bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Genetic and morphological analysis of multi-stemmed plants of tuart (Eucalyptus gomphocephala)
Authors: Byrne M. , Koenders A. , Rogerson K. , Sampson J. , van Etten E. J. B.
Published: November 2016

The tuart–banksia woodlands of the Swan Coastal Plain in Western Australia are characteristic vegetation communities of this coastal region, and Eucalyptus gomphocephala DC. (Myrtaceae; tuart) is an iconic tree of these communities. The species primarily occurs as a tall single-stemmed tree, but at the northern end of the distribution, it also occurs in a multi-stemmed form. Growth habit is frequently used as a taxonomic character in eucalypts, with many complexes having tree and mallee forms, although the genetic characterisation of growth habit in eucalypts has been limited. We investigated the genetic and morphological differentiation among populations of tree and multi-stemmed forms of tuart at the northern end of its distribution. Although the populations showed moderate levels of genetic diversity on the basis of microsatellite markers, as might be expected from populations on the periphery of the distribution, there was no evidence of genetic differentiation associated with the tree and multi-stemmed forms. Morphometric analysis showed some differences in the size of buds and fruits among the populations. Our analysis is consistent with environmentally induced variation in tuart in near-coastal populations where plants grow on poor soils and form may be affected by wind and salt exposure. This result adds to other evidence from pines and Nothofagus of environmental rather than genetic influences on growth form, particularly in stressful environments.
UAV remote sensing of spatial variation in banana production
Authors: Machovina Brian L. , Feeley Kenneth J. , Machovina Brett J.
Published: November 2016

Remote sensing through Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can potentially be used to identify the factors influencing agricultural yield and thereby increase production efficiency. The use of UAV remains largely underutilised in tropical agricultural systems. In this study we tested a fixed-wing UAV system equipped with a sensor system for mapping spatial patterns of photosynthetic activity in banana plantations in Costa Rica. Spatial patterns derived from the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were compared with spatial patterns of physical soil quality and banana fruit production data. We found spatial patterns of NDVI were significantly positively correlated with spatial patterns of several metrics of fruit yield and quality: bunch weight, number of hands per bunch, length of largest finger, and yield. NDVI was significantly negatively correlated with banana loss (discarded due to low quality). Spatial patterns of NDVI were not correlated with spatial patterns of physical soil quality. These results indicate that UAV systems can be used in banana plantations to help map patterns of fruit quality and yield, potentially aiding investigations of spatial patterns of underlying factors affecting production and thereby helping to increase agricultural efficiency.
The half-life of the cytochrome bf complex in leaves of pea plants after transfer from moderately-high growth light to low light
Authors: Zhu Hui , Zeng Ling-Da , Yi Xiao-Ping , Peng Chang-Lian , Zhang Wang-Feng , Chow Wah Soon
Published: November 2016

The content of cytochrome (cyt) bf complex is the main rate-limiting factor that determines light- and CO2-saturated photosynthetic capacity. A study of the half-life of the cyt f content in leaves was conducted whereby Pisum sativum L. plants, grown in moderately high light (HL), were transferred to low light (LL). The cyt f content in fully-expanded leaves decreased steadily over the 2 weeks after the HL-to-LL transfer, whereas control leaves in HL retained their high contents. The difference between the time courses of HL-to-LL plants and control HL plants represents the time course of loss of cyt f content, with a half-life of 1.7 days, which is >3-fold shorter than that reported for tobacco leaves at constant growth irradiance using an RNA interference approach (Hojka et al. 2014). After transfer to LL (16 h photoperiod), pea plants were re-exposed to HL for 0, 1.5 h or 5 h during the otherwise LL photoperiod, but the cyt f content of fully-expanded leaves declined practically at the same rate regardless of whether HL was re-introduced for 0, 1.5 h or 5 h during each 16 h LL photoperiod. It appears that fully-expanded leaves, having matured under HL, were unable to increase their cyt f content when re-introduced to HL. These findings are relevant to any attempts to maintain a high photosynthetic capacity when the growth irradiance is temporarily decreased by shading or overcast weather.
The earliest maize from San Marcos Tehuacán is a partial domesticate with genomic evidence of inbreeding
Authors: Vallebueno-Estrada Miguel , Rodríguez-Arévalo Isaac , Rougon-Cardoso Alejandra , Martínez González Javier , García Cook Angel , Montiel Rafael , Vielle-Calzada Jean-Philippe
Published: November 2016

