Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The impending threat of climate change (also known as global warming) has been an environmental concern for the past five decades. National governments, including the United States, have been aware of the problem at minimum for this span of time. While other nations have banded together to stop—and hopefully even reverse—the effects of global warming, the United States has not taken any decisive action. The failure of the United States government to deal with or act in regard to climate change has been largely economically driven, and may end up costing humanity greatly. Through the conception of global warming/climate change as a state crime of omission, this paper will analyze the failure of the United States to take decisive action in the fight against global warming through the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Kyoto Protocol appears to be an ideal test case for theories of two-level bargaining, because countries received unique quotas (verifiable quantitative bargaining outcomes) and the treaty was subject to legislative ratification. Indeed, prominent countries, including the United States and Russia, used the threat of withholding ratification strategically during bargaining. However, our quantitative analysis yields the surprising finding that ratification constraints did not appreciably affect the outcomes of the Kyoto bargaining, nor did bargaining outcomes affect ratification. Domestic political constraints did affect ratification, but not bargaining. Instead of casting the Kyoto Protocol in the two-level bargaining framework, we find that the politics of the Kyoto Protocol are best understood as a matter of hegemonic leadership by the European Union, which offered selective incentives—EU accession in most cases, but WTO accession in the case of Russia—to countries that participated. This interpretation of the data is confirmed by case studies of Russia and Poland.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This essay outlines how a 10-term search protocol for use in comprehensively identifying articles with coverage of protest events in Spanish-language news media sources was developed for the Mexico Protest Event Database (MPED) project. Three dimensions of this process are discussed: The sources used and why these were chosen; methodological concerns and how an iterative procedure was used to determine whether to include or omit specific terms; and assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of terms comprising the final search string using data on search hits and word counts for more than 18,500 articles that were produced and coded in the first stage of the development of the MPED.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study examines how young smokers process gain- and loss-framed antismoking information, and what are their concurrent cognitive responses and affective reactions to the messages. Findings from this study add knowledge to research in health communication and provide information for designing messages in public health campaigns. This study used a think aloud method and a within-subject experiment design, where participants verbalized their thoughts when they repeatedly viewed different messages with emphasis on either costs of smoking or benefits of not smoking. It was found that participants engaged in thinking about the likelihood for a certain outcome to happen or whether it is a direct result of smoking, much more than about the severity of the outcomes. A pattern was also observed that loss-framed messages aroused more negative emotions and induced more favorable attitudes than gain-framed messages.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This recently initiated project by UNIDIR is intended to create a new means for assessing community security needs as stakeholders themselves understand them in such a timeframe, and in such a format, as to be useful in the design and planning of post-conflict security activities by major implementing organisations. It is partly informed by modern approaches to ethnography. The project appreciates that security does not have one meaning to all people. What makes us secure, how we act to make ourselves secure, and what we are willing to do, and not do for that security differs from place to place and changes through time. The meanings that a community gives to the concept of security affect how they organize, enact and interpret their security environment, and their response to it. Therefore, what is in the world (premises of belief) and what is good (premises of value) vary radically around the globe - even for communities that face remarkably similar structural problems, like poverty, poor governance, politics of exclusion and high availability of small arms. Understanding that different societies respond to structural realities differently allows us to frame problems of security in particular ways that allow us to not only discover what local security concerns may be, but crucially, why.