Latest News Events

IDCR Fellow Dr Marco Larizza Seminar on Sierra Leone

March 16th, 2012

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

Over the last thirty years, decentralization has been a crucial component of public sector reforms in many developing countries, designed to transfer greater power to sub national levels of government and to provide a more effective oversight role to the people. Despite these arguments, little attention has been paid to empirically test under what

conditions decentralization reforms succeed in their stated objectives of enhancing popular trust for local authorities and strengthening government legitimacy. The paper addresses this gap by looking at the consequences of political decentralization in post-conflict Sierra Leone and examining the impact of decentralized service delivery on legitimating beliefs towards local governments and the consequences of these beliefs for quasi-voluntary compliance.

We use a unique longitudinal survey to estimate multi-level models which exploit variation over time and within and across sub-national units in Sierra Leone. Results suggest that the improvements in service delivery under conditions of decentralized governments are associated with greater trust in local government authorities Moreover, this impact is significantly higher for the most remote communities. We also nd that citizen’s trust in local government authorities is associated with greater participation in road cleaning, our indicator of quasi-voluntary compliance. The ndings are robust to control for alternate explanations and speak to the remarkable success of decentralization reforms in enhancing government legitimacy before ordinary citizens. The paper concludes by considering the policy implications of the findings for the design of international development programs in support of decentralization reforms in Sierra Leone, while also raising a number of interesting questions about the sources and consequences of trust in post-conflict and ethnically diverse states.

From the Moral to the Legal and Back Again

March 13th, 2012

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:

Moral-to-Legal-Landman-2012

Ending Wars

March 12th, 2012

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.

New Trailer on the Ecocide Event launched!

March 1st, 2012

The Ecocide Trial: The Sentence event has a new trailer:

Further details are available here:

http://www.idcr.org.uk/ecocide-trial-the-sentence