Significance

The valley of Tehuacán in Mexico is an important center of early Mesoamerican agriculture. To characterize the genetic constitution of the earliest phase of maize cultivation, we reexamined San Marcos cave in Tehuacán and sequenced DNA from three newly discovered maize samples dating at a similar age of 5,000 y B.P. The genomes of these samples reveal unforeseen levels of genetic diversity as compared with modern maize, indicating that the effects of domestication were not yet complete. We find that their genetic constitution was similar and influenced by inbreeding, suggesting that the corresponding plants come from a reduced population of isolated and perhaps self-pollinated individuals.
The trajectory of a language policy
Authors: Liddicoat Anthony J. , Curnow Timothy Jowan , Scarino Angela
Published: November 2016

This paper examines the development of the First Language Maintenance and Development (FLMD) program in South Australia. This program is the main language policy activity that specifically focuses on language maintenance in government primary schools and has existed since 1986. During this time, the program has evolved largely as the result of ad hoc changes, often resulting from decisions made outside the immediate scope of language maintenance provisions. The program was initially introduced as a general reform of language education in primary schools but eventually became a program focused specifically on language maintenance. The paper traces the ways that ad hoc changes have shaped the program, and how these have shaped the program over time. As a result of these changes over time, first language maintenance has moved from being an integrated focus within core language policy to being a peripheral language policy activity. As a result, although the FLMD represents an aspect of South Australia’s language policy, it does not have either a clear position within that policy nor does it have a clearly developed focus of its own.
On second position clitics crosslinguistically
Authors: Bošković Željko
Published: November 2016

This paper examines factors that are responsible for the availability of second position clitic systems crosslinguistically based on a variety of unrelated languages, including (but not limited to) Pama-Nyungan, Uto-Aztecan, Iranian, Slavic, and Romance languages. The proposed account has consequences for a variety of phenomena, including the Lobeck (1990)/Saito & Murasugi (1990) generalization that functional heads can license ellipsis of their complement only when they undergo Spec-Head agreement, preposition-stranding, and the licensing of pro.
Unaccusatives in Slovenian from a cross-linguistic perspective
Authors: Ilc Gašper , Marvin Tatjana
Published: November 2016

Ever since Perlmutter’s (1978) Unaccusative Hypothesis, intransitive verbs have been treated as comprising of two subclasses (i) unergatives, and (ii) unaccusatives. Evidence from sundry languages has shown that even though the unergative/unaccusative dichotomy is a universal property, there appears to be some language specific parametric variation as to the criteria for differentiating the two classes as well. In line with this claim, the present paper examines different diagnostic tests for unaccusativity/unergativity with a special focus on their (in)applicability to Slovenian data. Our analysis singles out three fairly reliable tests for determining the unaccusative status of Slovenian predicates: (i) the reduced relatives test, (ii) the impersonal passives test, and (iii) the secondary imperfectivization test. The discussion, however, also points out that none is flawless, as they also constitute false positives and false negatives.
IO realizations in Spanish reverse psych verb sentences
Authors: Nishida Chiyo
Published: November 2016

This paper examines the little-known morphosyntactic variation involving Spanish psych verbs that take an experiencer IO and a stimulus subject. With these verbs, a dative clitic duplicating the IO is widely assumed to be obligatory in the canonical [IO-V-S] order (A la gente joven LE/*Ø gustan los deportes ‘Young people like sports’). However, naturally occurring data from corpora show that clitic doubling is not obligatory in the non canonical [S-V-IO] order, yielding two variant constructions (Los deportes LE/Ø gustan a la gente joven ‘Sports appeal to young people’). Using written corpus data from Peninsular Spanish, the paper investigates two issues: (a) what is the overall distribution of clitic doubling in [S-V-IO] psych verb sentences?; (b) are there any systematic distributional differences between the two variants? With respect to (a), we found that for none of the 10 psych verbs surveyed was clitic doubling obligatory. With respect to (b), we found the presence of a clitic tends to restrict the referential properties of the lexical IO in terms of animacy, pronominality, individuality, and number. The findings of this study indicate that dative clitics, which are commonly analyzed as IO-V agreement markers, actually make a substantive contribution to the semantics of psych verb sentences.
The blocking effect in associative learning involves learned biases in rapid attentional capture
Authors: Luque David , Vadillo Miguel A. , Gutiérrez-Cobo María J. , Le Pelley Mike E.
Published: November 2016

