Suchergebnisse

Learning a second and/or a foreign language is no longer a luxury. Opportunities in higher education, in international military, diplomacy and economics increasingly require multilingual skills. Countries engaged in the global market need employees with knowledge of foreign languages and cultures to market products to customers around the globe and to work effectively with colleagues from partner countries with different languages and cultures. In the same way, international organisations have underscored the importance of competence in foreign languages for: international finance, trade, diplomacy and security. Research has further shown that knowledge of a foreign language broadens a person's opportunities in higher education and helps in the overall cognitive development. Foreign languages are essential in peace keeping missions and in international courts. In discussing the importance of foreign languages, this paper surveys literature to uncover key policy decisions, practices and directions adopted by various nations in the world. Examples are drawn from regions representing the five continents.

This Kenya national survey of journalists conducted in 2012 to 2013 ( n = 504) examines job satisfaction, income satisfaction, and predictors of job satisfaction. Findings indicate that the vast majority of journalists are satisfied with their current jobs (83%). However, a clear majority (61.8%) are dissatisfied with their monthly incomes. Nearly a quarter of journalists fall in the monthly salary bracket of US$375 to US$625. Compared by gender, male and female journalists are equally satisfied with their jobs. Older journalists, radio journalists, high income earners, and full-time journalists reported higher job satisfaction. Income, job security, and job autonomy were the main predictors of job satisfaction.

Résumé
Le continent africain a vécu certains des crimes de guerre de masse,
crimes contre l'humanité et crimes de génocide les plus odieux, le plus
souvent perpétrés dans le contexte d'un conflit armé interne. Ces atrocités
ont, pour la plupart, été commises sans que la communauté internationale
n'élève la voix ou n'agisse. Face à cette situation, l'article 4 de l'Acte
constitutif de l'Union africaine du 11 juillet 2000 reconnaît à
l'organisation le droit d'intervenir sur le territoire d'un État membre en
cas de crimes de guerre, de génocide et de crimes contre l'humanité, ainsi
que le droit des États membres de solliciter une telle intervention. L'Acte
constitutif de l'Union africaine est ainsi le premier traité international à
énoncer un tel droit. La disposition tranche avec les notions traditionneUes
du principe de non-ingérence et de non-intervention dans les affaires
intérieures des États-nations.
Cet article examine le droit d'intervention dans le cadre de l'Union
africaine. L'auteur se penche sur l'historique de la démarche qui a abouti à
l'insertion de cette disposition dans l'Acte constitutif, ainsi que sur les
principaux objectifs et les raisons de cette exception majeure au principe
de la souveraineté territoriale. En outre, la mise en œuvre de cette
disposition ainsi que les difficultés pratiques, juridiques et procédurales
prévisibles sont analysées. Les paramètres du droit d'intervention en droit
international, de même que les aspects politiques influant sur le débat
doctrinal, sont étudiés en vue d'évaluer le fondement juridique de l'article
4 de l'Acte constitutif.
L'auteur fait valoir que, s'il est vrai que la mise en œuvre du droit
d'intervention soulèvera très probablement des problèmes considérables, il
n'en reste pas moins que la disposition met en évidence les valeurs
fondamentales de l'Union africaine et les mesures énergiques que les États
membres sont disposés à prendre pour garantir ces protections élémentaires à
toute personne vivant en Afrique.

