Evaluation of Fadcanic's teacher training program in Nicaragua's Southern autonomous region of the Atlantic Coast
Since 1997, FADCANIC has been implementing a training program for unqualified teachers working in primary schools of Nicaragua’s Southern autonomous region of the Atlantic Coast. SAIH, the Norwegian NGO that has been funding this program, has commissioned the present evaluation. It concludes that the program has had a significant impact in terms of improving education in the region through addressing one of the most urgent needs of the educational sector, namely teacher qualifications. However, the evaluation also points out a number of other limitations for the sector, including lack of resources for materials, physical infrastructure and reasonable teacher salaries, as well as general social problems of the region. It recommends that the program is continued, and that even greater emphasis is put upon creating a teacher education appropriate to the multilingual and -cultural reality.
The Rhetoric of Hegemony : How the extended definition of terrorism redefines international relations
This paper looks at the rhetorical extension of the word “terrorism” to cover what used to be called guerrilla war, separatism, civil war, armed resistance and all other forms of political violence, down to and including non-lethal sabotage and vandalism. It begins by reflecting on how political power must be buttressed by legitimacy, which in turn involves the de-legitimisation of challengers. This is often achieved by assimilating political dissent to the “criminality” that by definition governments are created to combat. When governments use the term “order” to mean their own convenience, and the converse, this can effectively evoke the individual citizen’s fear of personally suffering violence, even when he is in fact more at risk from the government itself than from its critics. In much the same way, “terror” no longer means government violence against citizens (as in the 19th century), nor solely violence against civilians by dissident groups; it has recently mutated to mean any armed resistance to the party deploying the rhetoric, even in conventional military forms. The terrorist label is the ultimate delegitimising technique, which may be employed to mobilise metropolitan populations to support a globally-coordinated suppression of resistance to the new world order.
A Gap in OSCE Conflict Prevention? : Local Media and Inter-Ethnic Conflict in the Former Soviet Union
This paper argues that local media have been of great importance in the escalation of inter-ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union, and that conflict prevention by the OSCE in the region initially did not focus appropriately on media issues. During the past few years, however, media issues have increasingly come to preoccupy the OSCE, chiefly in connection with human rights issues and freedom of speech, but to some extent also as an element of conflict prevention. The importance of local media for OSCE conflict prevention is analysed in terms of the activities of the High Commissioner for National Minorities and Representative on Freedom of the Media, and OSCE annual reports.
Ways of improvement in the Russian labour market with emphasis on the shadow employment
The report discusses the main peculiarities of the Russian labour market, such as the relatively low unemployment, the prevailing shadow labour relationships and the overmanning in the public sector. The report is organised as follows. The first part aims to highlight the main aspects of the Russian labour market development and some peculiarities of the shadow employment in Russia. The second part presents the model, and applications of possible government policies for the labour market are discussed in the third part. The last part concludes.
Creating Security through Immigration Control: An analysis of European immigration discourse and the development towards a common EU asylum and imm...
The purpose of this report is to discuss the extent to which immigration has come to be perceived as a security threat by European Union (EU) policy makers. The manner in which immigration issues are presented by policy makers at the European level is assumed to have substantive implications for the choice of instruments in the area. A second purpose is therefore to discuss the extent to which the development towards a common EU asylum and immigration policy can be interpreted as security policy strategy. Increased immigration during the last few decades has coincided with increasing unemployment and economic restructuring in Western Europe. The issue of immigration became increasingly sensitive in the late 1980s after the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, when a tide of illegal immigrants was expected to inundate the West. Today, images of ships loaded with refugees off the shores of Italy, or of trucks filled with illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel, have become disturbing, but no longer rare features of European newspaper headlines. The impression is that of Europe being ‘swamped’, and unable to deal with the hordes of people standing outside its gates wanting in.Since the aim of this report is to examine the change that has taken place in European perspectives on immigration, a study of political discourse will enable us to deconstruct a number of justificatory domains, which are supported by the members of the European policy community. The main hypothesis is that security considerations are clearly reflected in the establishment and development of asylum and immigration instruments following the Amsterdam programme. Another hypothesis is that the framing of immigration as a security threat has legitimised the introduction of objectives and instruments that have their origin in security policy. This is notably to be seen in the accession agreements with the Central and Eastern European applicant countries, as well in the so-called ‘partnership-agreements’ with immigrant countries of origin and transit. Having established the broader aim of this report, I propose two main and inter linked questions as the framework for the analysis: First: To what extent has the issue of asylum and immigration come to be seen as a security threat, and thus as a security matter at the EU level? Second: To what extent is the above question reflected in the objectives and instruments of the common EU asylum and immigration policy? Can the development towards a common EU asylum and immigration policy be called a security policy strategy?
Partnership and Discord: Russia and the construction of a post Cold War security architecture in Europe 1991–2000
This study analyses Russia’s approach to the construction of a post-Cold War security architecture in Europe from 1991 to 2000. The author examines tensions, contradictions and ambiguities in Russia’s policy that contributed to making both partnership and discord ingredients to Russian–Western security relations. For instance, how can we understand Russia’s intense opposition to NATO enlargement and NATO’s out-of-area operations in light of Russia’s own formalised cooperation with the Western alliance? And how can we conceive of Moscow’s enduring position that the OSCE should be the ‘cornerstone’ of Europe’s security architecture, considering what many observers have interpreted as Russian obstruction of, and non-compliance with, OSCE decisions and norms? The author seeks to answer these questions by tracing the Russian debate on national identity and foreign policy that emerged in the wake of Soviet dissolution.
Damage Limitation and Decline in Institutional Powers: Russia’s Perception of the EU as a Security Actor 1999–2002
The report will discuss whether or not Russian interest and endorsement of the EU’s security and defense dimension repeated the overall strategic perspective of the Primakov doctrine, which aimed at counterbalancing US unipolarism by playing on the differences between the US and Europe in international affairs. I ask this question since analysts are not equivocal to this end. Some suggest that “Primakov’s fall from power has not undercut the importance of multipolarity in Russian foreign policy. By analyzing perceptions, I seek to highlight the dominating trends in the discourse on the EU in Russia. This involves a broad orientation with regard to sources. Russia has engaged in a comprehensive debate on relating to the EU and NATO within the field of security, and the report draws on vast material from the security debate within research circles and official speeches and newspaper reports. Perceptions will be linked to the interpretive approaches of damage limitation or declining institutional powers. A definition of these two approaches will be given below.
Regionale og bilaterale handelsavtaler i Latin-Amerika. Konsekvenser for norsk eksport