The surge in "unconventional" oil projects such as Alberta's Tar Sands in the last decade signals a shift in global production from relatively accessible conventional reserves to "frontier" oil. This paper examines one aspect of the oil/environment tension – the environmental regulatory system surrounding the tar sands – by adopting...
To analyze institutional dynamics, it is first necessary to determine when change has occurred, when not, and the nature and magnitude of change. If social institutions are defined in terms of rules, then a change of rules forms the core of institutional change. A number of complications arise from the...
Are the lending programs of the International Monetary Fund bad for democracy? The conventional wisdom is that the implementation of IMF conditional lending programs triggers cycles of austerity, social protest, and government repression that result in democratic backsliding. We present evidence which suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. We...
This essay discusses the role of the ulama (Islamic scholars) in the 2007 Nigerian elections. Based on interviews and the political activities and statements of the twelve members of the ulama, most of whom are from Kano, the author observes four areas of consensus among these scholars: 1) The compatiblity...
Most scholars think of courts as a single category of adjudicative bodies or triadic dispute adjudication. But courts play a variety of roles in the domestic political system. Increasingly, the roles and tasks delegated to International Courts (ICs) mimic in form and content the roles and tasks delegated to courts...
On February 22, 2022, I gave a talk hosted by the African Studies Program of Georgetown University. Two days later, Russian battalions were sent across Ukraine’s borders by President Vladimir Putin. In real time, viewers around the world have seen immense distress unleashed on innocent citizens. In Africa, distress has...
The aviation industry is set to see another significant leap in new technology, namely electric aircraft. As of the time of this research, both 9-seat and 19-seat aircraft would be ready to be launched by air service providers under the Essential Air Service (EAS) program. While electric aircraft manufacturers are...
Cite this article: Shen, J., McFarland, A.G., Blaustein, R.A. et al. An improved workflow for accurate and robust healthcare environmental surveillance using metagenomics. Microbiome 10, 206 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-022-01412-x and Background: Effective surveillance of microbial communities in the healthcare environment is increasingly important in infection prevention. Metagenomics-based techniques are promising due to their untargeted nature but are currently challenged by several limitations: (1) they are not powerful enough to extract valid signals out of the background noise for low-biomass samples,...
Why did political independence not lead to economic autonomy and sustained development which were confidently predicted by many development economists and nationalists in the 1950s and 1960s. Africa will not make sustainable progress in building democratic systems and fostering economic development until the continent acquires coherent, legitimate, and effective states....
Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual reality (VR) have attracted growing attention within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry in recent years. Integration of BIM and VR technology can develop workflow efficiency through enhanced common understanding and prepare students in architecture and engineering programs to become leaders of the...
Within the world of art music, composers have employed a variety of techniques to infuse popular music elements into their writing. This document is an examination of specific instances of this trend in twenty-first century wind ensemble repertoire. The study is limited to twenty-first century wind ensemble works by living...
In this talk and related activities, I hope to inspire others to take up one of the greatest challenges of our era: narrowing the governance gap which is at the root of many of Africa’s development and security dilemmas. In view of the emergence of many fragile and failed states,...
This paper examines conflictual relationships among British members of the Gold Coast administration. It adds to the literature that problematizes earlier notions of colonialism by highlighting tensions and contradictions inherent in colonial governance structures. This paper argues that at its inception, the Gold Coast colonial administration had deep cracks as...
This working paper focuses on the themes, authors, and changing modes of production of 152 booklets published (or purchased) in Nigeria relating to marriage. The author obtained them from bookshops mainly in Ibadan and Lagos, from church bookstores in Ado-Ekiti and Kabba, but also from motor parks in Lokoja, Kaduna,...
In order to make informed policy recommendations, development research faces two broad challenges: first, to identify and estimate the effects of interventions where they have occurred, and second to build and test theories about the effects that a related intervention would be hypothesized to exert in a different context. I...
This paper examines the relationship between a party'’'s descriptive representation of women and its ideological proximity to female and male voters. I find that male and female voters are both objectively closer to parties with more females in their delegations. However, males are more likely to subjectively assess parties with...
In this paper, Morgan and Orloff survey the contemporary study of states in the social sciences. They begin by tracing the history of scholarship on the state. The authors identify six main clusters of research on states that emerged through the effort to “bring the state back into” history and...