Social Peace and Political Pluralism

The social and political framework of war and peace.

Peace Building and Complex Political Emergencies

This paper examines the recent growth of the opium economy in North Eastern Afghanistan. A detailed analysis of one village in Badakshan Province reveals profound changes in the local economy and social institutions. The paper describes two major shifts in the local economy (1) the switch from wheat to poppy cultivation (2) the shift from the livestock trade to the opium trade. It then examines...

Pluralism; an Old but New Phenomenon in Socio-political Processes

This paper presents pluralism as a historical process. The term pluralism frequently appears not only in the field of political philosophy but also in social sciences. In one sense, the growing literature is stimulating and enriching, nevertheless the abundance of material attempting to explain the various interpretations of pluralist theory can be convoluted and overwhelming. Despite the const...

The Political Economy of Trade Policy Reform : Social Complexity and Methodological Pluralism

1 The last clause is important. If we have little confidence in our model of the economy, or political economy, the value of an extension of any normative statement relative to that economy to a concrete existing economy is considerably devalued. 2 This framing of the issues directly contradicts the claims made for the new research on the political economy of policy reform in Rodrik (1993). I h...

Social Computing, HCI, Social Change and Peace

This paper reports work regarding the design, development and evaluation of a surface computing application to support collaborative decision making.. The domainindependent application, so called Ideas Mapping, builds on the principle of Affinity Diagramming to allow participants to analyze a problem and brainstorm around possible solutions while they actively construct a consensus artifact a t...