Latest News Events
Dr Gizelis features in Science Magazine
Dr Ismene Gizelis from the Department of Government at the University of Essex has had her research featured in a new article on gender and conflict published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science magazine.
Dr Gizelis has been researching the role of women in peacekeeping and in violent conflict more generally. She has recently conducted field research in Liberia. The article in Science examines the possible relationship between gender inequality and violent conflict.
For more information, please see:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6083/839.summary
For the whole series on Human Conflict see:
BBC covers IDCR Olympic Dream Project
In the run up to London 2012, the BBC has featured the work of the IDCR on the Olympic Dream web resource. See the story here:
Going for Gold: Country Conditions and London 2012
Going for Gold
Press Release
© 2012 University of Essex all rights reserved.
Why do some countries always seem to strike Olympic gold, while others trail behind in the medals table? Is it down to their Olympian spirit, or their competitive edge? Not entirely, according to research by the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution (IDCR) at the University of Essex.
Research by the institute has shown the countries which do best in the games are likely to be wealthier, with higher levels of literacy and higher life expectancy. Although these are certainly not the only factors at work, there is a significant correlation between a country’s position on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI)[i] and its position on the medals table.[ii]
In 2008 the USA, with a high score of 0.9 on the HDI, was the top performer in the games with a total of 110 medals, while poor countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, close to the bottom of the HDI with a score of 0.24, went home without any medals at all.
Professor Todd Landman, Director of the IDCR, believes spectators at the games will be watching a display not just of human skill, strength and agility, but also of the conditions under which many of the Olympic athletes have grown up and trained.
“As we celebrate the wonder of the Olympics this year, it is important to reflect on the politics and economics that shape the games, as well as the many challenging obstacles that this year’s dedicated athletes have had to overcome to take part,” he says. “The financial crisis, the fallout of the Arab Spring and the continued rise of the BRIC countries will certainly be at the forefront of our minds this summer. The Olympic Dream is a small window into the complex world of today.”
IDCR has been working with a partner, The Mackman Group[iii], to create a series of interactive web-based ‘Olympic Dream’ maps (CLICK HERE for ACCESS), which allow users to see the relationships between Olympic success and deeper social or economic conditions.
Using data on economic development, political conditions and medal totals from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, users can look at global maps, create descriptive charts and analyse relationships between different indicators.
While the correlation between medals and wealth is positive and statistically significant, the overall relationship is not perfect and some countries buck the trend – for instance, Ethiopia is 157th on the HDI, with an index of 0.33, but was 29th on the 2008 medals table with seven medals. And while Norway is at the top of the HDI, with a score of 0.94, it was 21st on the 2008 scoreboard, with 10 medals.
Many of the big winners on the medals table are countries with large populations, like China and the USA. But even after population size has been taken into account, the relationship between development and medal totals is a significant one.
The research will be launched on Tuesday May 1 as part of British Universitite Week, which has an Olympic theme this year.
[i] The Human Development Index is a UN measure that combines data on per capita income levels, literacy and life expectancy. It ranges from 0 (low human development) to 1 (high human development).
[ii] The correlations, (1 is a perfect correlation and 0 is no correlation), are as follows:
Medals and Development .41
Medals and GDP: .37
Medals and population size: .35
[iii] The Mackman Group is an award-winning research, marketing, PR and design company based in Sudbury, on the Essex/Suffolk border.
New trailer for MSc in Conflict Resolution
The Department of Government offers an exciting MSc in Conflict Resolution that includes the opportunity to have an internship with the IDCR. The Department has a new trailer for the MSc that features staff and students on the programme. To see the trailer and find out more about the degree click HERE.
IDCR and IDEA
IDCR Director Professor Todd Landman and Dr Dorothea Farquhar provided training yesterday for over 130 staff members of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), a 27-member state inter-governmental organisation that works to support democracy building worldwide.
The training included sessions on stylised facts about democracy, development, and human rights in the world; definitions and models of democracy; measuring democracy; institutional design and democratic performance; and assessing the quality of democracy. The assessment framework was published in 2008 and was co-authored by David Beetham, Stuart Weir, Todd Landman, and Edzia Carvalho.
IDEA staff have come from all over the world for 5 days of activities in Stockholm. In particular, the IDCR team was keen to meet with the IDEA Nepal office, which has been working on the new constitution for post-conflict Nepal. The IDCR and The Mountain Trust, a Cambridge-based NGO working on projects in Nepal will send an intern from the Department of Government at the University of Essex this summer to work in the IDEA office.
Other staff have come from South Africa, South Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Australia, and Kenya.
Ecocide Press Release
On Saturday 31 March, the IDCR and the Hamilton Group hosted The Ecocide: The Sentenceevent at the University of Essex. In addition to the restorative justice process that took place during the day, the event also featured and academic panel and a roundtable discussion.