Blocking refers to the finding that less is learned about the relationship between a stimulus and an outcome if pairings are conducted in the presence of a second stimulus that has previously been established as a reliable predictor of that outcome. Attentional models of associative learning suggest that blocking reflects a reduction in the attention paid to the blocked cue. We tested this idea in three experiments in which participants were trained in an associative learning task using a blocking procedure. Attention to stimuli was measured 250 ms after onset using an adapted version of the dot probe task. This task was presented at the beginning of each learning trial (Experiments 1 and 2) or in independent trials (Experiment 3). Results show evidence of reduced attention to blocked stimuli (i.e. “attentional blocking”). In addition, this attentional bias correlated with the magnitude of blocking in associative learning, as measured by predictive-value judgments. Moreover, Experiments 2 and 3 found evidence of an influence of learning about predictiveness on memory for episodes involving stimuli. These findings are consistent with a central role of learned attentional biases in producing the blocking effect, and in the encoding of new memories.
Nonlinear fishbone dynamics in spherical tokamaks
Authors: Wang Feng , Fu G.Y. , Shen Wei
Published: November 2016

Linear and nonlinear kinetic-MHD hybrid simulations have been carried out to investigate linear stability and nonlinear dynamics of beam-driven fishbone instability in spherical tokamak plasmas. Realistic NSTX parameters with finite toroidal rotation were used. The results show that the fishbone is driven by both trapped and passing particles. The instability drive of passing particles is comparable to that of trapped particles in the linear regime. The effects of rotation are destabilizing and a new region of instability appears at higher q
min (>1.5) values, q
min being the minimum of safety factor profile. In the nonlinear regime, the mode saturates due to flattening of beam ion distribution, and this persists after initial saturation while mode frequency chirps down in such a way that the resonant trapped particles move out radially and keep in resonance with the mode. Correspondingly, the flattening region of beam ion distribution expands radially outward. A substantial fraction of initially non-resonant trapped particles become resonant around the time of mode saturation and keep in resonance with the mode as frequency chirps down. On the other hand, the fraction of resonant passing particles is significantly smaller than that of trapped particles. Our analysis shows that trapped particles provide the main drive to the mode in the nonlinear regime.
Hermeneutics
Authors: Warnke Georgia
Published: November 2016

Modern hermeneutics begins with F. D. E. Schleiermacher who systematized hermeneutics, developing it from a group of disparate disciplines meant to apply to different fields of discourse to a set of procedures applicable to all. Schleiermacher also insists on a methodical practice of interpretation including grammatical interpretation, which attends to an author’s language, and psychological or technical interpretation, which attends to an author’s intentions. In moving to philosophical hermeneutics, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer refocus away from the procedures conducive to understanding and towards the conditions under which understanding occurs: namely, in the context of our ongoing projects and purposes and the interrelations they involve. For Gadamer, these conditions lead to a rethinking of the Enlightenment’s criticism of tradition and prejudice. The context of understanding is a historically developed one. Indeed, Heidegger and Gadamer conceive of the so-called hermeneutic circle of whole and part not as a method for coming to a definitive understanding of a text, as Schleiermacher does, but rather as a reflection of our historical circumstances. We are the result of the effective histories of the very texts and discourses we seek to understand. To the extent that we are, however, we participate in their traditions and are oriented or prejudiced by the assumptions they hand down to us. The problem with a Schleiermachian reliance on interpretive method, then, is that it pretends to an objectivity that it cannot attain and thereby gives up on the possibility of acknowledging and interrogating prejudice. Schleiermacher’s focus on intentions is equally problematic. To the extent that we concentrate only or primarily on the intentions or thoughts behind an author’s or speaker’s expression, we fail to take their expressions up as possible insights or valid claims. In contrast, philosophical hermeneutics asks us to take works of literature seriously with regard to their subject matter, or Sache, and to engage dialogically in a process of clarifying an issue or subject matter for ourselves. In short, we miss much of what we can learn about a subject matter if we look to intentions over content. Likewise, we miss much of what we can learn about ourselves if we look to method and forgo dialogue.
The Salem Witch Trials
Authors: Van Engen Abram C.
Published: November 2016

The Salem witch trials have gripped American imaginations ever since they occurred in 1692. At the end of the 17th century, after years of mostly resisting witch hunts and witch trial prosecutions, Puritans in New England suddenly found themselves facing a conspiracy of witches in a war against Satan and his minions. What caused this conflict to erupt? Or rather, what caused Puritans to think of themselves as engaged, at that moment, in such a cosmic battle? These are some of the mysteries that the Salem witch trials have left behind, taken up and explored not just by each new history of the event but also by the literary imaginations of many American writers.

