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11501. Making Government Anti-Corruption Hotlines Effective

Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Transparency International
Abstract:
Anti-corruption hotlines provide a key channel for governments to receive complaints from individuals who have come into contact with or been victims of corruption. Increasingly, hotlines are being valued as a channel for citizen redress and as a barometer of the success of government anti-corruption efforts. They provide for broad feedback to governments from civil society on how well policies and institutions are working, where breakdowns occur and where responses are needed. As a service, hotlines are similar to community audits and legal advice centres in offering a means to cross-check whether campaign pledges and government promises are producing results. Yet their success in combating corruption is dependent on a number of operational, administrative, institutional and political factors — each of which this paper will attempt to address by drawing on examples from Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Kenya and Moldova.
Topic:
Civil Society, Corruption, International Affairs, and Governance
Political Geography:
Kenya, Moldova, and Azerbaijan

11502. The Integrity Pact: A Powerful Tool for Clean Bidding

Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Transparency International
Abstract:
The Integrity Pact (IP) is a tool developed during the 1990s by Transparency International (TI) to help governments, businesses and civil society intent on fighting corruption in the field of public contracting. It consists of a process that includes an agreement between a government or government department (hereafter referred to as the Authority) and all bidders for a public sector contract.
Topic:
Civil Society, Corruption, International Affairs, and Governance

11503. The Anti-Corruption Plain Language Guide

Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Transparency International
Abstract:
Corruption and its effects are a global dilemma. From small bribes paid to police officers in Bangladesh to the holding of stolen assets by banks, the impacts from these abuses on states and citizens are the same: the undermining of the rule of law, the violation of rights, opaque institutions, lost public resources and weakened national integrity.
Topic:
Civil Society, Corruption, International Affairs, and Governance

11504. Progress Report 2009: Enforcement of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions

Author:
Fritz Heimann and Gillian Dell
Publication Date:
06-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Transparency International
Abstract:
In 1997, the member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) adopted the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (the OECD Convention). The adoption of the Convention was a landmark event in the fight against international corruption representing a collective commitment to ban foreign bribery by the governments of the leading industrialised states - countries accounting for the majority of global exports and foreign investment. Because most major multinational companies are based in OECD Convention countries, the Convention was hailed as the key to overcoming the damaging effects of foreign bribery on democratic institutions, development programmes and business competition. The Convention now has 38 parties. It requires parties to make it an offence to “intentionally offer, promise or give any undue pecuniary or other advantage, whether directly or through intermediaries, to a foreign public official, for that official or for a third party, in order that the official act or refrain from acting in relation to the performance of official duties, in order to obtain or retain business or other improper advantage in the conduct of international business.”
Topic:
Corruption, International Trade and Finance, International Affairs, and Governance

11505. Technical Challenges Associated with the New U.S. Nuclear Agenda

Author:
Jessica Yeats
Publication Date:
12-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
At the 3 November 2009 SNL-LLNL-CSIS workshop, participants identified a number of key technical challenges and opportunities associated with Congress and the Obama Administration's new U.S. nuclear agenda. These key judgments can be distributed into four principal issue areas: 1) broad policy considerations; 2) challenges and opportunities facing the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise; 3) challenges and opportunities facing monitoring and verification; and 4) challenges and opportunities in cooperative threat and risk reduction. Within each sub-set, participants identified challenges that are common to nuclear futures ranging from a world without nuclear weapons to a highly proliferated world, as well as those challenges that are unique to a particular future.
Topic:
Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
United States

11506. Britain and the 1960 Cyprus Accords: A Study in Pragmatism

Author:
Michael Moran
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Political Trends Center (GPoT)
Abstract:
One of the main factors that led directly to the present status quo in Cyprus tends to be forgotten. This was the extraordinary display of timidity on the part of Great Britain in the 1960s when confronted with determined Greek Cypriot attempts to make Cyprus Greek. And, needless to say, the subsequent forceful division of the island by Turkey in 1974 should always be seen in this earlier context: not, that is, as some kind of unforeseeable interruption in the island's natural and peaceful progression towards its Hellenic 'redemption'; least of all as the result of a brutal and arbitrary interference in a sovereign state on the part of a 'foreign power', both of which notions still circulate among many Greeks and their political sympathisers.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
Britain, Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus

