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The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) has been mediating the South Sudan conflict since 2013. IGAD’s intervention in South Sudan is anchored on its founding norm of peaceful settlement of regional conflicts and in reference to the principle of subsidiarity, under the Africa Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). However, it is puzzling how violence continued unabated even as conflict parties negotiated and signed numerous agreements under the auspices of IGAD. The parties to conflict seem unwilling to implement the 2018 peace agreement, which is arguably un-implementable. Yet, it appears that IGAD mediators were privy to this situation all along. The question that then arises is why IGAD would continue engaging in a mediation process that neither ends violence nor offers a promise of a resolution? Drawing out on empirical data, this paper argues that IGAD’s organisational structures and functionality are key to understanding and explaining the South Sudan phenomenon within broader discourses on peace and security regionalism in Africa. This paper suggests the need to pay attention to the embeddedness of political power dynamics in the structures and functionality of Africa’s Regional Economic Communities (RECs), such as IGAD, as one of the ways to (re)thinking and (re)orienting norms and practices of regional conflict management within the APSA and in pursuit of the “African solutions to African problems.”

Data for this paper was obtained through document reviews and 39 elite interviews. The interviews were conducted with representatives of IGAD member states, bureaucrats of IGAD and its organs mediation support teams, conflict parties, diplomats and other relevant experts purposively selected based on their role in the mediation. The physical interviews were conducted in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, with others conducted virtually. Analysis and presentation of findings are largely perspectival, highlighting coexistence of contending peacemaking ideas and practices. The discussions centre around inter-linked themes of IGAD’s conceptions of peace and approaches to peacemaking as informed by its structural and functional designs.

Findings illustrate the complexity of the peace process and the centrality of power politics in IGAD’s peace and security arrangements. In view of the findings, this paper echoes the need for enhanced and predictable collaborative framework between IGAD and the African Union (AU) as central to the operationalisation of the APSA and pursuit of the African solutions to the African problems. Hence, this paper suggests transforming IGAD’s political program into a robust political bureau with predictable interlinkages and structured engagements between IGAD’s heads of state and government and the APSA’s Panel of the Wise (PoW).

The study is based on empirical data obtained through the researcher's own framed questions, and its argument is based on the researcher's own interpretations innovatively framed within existing theoretical framework, particularly hybrid peace theory. Based on the findings, this paper makes bold and practical recommendations for possible workable collaborative framework between IGAD and the AU under the APSA framework

Purpose – This chapter provides one aspect of the organizational side of the biology and politics enterprise.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter provides a historical description of two organizations that help to structure the “business” of biology and politics: The International Political Science Association’s (IPSA) Research Committee #12 and the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS).

Findings – Research Committee #12 had its origins in the early 1970s, whereas APLS came about in the later 1970s. The discussion of these two organizations gives the reader a better sense of the twin enterprises. In the process of discussing APLS, the chapter also outlines the contributions of its professional journal, Politics and the Life Sciences.

Originality/value – Seldom has there been a detailed discussion of these two organizations in one place.

We are long overdue for a conversation about ethical treatment of student researchers. Ethical treatment of research participants has been carefully defined through decades of public conversation, and ethical practices have been institutionalized through mechanisms like mandatory ethics trainings and Institutional Review Boards. Student researchers deserve the same level of consideration. While there are many types of ethical violations of student labor in research projects, there are two that are of particular concern to social movements researchers: use of volunteer labor without clear academic or professional benefits, and failure to ensure the safety of student researchers. The first of these ethical violations is especially common in social movements research because of the emergent nature of protests: new rounds of protests begin and researchers seek to rapidly collect data on a tight timeframe, making grant funding to pay student researchers challenging. The second situation emerges when faculty researchers do not consider the ways students' race, gender identity, or other characteristics, or the nature of the protests themselves might create potential risks for students.

In this paper, I propose using the Belmont Report principles to create guidelines for ethical treatment of student researchers. While these principles were developed for the purposes of protecting research participants, the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice help us to clarify the risks and benefits for student researchers, to find ways to maximize the benefits of student research participation, and to understand and address the inequalities that plague graduate student training.

Histories of American public administration during the Progressive era (1890‐1920) tend to highlight the positive contributions of its major founders, skimming lightly over nativist, anti‐democratic and racial writings. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the given narrative by setting the record straight regarding the latter writings of three major figures: Frederick Cleveland, Frank Goodnow and W.F. Willoughby. Not intended as an exercise in presentism, the goal is a more nuanced understanding of public administration history. This research approach can be used internationally by other management historians to examine cultural biases by other management theorists.

Mainstream qualitative research techniques in management history and a close literary examination of lesser known and out‐of‐print writings.

The three major public administration figures on President Taft's Commission on Economy and Efficiency (1910‐1913) expressed nativist, racial and anti‐democratic views in their published writings, before and after serving on the commission. These views are little known and need to be added to the given historical narrative. The three deemed that only limited populations were qualified to govern a democracy and provide efficient public administration to the masses.