The primary explanations of Salem set the crisis within the context of larger developments in Puritan society. Though such developments could be traced to the beginning of Puritan settlement in New England, most commentators focus on shifts occurring near the end of the century. This was a period of intense economic change, with new markets emerging and new ways of making money. It was also a time when British imperial interests were on the rise, tightening and expanding an empire that had, at times, been somewhat loosely held together. In the midst of those expansions, British colonists and settlers faced numerous wars on their frontiers, especially in northern New England against French Catholics and their Wabanaki allies. Finally, New England underwent, resented, and sometimes resisted intense shifts in government policy as a result of the changing monarchy in London. Under James II, Massachusetts Bay lost its original charter, which had upheld the Puritan way for over fifty years. A new government imposed royal rule and religious tolerance. With the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution, the Massachusetts Bay government carried on with no official charter or authority from 1689 until 1691. When a new charter arrived during the midst of the Salem witch hunt, it did not restore all the privileges, positions, or policies of the original “New England Way,” and many lamented what they had lost. In other words, in 1692, New England faced economic, political, and religious uncertainty while suffering from several devastating battles on its northern frontier. All of these factors have been used to explain Salem.

When Governor William Phips finally halted the trials, nineteen had been executed, five had died in prison, and one man had been pressed to death for refusing to speak. Protests began almost immediately with the first examinations of the accused, and by the time the trials ended, almost all agreed that something had gone terribly wrong. Even so, the population could not necessarily agree on an explanation for what had occurred. Publishing any talk of the trials was prohibited, but that ban was quickly broken. Since 1695, interpretations have rolled from the presses, and American literature—in poems, plays, and novels—has attempted to make its own sense and use of what one scholar calls the mysterious and terrifying “specter of Salem.”
The Chapter
Authors: Dames Nicholas
Published: November 2016

First known as a kephalaion in Greek, capitulum or caput in Latin, the chapter arose in antiquity as a finding device within long, often heterogenous prose texts, prior even to the advent of the codex. By the 4th century ce, it was no longer unusual for texts to be composed in capitula; but it is with the advent of the fictional prose narratives we call the novel that the chapter, both ubiquitous and innocuous, developed into a compositional practice with a distinct way of thinking about biographical time. A technique of discontinuous reading or “consultative access” which finds a home in a form for continuous, immersive reading, the chapter is a case study in adaptive reuse and slow change. One of the primary ways the chapter became a narrative form rather than just an editorial practice is through the long history of the chaptering of the Bible, particularly the various systems for chaptering the New Testament, which culminated in the early 13th century formation of the biblical chaptering system still in use across the West. Biblical chapters formed a template for how to segment ongoing plots or actions which was taken up by writers, printers, and editors from the late medieval period onward; pivotal examples include William Caxton’s chaptering of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in his 1485 printing of the text, or the several mises en proses of Chrétien de Troyes’s poems carried out in the Burgundian court circle of the 15th century. By the 18th century, a vibrant set of discussions, controversies, and experiments with chapters were characteristic of the novel form, which increasingly used chapter titles and chapter breaks to meditate upon how different temporal units understand human agency in different ways. With the eventual dominance of the novel in 19th-century literary culture, the chapter had been honed into a way of thinking about the segmented nature of biographical memory, as well as the temporal frames—the day, the year, the episode or epoch—in which that segmenting occurs; chapters in this period were of an increasingly standard size, although still lacking any formal rules or definition. Modernist prose narratives often played with the chapter form, expanding it or drastically shortening it, but these experiments usually tended to reaffirm the unit of the chapter as a significant measure by which we make sense of human experience.
Language and Culture
Authors: Lee Ee Lin
Published: November 2016

Language is an arbitrary and conventional symbolic resource situated within a cultural system. While it marks speakers’ different assumptions and worldviews, it also creates much tension in communication. Therefore, scholars have long sought to understand the role of language in human communication. Communication researchers, as well as those from other disciplines (e.g., linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology), draw on each other’s works to study language and culture. The interdisciplinary nature of the works results in the use of various research methods and theoretical frameworks. Therefore, the main goal of this essay is to sketch the history and evolution of the study of language and culture in the communication discipline in the United States.

