Through the examination of one of the most successful cases of a European Community (EC) law litigation strategy, this article develops a general framework for understanding when and how the EC legal system will be successfully used by domestic groups to challenge national policy. The authors show how the European legal system actually shifted the domestic balance of power in favor of equality ...

A pillage game is a formal model of Hobbesian anarchy as a coalitional game. The technology of pillage is specified by a power function that determines the power of each coalition as a function of its members and their wealth. A coalition can despoil any other coalition less powerful than itself. The present paper studies the problem of achieving an efficient allocation of resources when the re...

T.V. Paul is James McGill Professor of International Relations at McGill University, Canada. During 2002-03 he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA and was also a senior visiting scholar at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He is the author of Power versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons (McGill-Queen’s, 20...

The geopolitical importance of the Caspian region does not stem solely from its energy potential. Whether or not the area emerges as a major energy producer, its central geographical location, the considerable potential for regional instability and internal and interstate conflict, and the competition among external powers for influence all suggest that events in the region will shape the balan...

In this work, we use first principles of kinematics to provide a fundamental insight into mechanical power distribution within multi-actuator machines. Individual actuator powers—not their net sum—determine the efficiency and actuator size of a multi-joint machine. Net power delivered to the environment naturally discards important information about how that power is generated. For example, sim...

In order to achieve high performance and efficiency of coal-fired power plants, it is highly important to control the coal flow into the boiler in the power plant. This means suppression of disturbances and force the coal mill to deliver the required coal flow, as well as monitor the coal mill in order to detect faults in the coal mill when they emerge. This paper deals with the second objectiv...

Ratings are critical to the function and success of services in the emerging sharing economy. They are a means through which users develop trust in one another and in the services themselves. Ratings are designed to give users a proxy for the expected quality and risk of potential online transactions. We expect online ratings to reflect an objective measure of quality, but such evaluations in f...

This fascinating book by Paul Kennedy, a professor of history at Yale University, is about the changing balance of power in the past 500 years. The book explains the interaction between economics & strategy and relates military conflicts to economic progress. As the author puts it, “Wealth is usually needed to underpin military power and military power is usually needed to acquire and protect w...

"Civilizations" and "world systems" are alternative labels for the largest macropolitical entities that have existed in human history. These historical civilizations/world systems may be seen as having two polar types of power structure, the "states system" and the "universal empire." Each form has certain characteristic accompaniments, which may promote it, be promoted by it, or both. For stat...