11507. Cyprus: Unity and Difference

Author:
Michael Moran and Rauf R. Denktas
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Political Trends Center (GPoT)
Abstract:
This series of letters came about as follows. Sometime late in April, 2008 I went to see President Denktaş at his office in Nicosia, partly as a courtesy visit and partly because I thought he would be interested to read two documents I brought with me. One was a long article on Cyprus by Perry Anderson, a well-known British leftist, now teaching at an American university. Anderson's piece had recently appeared in the London Review of Books to which journal he was a regular contributor. The other thing I gave Denktaş was a letter I had sent to the LRB pointing out, in effect, what a one-sided, slapdash assortment of misinformation Anderson had inflicted on the British reading public.
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, and Cyprus

11508. Administrative Reform in International Organizations : The Case of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS

Author:
Olivier Nay
Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center on International Cooperation
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the causal factors, implementation, and side effects of administrative reforms launched within the United Nations system, in the field of HIV and AIDS. It is based on an empirical analysis of the UNAIDS Programme, an interorganizational system bringing together ten UN agencies to combat the worldwide epidemic, with the support of a Secretariat. Firstly, the paper argues that the administrative reform of UNAIDS was unlikely to have come from the UN organizations themselves, although the Programme was expected to lead these organizations to better coordinate and harmonize their AIDS strategies. Secondly, it identifies three external factors that have led UN organizations to reform their governance mechanisms and procedures. Thirdly, it explores the conditions under which the reform of UNAIDS has been implemented since 2005, with particular attention to the Secretariat that has become involved as an active “reform entrepreneur.” Finally, it identifies some of the unexpected effects of the reform, with a particular emphasison competition between UN agencies, organizational complexity, and bureaucratization. The concluding remarks argue that when analyzing administrative reforms within international organizations, one should investigate the interrelations between the external pressures that drive reforms and the activity of reform entrepreneurs.
Topic:
HIV/AIDS, Health, Humanitarian Aid, United Nations, and Infectious Diseases

11509. La langue amère des temps nouveaux : dynamique de la violence au Rwanda rural

Author:
Emmanuel Viret
Publication Date:
08-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Dealing with the dynamics of rural violence under the multi-party transition (1991-1994), this paper suggests new points of view on the mobilization of Rwandan peasantry during the genocide (1994). Going through local archives and interviews held in the hills and in four prisons of the country, the analysis focuses on the increasing development of an economy of violence. The multi-party system incited competing rural elites to recruit a growing number of men and ruffians against other contenders in order to assure their access to power. Local elites (re)formed patron-client links previously dried by the spreading of money and wage incomes in the countryside. Particular attention is paid to the dimension of political entrepreneurship and to the relationship between social brokers and rural elites, in the course of the struggle between political parties as well as during the building of the Power coalitions which led the massacres locally.
Topic:
Political Violence, Democratization, Economics, and Genocide
Political Geography:
Africa

11510. Le parcours du combattant : une approche biographique des militant(e)s sikh(e)s du Khalistan

Author:
Laurent Gayer
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Between 1984 and 1995, the Indian Punjab was the theatre for a separatist insurrectional movement led by Sikh irregular armed groups. Most Sikh militants who picked up the gun against the Indian state were male, but a handful of women also took part in this armed struggle, which also enjoyed some support from Pakistan. Rather than the motivations of the fighters, it is their individual trajectories that are explored here. Following a critical biographical approach, paying attention to the silences of the actors and to the distorting effects of their ex-post testimonies, this paper aims at unraveling the familial genealogies of these militant careers, before identifying their successive sequences. Through this exercise, it is possible to shed light on individual dispositions towards engagement. However, this preliminary exercise must be followed up by an in-depth study of the conditions of actualization of these dispositions into a sustained form of commitment. Therefore, this paper focuses on the modalities of recruitment into clandestine organizations, before turning to the practical and psychological dilemmas induced by the return of these combatants to civilian life, which remain understudied. By introducing gender into the scope of the study, this paper also aims at assessing the variations between masculine and feminine ways of being and having been in clandestinity.
Topic:
Armed Struggle, Insurgency, and Sectarian violence
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Punjab