Due to space constraints only select works, particularly those that are considered landmarks in the field, are highlighted here. The fundamentals of language and the development of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in leading to the formation of the language and social interaction (LSI) discipline are briefly described. The main areas of LSI study—namely language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication—are summarized. Particular attention is paid to several influential theories and analytical frameworks: the speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis. Criticisms and debates about the trends and directions of the scholarship are also examined.
Global Environmental Change and the New Social Contract for Research
Authors: Castree Noel
Published: November 2016

Humans are altering the hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere in unprecedented ways. Since the late 1980s, a range of geoscience disciplines (such as climatology and ecology) have shown humans to be a “planetary force.” The scale, scope, and magnitude of people’s combined activities threaten to take the planet’s environmental systems out of their Holocene state. This not only raises new research questions for the academic community (such as “What is the best way for a low-income, low-lying country to adapt to sea-level rise?”). It also invites the community to rethink its role in relation to the societies that fund its research and will experience profound impacts of global environmental change. In turn, this rethink raises the question of what kind of research will best suit a change of role. In recent years some global change researchers have called for a “new social contract.” These calls challenge the “old” social contract wherein academic independence was assured by governments so long as universities produced a succession of benefits to society on the basis of both fundamental (non-applied) research and “use-inspired” inquiry and invention. The new social contract directs global change researchers to produce much more of the latter, namely “decision-relevant” knowledge (for governments and other stakeholders). This means that global change research (GCR) will become less geoscience dominated and include more social science and even humanities content: after all, it is human activities that are both the cause of, and solution to, our planetary maladies. A more applied and people-focused GCR community promises to deliver many benefits in the years ahead. However, there are some problems with the way a new social contract is currently being conceived. Unless these problems are addressed, the GCR community will arguably serve societies worldwide far less well than it could and should do. This review describes the old and new social contract ideas in relation to present and future GCR. It does so both descriptively and in a critically constructive way, presenting arguments for a truly new social contract for GCR.
History of Convective Storm Science
Authors: Doswell Charles A.
Published: November 2016

Convective storms are the result of a disequilibrium created by solar heating in the presence of abundant low-level moisture, resulting in the development of buoyancy in ascending air. Buoyancy typically is measured by the Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) associated with air parcels. When CAPE is present in an environment with strong vertical wind shear (winds changing speed and/or direction with height), convective storms become increasingly organized and more likely to produce hazardous weather: strong winds, large hail, heavy precipitation, and tornadoes.

Because of their associated hazards and their impact on society, in some nations (notably, the United States), there arose a need to have forecasts of convective storms. Pre-20th-century efforts to forecast the weather were hampered by a lack of timely weather observations and by the mathematical impossibility of direct solution of the equations governing the weather. The first severe convective storm forecaster was J. P. Finley, who was an Army officer, and he was ordered to cease his efforts at forecasting in 1887. Some Europeans like Alfred Wegener studied tornadoes as a research topic, but there was no effort to develop convective storm forecasting.

World War II aircraft observations led to the recognition of limited storm science in the topic of convective storms, leading to a research program called the Thunderstorm Product that concentrated diverse observing systems to learn more about the structure and evolution of convective storms. Two Air Force officers, E. J. Fawbush and R. C. Miller, issued the first tornado forecasts in the modern era, and by 1953 the U.S. Weather Bureau formed a Severe Local Storms forecasting unit (SELS, now designated the Storm Prediction Center of the National Weather Service). From the outset of the forecasting efforts, it was evident that more convective storm research was needed. SELS had an affiliated research unit called the National Severe Storms Project, which became the National Severe Storms Laboratory in 1963. Thus, research and operational forecasting have been partners from the outset of the forecasting efforts in the United States—with major scientific contributions from the late T. T. Fujita (originally from Japan), K. A. Browning (from the United Kingdom), R. A. Maddox, J. M. Fritsch, C. F. Chappell, J. B. Klemp, L. R. Lemon, R. B. Wilhelmson, R. Rotunno, M. Weisman, and numerous others. This has resulted in the growth of considerable scientific understanding about convective storms, feeding back into the improvement in convective storm forecasting since it began in the modern era. In Europe, interest in both convective storm forecasting and research has produced a European Severe Storms Laboratory and an experimental severe convective storm forecasting group.