The academic panel comprised presentations from Professor Steffen Boehm from the Essex Business School, Professor Sheldon Leader from the School of Law, Professor Hugh Ward from the Department of Government, and Dr Netta Weinstein from the Department of Psychology. Professor Boehm examined the comparative trends in carbon emissions data by region and country. Professor Leader argued that the structure of large multinational corporations allows for limited liability for environmental damage, but that new initiatives in project finance are beginning to look at ways of building in protections for the environment for some large scale extractive projects. Professor Ward presented a comparative analysis of political regimes and emissions data to show that liberal democracies may not be the best political system for the protection of the environment. Finally, Netta Weinstein shared a range of survey and experimental data on the individual benefits that can be derived through inceased interaction with nature.
The second session featured internationally renowned photographer Garth Lenz, who presented an extended version of his TED talk on the Tar Sands development in Canada. The audience was show remarkable photos of the arboreal forests in Canada and the scale of the current destruction of the area owing to the extraction of ‘dirty oil’ from the Tar Sands. The ensuing roundtable discussion included Dr Damien Short from the Institute for Commonwealth Studies, Michael Mansfield QC, and Dr Karen Hulme from the School of Law at the University of Essex.
The full press release can be found here:
Ecocide a success, Ecocultures on the way…
The Ecocide eventat the IDCR was a great success. Over 100 participants attended the one day event, which featured mock legal proceedings, a restorative justice circle, a sentencing, an academic panel and a roundtable discussion of the amazing work of photo journalist Garth Lenz. A full press release is forthcoming!
In a complementary event, the newly founded Essex Sustainability Institute will be hosting an Ecocultures event on 17-18 April 2012, which examines a variety of different ways in which groups and communities at the local level respond to and work within the new confines of environmental change.
The aim of the Ecocultures programme is to synthesise the best current understanding of what it means to be a ‘sustainable community’, how sustainable communities maintain social-ecological resilience, and how we can transfer lessons from these communities to improve ‘mainstream’ policy and practice.
More details can be found here:
IDCR Fellow Dr Marco Larizza Seminar on Sierra Leone
Dr Marco Larizza (PhD Government, Essex) Public Sector Governance Specialist from the World Bank and Fellow of the IDCR will be giving a seminar entitled:
Why Quality Matters: Rebuilding Trustworthy Local Government in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone
21 March 2012
1pm to 3pm
Room 4SB.5.3 at the University of Essex
From the Moral to the Legal and Back Again
IDCR Director, Professor Todd Landman gave a methods seminar at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (NCHR) in Oslo today on empirical approaches to analysing multiple levels of human rights governance. His seminar is part of a larger project hosted by the NCHR called Multi-Rights, which examines the legitimacy and effectiveness of different human rights bodies across national, regional and international levels. (Click HERE for a project summary.) The seminar outlined a set of different social scientific approaches and research design issues associated with the main lines of inquiry of this project. The IDCR and NCHR are exploring ways for the University of Oslo and the University of Essex to collaborate further on this important area of research.
For a copy of the presentation, please click the link here:
Ending Wars
Cecile Fabre ~ Lincoln College Oxford University
This week’s political theory seminar series in the Department of Government features Cecile Fabre from the Department of Philosophy and Lincoln College, Oxford University. Cecile will present a paper titled ‘Ending Wars’, which is part of her ongoing project on the ethics of war.
The seminar is on Thursday 15 March at 13:15 in the Ivor Crewe seminar room on the Colchester Campus of the University of Essex.
Tea and refreshments will be provided.
Paper abstract:
Military occupation is one of the harshest ‘dilemmatic situations’ to which human beings are confronted. Occupying soldiers and occupied civilians have to decide, every day, whether to treat one another as enemy, human beings, or both. Negotiating those relationships does not always require grand decisions and solemn gestures. More often than not, from the point of view of occupied populations, it is to be exposed to the necessity of daily acts of moral compromise, most of which are often insignificant when taken on their own but whose cumulative effect, under the long shadow of war and its privations, can corrode one’s moral integrity – one’s sense of how one should act towards those soldiers who walk down one’s streets, buys goods from one’s shops, uses one’s facilities. Suprisingly in the light of the recent occupation of Iraq by the US, there is a dearth of philosophical work on this issue. My aim in this paper is to explore the moral rights and duties which occupiers and occupied have vis-à¬-vis one another. I argue, contra the law of occupation, that those rights and duties largely depend on the moral status of the war (as just or unjust) which precedes the occupation.
Cecile Fabre is a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Lincoln College, Oxford. Previously Chair in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Lecture/SL at the LSE. Fellow of the British Academy. Publications include: Social Rights under the Constitution (Oxford University Press), Whose Body is it Anyway (Oxford University Press), Justice in a Changing World (Polity Press), and a forthcoming monograph on the ethics of war with Oxford University Press.
