, rather than focusing on more traditional forms of political violence, such as riots and assassinations. Thus the chapter analyzes the role of violence at the core of the modern nation-state, especially through discussing Walter Benjamin’s distinction between law-preserving and law-making violence. The chapter concludes that political violence is often at its worst, most intense, and most widespread when trust in political institutions falters and significant portions of a given polity no longer find these institutions credible or legitimate. Conversely, political violence can be minimized through the construction of strong, inclusive, and vibrant political institutions based on principles of inclusion and procedural justice, qualities Johan Galtung saw as the foundations for positive peace.</p
Human (in)security
No full textThe 1990s was host to a range of conflicts emerging from failed or failing states. These conflicts typically involved significant humanitarian crises and widespread human rights abuses. Within this changing global environment, new security thinking started to engage ‘people’ as the referent of security, moving away from the previous privileged status granted the state as the only referent of security. During the Cold War, a mindset shaped around superpower competition and state-based conflict dominated strategic thinking. However, for many people globally daily insecurities shaped their notions of what real deficits in security encompassed. The end of the Cold War enabled the human security paradigm to provide a significant challenge to the primacy of the state in security thinking. On the other hand, human security has been subject to much criticism and there has been heated debate over its applicability within the security agenda. This chapter argues that despite earlier concerns over its efficacy, human security has made inroads into security thinking and is mutually reinforcing to national security
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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