The development of computers in World War II created the ability to make numerical simulations of convective storms and numerical weather forecast models. These have been major elements in the growth of both understanding and forecast accuracy. This will continue indefinitely.
Religion in International Relations
Authors: Schwarz Tanya B. , Lynch Cecelia
Published: November 2016

Though religion was never absent from international relations, since the Iranian Revolution, the end of the Cold War, and the events of 9/11, the international community has taken a renewed interest in it. Questions center on the role of religion in peace and conflict, the compatibility of religious law and norms with different systems of government, and the influence of religious actors on a wide range of issues. A reliance on Enlightenment assumptions, which link “the religious” to the irrational, magical, or emotive, led many to deem religion inappropriate for the public sphere and a key factor leading to conflict. On the other hand, the same assumptions led to an association of “the secular” with reason, proper forms of government, and peace. Multiple scholars challenged such a dichotomous framework, arguing that “the religious” and “the secular” cannot be meaningfully separated, or that, at the very least, the origins of the category of “religion” must be examined in order to study acts and practices deemed religious in the 21st century.

Scholarship that wishes to avoid broad generalizations and problematic assumptions about religion should move beyond Enlightenment assumptions and approaches that treat diverse religious communities, acts, and ideas as inherently “good” or “problematic.” To do so, scholars should reflexively engage with religion, paying attention to their own ontological assumptions and the consequences of those assumptions for analyses of religion and politics. In addition, scholars must situate the practices, principles, and identities of religious individuals and communities within broader historical and geographical contexts in order to understand the critical factors informing their ethical frameworks. There are several approaches that are attentive to interpretation, practice, and ethics, including neo-Weberianism, positive ethics, securitization theory, and a relational dialogical approach. These approaches provide alternatives to essentialized notions of religion and shed light on why and how religious actors choose some possible courses of action over others.
Analytical Marxism
Authors: Vrousalis Nicholas
Published: November 2016

Marxists believe that an understanding of human society presupposes an understanding of the nature of the production of its material surplus and the nature of control over that surplus. This belief forms part of the “hard core” of the Marxist scientific research program. This hard core is complemented by a set of auxiliary hypotheses and heuristics, constituting what Imre Lakatos has called a scientific research program’s “protective belt.” The protective belt is a set of hypotheses protecting a research program’s hard core. Over the past century and a half, Marxists have populated the protective belt with an economic theory, a theory of history, a theory of exploitation, and a philosophical anthropology, among other things. Analytical Marxism is located in Marxism’s protective belt. It can be seen as a painstaking exercise in intellectual housekeeping. The exercise consists in replacing the tradition’s antiquated, superfluous, or degenerate furnishings with concepts, methods, and auxiliary hypotheses from analytic philosophy and up-to-date social science.

The three most influential strands in analytical Marxism are, roughly: its reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history, historical materialism; its philosophical anthropology, including the theory of freedom; and its theory of exploitation, including the theory of class.
The Geography of Civil War
Authors: Linke Andrew M. , Raleigh Clionadh
Published: November 2016

Attention to geography in the study of civil war has risen dramatically in recent years. Beginning with county-level data in the fields of classical political geography, international relations, and comparative politics, a vast body of conflict research is now dedicated to sub-national analysis. This later turn is itself geographical. Innovations in the geographical study of civil war have dramatically improved our collective understanding of violence and continue to call for modifications of conflict theory.

While a turn toward geography has therefore proved valuable for academic research that is most often dominated by political science, there remain fundamental differences within the research community about what constitutes geographical inquiry. An example of such a difference is the attention that physical geography (such as forest cover, mountainous terrain) has received in civil war research over investigations of the nuanced social composition of regions and localities, which tends to dominate for conflict research within the discipline of human geography.

The spatial dependencies among conflict locations and events need to be highlighted for their importance. These patterns can reveal important underlying social forces that are interesting to scholars in various disciplines, as well as to the study of key geographical processes and the shift toward spatial disaggregation. This localization of violence studies is necessary and concerns the notion of hierarchical scale, which is a conceptual foundation of human geography. In studying the geography of civil war, there are methodological tools that can outline some risks associated with geospatial analysis of violence.
Waves of Political Terrorism
Authors: Kaplan Jeffrey
Published: November 2016

Wave theory refers to the “Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” which was published in 2004 by David C. Rapoport, professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a founding editor of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. Wave theory made a unique contribution to the study of terrorism by positing a generational model that linked contemporaneous global terrorist groups based on their shared characteristics of ideology/theology, strategy/tactics, and visions for the future. Although wave theory is focused on the modern period, from the late 19th century to the present day, it is built on a thorough grounding of the history of terrorism, which dates from the 1st century ce.
Emerging Powers in Foreign Policy
Authors: Wehner Leslie
Published: November 2016