Internationally, scholars can apply this approach to the forgotten or largely hidden publications of other key management theorists.

Management histories of early American public administration have passed lightly over the works of its founders with nativist, racial and anti‐democratic views. This has had the effect of sanitizing the historical record by ignoring publications that provide a fuller contextual understanding of the worldviews of these major figures.

When a manipulator captures an unknown space object, inertia parameters of endpoint payload should be timely obtained to handle possible unexpected parameter variations and monitor the system’s operating conditions. Therefore, this study aims to present an identification method for estimating the inertia parameter of the payload carried by a flexible two-link space manipulator.

The original nonlinear dynamics model of the manipulator is linearized at a selected working point. Subsequently, the system modal frequencies with and without payload are determined using the subspace identification algorithm, and the difference of these frequencies is computed. Furthermore, by adjusting the structural configuration of the manipulator, multiple sets of frequency differences are obtained. Therefore, the inertia parameters of the payload, i.e. the mass and the moment of inertia, can be derived from the frequency differences by solving a least-squares problem.

The proposed method can effectively estimate the payload parameters and has satisfactory identification accuracy.

The approach’s implementation provides a practical reference for determining inertia parameters of an unknown space target in the capture process.

The study proposes a novel method for identifying the inertia parameters of the payload of a flexible two-link space manipulator using the estimated system frequencies.

The inconsistency between the appearance of incoherence and chaos in the US policymaking process bringing about a historic record of legislative achievements in the 1960s and 1970s, on the one hand, and the emergence of hierarchical order bringing about a prolonged period of legislative impotence in the early 2000s, on the other hand, has led legislative scholars to revisit strongly held prior beliefs about legislative organization. Similar reevaluations of the garbage can model that emphasize the potential for conflict-ridden and chaotic organizations to be adaptively rational are ongoing in organizational theory. This paper adapts recent research on organizational design to explore the conditions under which decentralized, chaotic decision making facilitates more desirable legislative outcomes than centralized decision making controlled by a benevolent dictator. The author demonstrates that normative claims about legislative organization – much like normative claims about organizational design – should vary depending on the task environment faced by the legislature. In the face of rugged uncertainty in the mapping from policies to outcomes, decentralized decision making among modestly polarized legislators with fluid participation in decisions facilitates a functional mix of exploitative and exploratory search.

This chapter examines how gender interacts with informal workers’ collective action strategies in the context of contemporary development scripts around economic growth. Specifically, it engages the theoretical debates on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism as the systems of domination that organize gender and class. Drawing from a comparative analysis of informal workers’ movements in India’s domestic work and construction sectors, I find the relationship between gender and class and between patriarchy and capitalism is being reconceptualized from below and differs by occupational structures and organization histories. For domestic workers, movements assert what I call a “unitary” model of exploitation. Because domestic workers’ organizations entered the productive sphere through a focus on social reproduction, their struggles conflate gender and class to reverse the shame attached to domestic work and increase the recognized worth of women’s labor. Because construction workers’ organizations mobilize male and female workers and began as class-based organizations focusing on productive work, they articulate what I term “a dual systems” approach to patriarchy and capitalism that exposes inequalities between men and women within the sector, such as unequal pay, glass ceilings, and issues of embodiment. In both cases, global development scripts have not only shaped movement approaches, but also enabled movements to articulate gendered labor subjects in innovative ways. While domestic workers’ unitary model has had more success in increasing women workers’ dignity and leadership, construction workers’ dualist model has attained more successes in attaining material benefits in the reproductive sphere. These findings suggest that debates on unitary versus dual-systems models of exploitation present a false dichotomy and veil the reality that both are necessary for feminist theory, development models, and women workers’ struggles on the ground.

To clarify our analysis, we start with a conceptual explanation of synarchy and the key terms that we need to use in this chapter. Synarchy is a neologism that combines synthesis with anarchy. We will first look at how these two contrasting ideas are linked. In juxtaposition, they provide a basis for understanding contemporary public administration in a global and comparative context.

This paper aims to explore the ways in which gender and feminism are practised in professional military education (PME), which is viewed as an atypical higher education institution, by focusing on the practice and discourse of female academics.

The paper uses a case study approach using participant observation and semi‐structured interviews. The authors' qualitative analysis is informed by feminist research methods.

The authors identified a number of key areas around which resistance and accommodation to gender norms are produced: the visual, the vocal and collective action. Analysis of these revealed the everyday practices of academic identities, the gendering of knowledge, and feminist interventions. The authors found that the practices and debates of academic women in PME reflect the wider debates in academia.

PME and its relationship with gender and feminism have rarely been studied. This paper begins that task. The findings of this atypical case also add to the growing body of research on identity, gender, and feminism in academia, as well as to women working in male‐dominated institutions.