1,720,965 research outputs found
Drug Smuggling and the Stability of Fragile States. The Diverging Trajectories of Mali and Niger
No full textWhat is the impact of smuggling on political ordering and stability in fragile states? We investigate how transnational drug smuggling networks affect protection and extraction dynamics, and drive divergent political stability trajectories in fragile countries that otherwise exhibit structural similiarities–i.e. Mali and Niger. Building on ethnographic evidence, we explore the hypothesis that distinctive peace- and state-building strategies result in different degrees of resilience vis-à-vis potentially destabilising factors. To explain variation in political stability we introduce the concept of ‘hybrid state-sponsored protection racket’, in which non-state armed actors are coopted in a protection assemblage under the tutelage of the state
Government policy and the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and African arenas
No full textAs in previous years, so too in 2018 the migration question dominated the Italian political debate. The new ruling coalition announced a policy change based on the intransigent protection of maritime borders. Against the background of a decline in the number of migrants reaching Italy’s shores, the year saw the imposition of increasingly tight restrictions on the activities of the NGOs involved in search-and-rescue operations along the central Mediterranean route. The closure of Italy’s ports, besides having obvious humanitarian implications, led to the displacement of migration flows, with repercussions for other Mediterranean countries. At the same time, the thousands of repatriations that were promised by the Lega (League) during the election campaign did not materialise. Rather than focussing on the government’s strategy in the domestic sphere, this article examines the continuities and discontinuities in the policy of Italy’s new government concerning the international dimension of the migration question, and it does so by focussing on the Mediterranean and African arenas. Upon closer scrutiny, the new government coalition built its policy on already existing trends, beginning with restrictions on search-and-rescue activities at sea, and a higher-profile role for the interior minister (the League’s Matteo Salvini) in issues that had once fallen within the remit of the foreign ministry. At the same time, the choice in favour of unilateral intransigence and the display of open hostility vis-à-vis Western European governments, together with the refusal by the Visegrad countries to accommodate requests coming from Rome, were reflected in Italy’s growing isolation in Europe
The data that we do (not) have: studying drug trafficking and organised crime in Africa
Full text linkAn increasing amount of reports highlights the growing salience of drug trafficking in Africa. Yet the evidence-base for this claim remains problematic. Stemming from a critical approach to social sciences’ epistemology, the paper explores how drug trafficking data are framed, produced and shared. Building on an extensive literature review and key interviews, it provides an in-depth analysis of both the main open source drug trafficking metrics (at UN, US and EU level), and the inner working of anti-drug trafficking agencies in key African countries, i.e. Nigeria, Senegal and Mali. The analysis shows that politicised framings, practical challenges and methodological inconsistencies affect drug trafficking knowledge production, especially in Africa. The paper therefore suggests to treat drug trafficking data – both quantitative and qualitative ‘evidence’ – not as proxies that would reveal ‘the reality’ of criminal under- and over-worlds ‘out there’, but performances whose appearance and disappearance is part and parcel of the mechanics of state (un)making. Anchoring the interpretation of drug trafficking data to the dynamics of protection and extraction characterising parallel modes of governance in the post-colonial world leads to the acknowledgement that the absence of reliable data is not a mere knowledge gap, but a datum in itself that calls for interpretation and investigation
La rete Seenet e il Programma – I Governi Locali Motori dello Sviluppo. Sintesi di un'esperienza
No full text
Strategic misalignment: European security and P/CVE engagement in the Sahel
Full text linkA key security partner of the region for more than a decade, the European Union today faces growing challenges and the potential failure of its policy towards the Sahel. While the cycle of violence does not appear to be receding, rivals such as Russia – but also Western allies such as Turkey or the Gulf states – are building new partnerships in the region. Contesting the idea that exogenous factors alone explain strategic shortcomings, we explore instead how the evolution of EU initiatives aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) has contributed to strategic misalignments with Sahelian partners. The choice of new international partners by Sahelian states does not primarily follow from ideological reasons, but rather displays tactical ductility and sensitivity to political costs and strategic opportunity. The EU assistance to the emergence of a regional security model, based increasingly on securitization and militarization through ambiguous, at times incoherent and self-referential policies, should be examined to better understand the weakening of political influence in the Sahel
Grasping Local Participation: The Implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in the Western Balkans and North Africa
No full textThis article focuses on those “points of fracture” (Kirby and Shepherd 2020, 12) that have manifested in the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda in the Mediterranean region by examining National Action Plans (NAPs) in two distinct sub-regions – the Western Balkans and North Africa. We develop a comparative framework to shed light on the dimension of participation of these plans in four countries where the debate on WPS has reached different stages: Bosnia–Herzegovina, Kosovo, Tunisia and Morocco. By empirically investigating participation as both modality and focus of WPS debate and practice in these countries, we show that NAPs are unable to produce “meaningful local ownership” (Basini and Ryan 2016, 390) and that the international discourse on WPS should be re-thought to resonate with women’s needs, experiences and perspectives in post-conflict and post-revolutionary settings
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
- …
