Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Rethinking Absorptive Capacity
When recipients cannot absorb the aid and attention they are offered, the common response is “capacity building”—as if the source of the problem is the recipient’s implementation capacity. In this report, Robert D. Lamb and Kathryn Mixon present the results of their research on the sources of absorptive capacity. They find that this sort of “blaming the victim” mentality, while common, is not always justified. While it is true that many aid recipients do not have adequate capacity for implementation, it is equally true that many aid programs are designed and implemented without an adequate appreciation of local desires, resources, capabilities, and challenges. Absorptive capacity, in other words, is a byproduct of the donor-recipient relationship. The authors present a new framework for measuring absorptive capacity. This framework is intended to supplement existing planning, monitoring, and evaluation processes, offering a new way to test whether an existing approach is compatible with local conditions and a method for improving the fit.
Rethinking Legitimacy and Illegitimacy
This report introduces a new assessment framework for legitimacy and illegitimacy that governments, businesses, and other organizations can use to better understand the sources and dynamics of support or opposition for any entity, policy, or program. It includes an intellectual history of the concept of legitimacy, summarizes the literature, introduces a new conceptualization of illegitimacy, and outlines four types of legitimacy assessments, from a rapid to a comprehensive assessment.
The Uncertain Transition from Stability to Peace
Most violent conflicts since the turn of this century were in countries that had experienced an earlier violent conflict. How can we tell when a country is likely to remain stuck in a cycle of violence? What factors suggest it might be “ripe” for stabilizing and peace building? The authors studied four cases: Chad is stuck in a cycle of violence, while El Salvador, Laos, and Mozambique have had different results in their transitions from violence to stability to peace. Conflicts without internal cohesion of combatants or pressure from foreign patrons to stop fighting are probably not ripe for stabilizing. Where there are subnational or regional actors committed to violence, post-conflict peace building is not likely to succeed without enforcement capacity to contain violence or demonstrated commitments to increasing political inclusion and making material improvements in the lives of residents.
Political Governance and Strategy in Afghanistan
Afghanistan's de facto system of governance is a politically driven "hybrid" order made up of shifting links among many different formal, informal, and illicit actors, networks, and institutions. Because its central government does not have the capacity to govern through its extremely centralized system and will not have that capacity for at least a generation, it will need to share the burden of stabilizing and governing the country with other governance and political actors. Alone, those other actors will not have the capacity to keep Afghanistan together either.To use Afghanistan's hybrid system as a resource for stabilization, the United States should work with its international and Afghan partners to develop a "political governance" strategy. The requirements for such an approach are detailed in this report. The governance component would encourage and enable formal and informal actors to share the burden of governing. To make sure power brokers do not contribute to instability, the politics component would give some a stake in the political and economic system while giving the most malign a set of targeted incentives to behave in ways conducive to stability.
Advances and Challenges in Political Transitions
The United States has provided support to political transitions worldwide for many years. But it was just twenty years ago that the US government established an office specifically to respond when regimes or conflicts ended and to maintain momentum toward positive change. Today’s conflicts, however, are more complex, usually involving half a dozen or scores of armed groups—and their alliances and motivations are not always clear. Seldom are peace agreements in place to act as a roadmap to the transition. And transition work now more commonly begins before violence even ends. This report, published on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Office of Transition Initiatives at the US Agency for International Development, considers what today’s complexities imply for how conflicts and transition work might evolve in the future, with chapters on each major region of the world and on topics such as extremism, urbanization, gender, and humanitarian response.
Absorptive Capacity in the Security and Justice Sectors
In development, stabilization, and peace building, donors increasingly recognize the importance of being sensitive to the local contexts of their efforts. Yet the use of “blueprints” remains widespread. Even when standard approaches are modified for particular aid partners, there often remains a poor fit between donor efforts and local conditions. When recipients cannot absorb the aid and attention they are offered, the common response is “capacity building.” While it is true that many aid recipients do not have adequate capacity for implementation, this report presents the results of a case study demonstrating that some security and justice programs are designed and implemented without an adequate appreciation of local desires, resources, capabilities, and challenges. Absorptive capacity, in other words, is a byproduct of the donor-recipient relationship. An earlier study by the authors introduced a new framework for measuring absorptive capacity. This volume applies it to security and justice sector programs that did not meet all of their objectives in Lebanon, Cambodia, and Colombia.
Colombia
This report from the CSIS Americas Program provides a detailed look at the challenges the Colombian government confronts as it moves from providing security to developing rural areas that were previously conflict zones. In particular, the report examines such issues as remaining security needs; land tenure; needed infrastructure improvements; and better governance. In addition, the report offers recommendations on how the Colombian government can move forward in consolidating gains in its countryside—and how the United States can help.
Religion and Militancy in Pakistan and Afghanistan
"The importance of studying the rise of Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot be overemphasized. Both countries have experienced serious threats from radical Islamic groups, and the ideological and strategic nature of radical Islam in the region has changed over the years. This report presents the results of a comprehensive review of the English-language literature on militant Islamic movements in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Islamic radical groups, often viewed as monolithic, are in reality far from homogeneous in outlook, religious beliefs, or the strategies and tactics they use to achieve their goals. Clearly, no mere classification of these groups in the form of typologies that attempt to capture their ideological diversity or the development of their networks will be particularly useful in determining how the U.S. government and other nations ought to engage with them. This review thus focuses on the diversity of religious beliefs held by non-state armed groups (militants) and the relationship between those beliefs and their overall objectives and activities."--Publisher's website.