Emerging powers are usually referred to as states whose increasing material capacities and status-seeking strategies may potentially have an impact on the international system and also affect the dominant position of the hegemonic powers therein. The rising of new powers is a recurrent phenomenon in international relations. When talking about emerging powers, scholars associate the words with the so-called BRICS states: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The emergence of BRICS, and especially of China, poses the question of whether the rising process is a peaceful one. Realism, institutionalism, and constructivism have all dealt with the possible systemic impacts of the BRICS states. BRICS nations seem to be reformist rather than disruptive, meaning that they are pushing for the better representation of their self-perceived new status in multilateral institutions rather than challenging the current system per se. In terms of foreign policy, BRICS states interact with well-established powers such as the United States and European ones—herein they display balancing or bandwagoning strategies, as they do also toward each other. Moreover, well-established powers either accommodate or contest the rising process and status claims of these emerging powers. However, BRICS states are also regional powers. Regional peers contest the rising processes of BRICS and particularly claims to global powerhood.

While BRICS can be seen as striving for the reform of multilateral institutions, the traditional view of BRICS as a homogenous force, comprising countries with similar interests, is sometimes misleading. Even though BRICS states have their own institution with a new bank, they also pursue different interests within traditional institutions. Therefore, the existing literature on BRICS is tilted toward systemic and institutional concerns. Although works taking into consideration the interplay between the domestic and international levels in foreign policy analysis do exist, they are not necessarily related to emerging processes and rarely go beyond foreign economic policy issues. People, leaders, and governmental institutions are decision makers or are part of the decision-making process in foreign policy, and thus they form perceptions and act according to how the rising process of the state is unfolding. An integration of the systemic, state, and personal levels captures the essence of the foreign policies of BRICS states in the context of rising and can take into consideration the ups and downs and stalemates of rising-process trajectories in international politics.
Religion in Foreign Policy
Authors: Haynes Jeffrey
Published: November 2016

Most states’ foreign policies are secular in orientation and focus. A few make religion a prominent component of their ideological approach to foreign policy. States whose foreign policies are consistently or irregularly informed by religion include Egypt, Iran, India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. In each case, these states’ foreign policies feature domestic religious actors seeking to have regular or intermittent involvement in foreign policymaking. The impact and capacity of such religious actors is linked to the ideological and/or national interest priorities of incumbent governments. That is, religious actors may have an input into foreign policymaking, which reflects a concern more generally with the association between material concerns—including national security issues—and religious and ethical ideas, norms, and values.

In addition to states with input from religious actors in foreign policymaking, there are several important nonstate actors whose religious beliefs centrally inform their foreign policies, which often focus on activities in the United Nations, the world’s largest and most comprehensive organization with near-universal state membership. The United Nations is a key focal point to pursue such policies, and three such actors are discussed: the Holy See/Vatican (and, more generally, the Roman Catholic Church), the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and the World Council of Churches (WCC), whose religious orientations are, respectively, Roman Catholicism, Islam, and non-Catholic Christianity. The importance of religious actors in foreign policy, in relation to both selected states and nonstate actors, is explored.
Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy
Authors: Oktay Sibel
Published: November 2016

Coalition governments are observed frequently in parliamentary systems. Approximately 70% of all governments in postwar Europe have been one type of coalition or another. Israel has never been ruled by a single-party government in its history. Recently, majoritarian systems like Britain produced coalitions, taking many by surprise.

The prominence of coalitions in parliamentary democracies compels researchers to study them more closely. The Comparative Politics literature investigates, in particular, the dynamics of coalition formation and termination, as well as the domestic policy outputs of coalitions, especially compared to governments ruled by a single party.

Coalitions have generated interest on the International Relations front as well. One avenue of research transcends the “political party” as a building block and conceptualizes coalitions as a “decision unit” by focusing on the group of veto players in a regime’s foreign policy apparatus. Another line of scholarship, situated in the “Democratic Peace” framework, looks at coalitions as a domestic-institutional factor to observe their effects on the likelihood of international conflict.