The Maasai/Kikuyu agro-pastoral borderlands of Maiella and Enoosupukia, located in the hinterlands of Lake Naivasha's agro-industrial hub, are particularly notorious in the history of ethnicised violence in the Kenya's Rift Valley. In October 1993, an organised assault perpetrated by hundreds of Maasai vigilantes, with the assistance of game wardens and administration police, killed more than 20 farmers of Kikuyu descent. Consequently, thousands of migrant farmers were violently evicted from Enoosupukia at the instigation of leading local politicians. Nowadays, however, intercommunity relations are surprisingly peaceful and the cooperative use of natural resources is the rule rather than the exception. There seems to be a form of reorganization. Violence seems to be contained and the local economy has since recovered. This does not mean that there is no conflict, but people seem to have the facility to solve them peacefully. How did formerly violent conflicts develop into peaceful relations? How did competition turn into cooperation, facilitating changing land use? This dissertation explores the value of cross-cutting ties and local institutions in peaceful relationships and the non-violent resolution of conflicts across previously violently contested community boundaries. It mainly relies on ethnographic data collected between 2014 and 2015. The discussion therefore builds on several theoretical approaches in anthropology and the social sciences – that is, violent conflicts, cross-cutting ties and conflicting loyalties, joking relationships, peace and nonviolence, and institutions, in order to understand shared spaces that are experiencing fairly rapid social and economic changes, and characterised by conflict and coexistence. In the researched communities, cross-cutting ties and the split allegiances associated with them result from intermarriages, land transactions, trade, and friendship. By institutions, I refer to local peace committees, an attempt to standardise an aspect of customary law, and Nyumba Kumi, a strategy of anchoring community policing at the household level. In 2010, the state "implanted" these grassroots-level institutions and conferred on them the rights to handle specific conflicts and to prevent crime. I argue that the studied groups utilise diverse networks of relationships as adaptive responses to landlessness, poverty, and socio-political dynamics at the local level. Material and non-material exchanges and transfers accompany these social and economic ties and networks. In addition to being instrumental in nurturing a cohesive social fabric, I argue that such alliances could be thought of as strategies of appropriation of resources in the frontiers – areas that are considered to have immense agricultural potential and to be conducive to economic enterprise. Consequently, these areas are continuously changed and shaped through immigration, population growth, and agricultural intensification. However, cross-cutting ties and intergroup alliances may not necessarily prevent the occurrence or escalation of conflicts. Nevertheless, disputes and conflicts, which form part of the social order in the studied area, create the opportunities for locally contextualised systems of peace and non-violence that inculcate the values of cooperation, coexistence, and restraint from violence. Although the neo-traditional institutions (local peace committees and Nyumba Kumi) face massive complexities and lack the capacity to handle serious conflicts, their application of informal constraints in dispute resolution provides room for some optimism. Notably, the formation of ties and alliances between the studied groups, and the use of local norms and values to resolve disputes, are not new phenomena – they are reminiscent of historical patterns. Their persistence, particularly in the context of Kenya, indicates a form of historical continuity, which remains rather "undisturbed" despite the prevalence of ethnicised political economies. Indeed, the formation of alliances, which are driven by mutual pursuit of commodities (livestock, rental land, and agricultural produce), markets, and diversification, tends to override other identities. While the major thrust of social science literature in East Africa has focused on the search for root causes of violence, very little has been said about the conditions and practices of cooperation and non-violent conflict resolution. In addition, situations where prior violence turned into peaceful interaction have attracted little attention, though the analysis of such transitional phases holds the promise of contributing to applicable knowledge on conflict resolution. This study is part of a larger multidisciplinary project, "Resilience in East African Landscapes" (REAL), which is a Marie Curie Actions Innovative Training Networks (ITN) project. The principal focus of this multidisciplinary project is to study past, present, and future thresholds and sustainable trajectories in human-landscape interactions in East Africa over the last millennia. While other individual projects focus on long-term ecosystem dynamics and societal interactions, my project examines human-landscape interactions in the present and the very recent past (i.e. the period in which events and processes were witnessed or can still be recalled by today's population). The transition from conflict to coexistence and from competition to cooperative use of previously violently contested land resources is understood here as enhancing adaptation in the face of social-political, economic, environmental, and climatic changes. This dissertation is therefore a contribution to new modes of resilience in human-landscape interactions after a collapse situation.

Drought is one of the major scourges of humanity with its devastations manifested in form of negative economic impacts, massive malnutrition, human miserly and death to both livestock and people. Yet drought (and its impacts) is not new and has been a subject of writing from early days and from many parts of the world. This paper discusses weather and human related causes of drought in Kenya, using a case study of the 2008-2009 and the 2011 droughts in Kenya and affecting the whole Horn of Africa whose devastating impacts are still being felt. It uses information from various sources collected in the recent past on weather and declining forest cover in Kenya's key water towers as a possible link to the drought. The analysis show that the drought may have been caused by the ongoing climate change while the severity of the drought impacts were made worse and may be attributed to a series of events which are human related including post-election violence in 2007, failed government policies on food security leading to poverty in semi-arid parts of Kenya. The paper notes that those most affected by the drought were the pastoralists, children and women, while wildlife was not spared either. It proposes policies that promote an integrated creative approach in fighting drought related famines in Kenya which include initiating both a "green" and "blue" revolutions in Kenya's marginal lands as a way of climate change adaptation strategies to mitigate food insecurity.

While much consideration has been given to the approval process, base classification, and codification of tax and expenditure limits (or TELs), these factors tell us nothing about how they actually work. This study focuses exclusively on the technical elements of these limits and finds how states estimate their limits have over time eroded their potency. More specifically, if a state resets or rebases its limit annually by using actual revenues or expenditures for the preceding year, the limit will trend closely with actual revenues or expenditures, effectively restricting growth in spending as prescribed by law. However, if the law requires a state to estimate its limit using the appropriation limit for the preceding year instead of actual revenues or expenditures, that is, without rebasing, the limit will reflect cumulative changes to the base when it was first approved. Over time, the TEL cap is significantly above the states revenues or expenditures as it remains unaffected by the state's underlying fiscal and economic environment.