This article interrogates whether, and if so how, international mediation might shape the identities of conflict parties. I examine stages II Geneva Peace Process, early United Nations (UN)-led efforts in relation to Syrian civil war, by thematically analysing 31 semi-structured interviews, 35 press conferences 68 official documents. argue that mediators parties can reimagine within, response t...

Integration of information from distributed, heterogeneous information sources is an active area of research in the database community. The research efforts have mainly concentrated on sources such as collections of web documents, relational databases and text files. In the domain of spatial information systems, researchers have studied integration architectures, issues and problems in semantic...

This article provides a critical examination of telecommunications regulation in the EU and argues for the need for change along the lines of subsidiarity and mediation. This discussion is particularly timely, as the European Commission is working on a new telecommunications regulatory framework, with the lessons and failures of the past appearing more critical than ever. In this context, this ...

This study empirically establishes a link between medieval trade, agglomeration and contemporary regional development in ten European countries. It documents a statistically and economically significant positive relationship between prominent involvement in medieval trade and commercial activities and regional economic development today. Further empirical analyses show that medieval trade posit...

Previous studies on information disclosure have heavily relied on the justice theory to explain how users balance the benefits and privacy risks (e.g., privacy calculus) induced by the information disclosure behavior. However, the specific mechanism of privacy calculus (or the role of justice) and the boundary conditions under which the privacy calculus works have been rarely empirically invest...

The present study investigated how consequence value influences affect, attention, and learning while reading instructional texts, and if text difficulty moderates these effects. Participants studied four instructional texts on research methods in a 2 × 2 consequence value (high vs. low) × text difficulty (easy vs. difficult) within-subjects experiment. Consequence value was manipulated by assi...

In string compactification on a manifold X , in addition to the string scale and the normal scales of low-energy particle physics, there is a Kaluza-Klein scale 1 R associated with the size of X . We present an argument that generic string models with low-energy supersymmetry have, after moduli stabilization, bulk fields with masses which are parametrically lighter than 1 R . We discuss the imp...

Although cynical beliefs about human nature yield numerous adverse consequences for individuals’ life outcomes and well-being, very little is known about factors that counteract the development of cynical beliefs. Drawing from the literature on the “education effect” describing the importance of education in overcoming close-mindedness and negative views of others, we propose that education can...