Departing from the “Democratic Peace” tradition, more recent research in Foreign Policy Analysis rejuvenates the study of coalitions in international politics. This literature not only encourages theory development by scrutinizing why coalitions behave differently than single-parties in the international arena but also bridges the gap between International Relations and Comparative Politics. Emphasizing the organic relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy, foreign policy researchers dissect coalition governments to highlight the role political parties play on foreign policy formulation and implementation. This literature also illustrates the merits of methodological plurality in studying foreign policy. Using a combination of comparative case studies, process tracing, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and regression modeling, it sheds light not only on the broader trends that characterize coalition foreign policy but also on the causal mechanisms and contextual factors which often go unaccounted for in purely statistical analyses. The recent advances in role and image theories in Foreign Policy Analysis are expected to influence the study of coalitions and their foreign policies, offering an interpretivist take alongside this positivist trajectory.
Identity and Foreign Policy
Authors: Vucetic Srdjan
Published: November 2016

Identity has come to figure prominently in the study of foreign policy since the 1990s when it was first introduced by constructivist theorists in International Relations. Consensus on what identity is and what it does in relation to foreign policy does not exist and is unlikely to be ever forged. Some scholars investigate state identity—how it impacts foreign policy processes while simultaneously being impacted by international structures. Others use the concept of identification to examine what foreign policy means for the constitution of modern political subjectivities. Still others seek to bring together constructivist identity scholarship together with more established approaches in Foreign Policy Analysis. This article considers the contextual emergence and evolution of the “identity and foreign policy” scholarship in its many different and differing streams. The large volume of literature produced on this subject over the past two and a half decades defies an easy summary of its theoretical and empirical contributions, but an overview of the main controversies and debates should provide the reader with a solid foundation for further research.
Infectious Disease as a Foreign Policy Threat
Authors: Katz Rebecca , Sorrell Erin , Standley Claire
Published: November 2016

The last 30 years have seen the global consequences of newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, starting with the international spread of HIV/AIDS, the emergence of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers, SARS, MERS, novel influenza viruses, and most recently, the global spread of Zika. The impact of tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases on society are now better understood, including how these diseases influence the social, economic, and political environment in a nation. Despite international treaties and norms, the specter of intentional use of infectious disease remains present, particularly as technological barriers to access are reduced. The reality is that infectious diseases not only impact population health, but also have clear consequences for international security and foreign policy.

Foreign policy has been used to coordinate response to infectious disease events and to advance population health around the world. Conversely, collaboration on infectious disease prevention, preparedness, and response has been used strategically by nations to advance diplomacy and improve foreign relations. Both approaches have become integral to foreign policy, and this chapter provides examples to elucidate how health and foreign policy have become intertwined and used with different levels of effectiveness by governments around the world. As the scope of this topic is extensive, this article primarily draws from U.S. examples for brevity’s sake, while acknowledging the truly global nature of the dynamic between infectious diseases and foreign policy, and noting that the interplay between them will vary between countries and regions.

In 2014, U.S. President Barak Obama called upon global partners to, “change our mindsets and start thinking about biological threats as the security threats that they are—in addition to being humanitarian threats and economic threats. We have to bring the same level of commitment and focus to these challenges as we do when meeting around more traditional security issues”. With world leaders increasingly identifying disease as threats to security and economic stability, we are observing infectious diseases—like no other time in history—becoming an integral component of foreign policy.
A Revisionist Perspective on Framing Effects
Authors: Liu Jiawei , Scheufele Dietram A.
Published: November 2016

There is a dichotomy in framing research that can be traced back to its multidisciplinary origins in psychology and sociology. Definitions of framing rooted in psychology are concerned with the differential presentation of the otherwise identical information and are often referred to as equivalence framing. Definitions rooted in more sociological traditions investigate how a message can be constructed with different sets of information to highlight contrasting perspectives on the same issue. The latter is typically referred to as emphasis framing. Although often subsumed under the same label, equivalence framing and emphasis framing are systematically different, both conceptually and operationally. Therefore, the two traditions need to be carefully distinguished in terms of their origins, conceptualization and operationalization of frames, underlying mechanisms, cognitive outcomes, and their relationships with other media effects theories.

Categorizing existing studies revealed two major pitfalls in framing effects literatures. First, many political communication studies to date have adopted the emphasis framing approach. However, as substantial manipulation of information introduces confounding variables making it difficult for researchers to attribute the effect on the audience to the change of frames, this approach has relatively low internal validity in experiments and can hardly be distinguished from other cognitive media effects models, such as agenda setting and priming. Thus, the bias toward emphasis framing needs to be addressed by conducting research with equivalence frames so that a more concrete causal relationship between message framing and its effects can be established. In addition, little attention has been given to visuals in framing effects research so far. Considering that people consume information in a multimedia environment online, visual frames and verbal-visual interactions need to be further investigated.