The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) ...population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society.             Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years, Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women’s activists and NGOs responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilizing the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasize innocence and victimhood.
This paper studies the effect of foreign competition on the extent of forecasting bias. I focus on two biases often described in the behavioral economics literature: overoptimism and excessive belief ...in trends. Using data from firm-level surveys in five African countries, I show that firms that do not face foreign competition generate forecasts of sales growth that have greater trend and optimism biases than firms that have foreign competitors. I further provide evidence that these erroneous forecasts have real effects on firms' inventory management.
Somalia is a failed state, representing a threat to itself, its neighbours and the wider world. In recent years, it has become notorious for the piracy off its coast and the rise of Islamic ...extremism, opening it up as a new 'southern front' in the war on terror. At least that is how it is inevitably portrayed by politicians and in the media. Mary Harper presents the first comprehensive account of the chaos into which the country has descended and the United States' renewed involvement there. In doing so, Harper argues that viewing Somalia through the prism of al-Qaeda risks further destabilizing the country and the entire Horn of Africa, while also showing that though the country may be a failed state, it is far from being a failed society. In reality, alternative forms of business, justice, education and local politics have survived and even flourished. Provocative in its analysis, Harper shows that until the international community starts to 'get it right' the consequences will be devastating, not just for Somalia, but for the world.
Worlds Apart tells of a well-meaning foreign policy establishment often deaf to the voices of everyday people. Its focus is the Bosnian War, but its implications extend to any situation that prompts ...the consideration of military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Ambassador Swanee Hunt served in Vienna during the Bosnian War and was intimately involved in American policy toward the Balkans. During her tenure as ambassador and after, she made scores of trips throughout Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia, attempting to understand the costly delays in foreign military intervention. To that end, she had hundreds of conversations with a wide range of politicians, refugees, journalists, farmers, clergy, aid workers, diplomats, soldiers, and others. In Worlds Apart, Hunt’s eighty vignettes alternate between the people living out the war and “the internationals” deciding whether or how to intervene. From these stories, most of which she witnessed firsthand, she draws six lessons applicable to current conflicts throughout the world. These lessons cannot be learned from afar, Hunt says, with insiders and outsiders working apart. Only by bridging those worlds can we build a stronger paradigm of inclusive international security.
This paper considers efficient venture capital investment duration for different types of entrepreneurial firms so that on exit, information asymmetries between the venture capitalist (as seller) and ...the new owners of the investment are minimized and capital gains maximized. We hypothesize that a number of factors are likely to affect investment duration, and our empirical tests confirm the statistical significance of some of these variables (stage of firm at first investment, capital available to the venture capital industry, whether the exit was preplanned, whether the exit was made in response to an unsolicited offer). However, the fit between our theoretical model and the data is stronger in the United States than in Canada, offering evidence in support of the view that institutional factors have distorted investment duration in Canada.
At both the state and national levels, public policies are being designed to stimulate the demand for locally owned open space. Yet very little is known about the factors that influence the demand ...for open space and the sensitivity of demand to price and income. To fill the void, this study uses data for Connecticut cities and towns to estimate the public demand for open space. The empirical results suggest that the demand for open space is relatively insensitive to changes in price but highly responsive to changes in income. The findings also show that federal and state open space may tend to crowd out locally owned open space and that locally owned open space represents a highly congestable good. Finally, the analysis indicates that privately owned open space is not a good substitute for locally owned public open space.
Many authors have written about the participation of women in WW2 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mostly in health care. Participation of Bosnian and Herzegovinian women in the 1992-1995 war was also ...significant. According to Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina data, there were 5360 recruited women. Some were engaged in logistics and some were fighters. This review presents the characters of the brave women who have inspired current generations.
Recent research has suggested that intra-day volatility may possess a component structure due to heterogeneous information arrivals. This paper reports evidence for the existence of such components ...in FTSE-100 stock index futures returns data. Preliminary GARCH model estimates support previous evidence for other markets indicating the breakdown of theoretical GARCH temporal aggregation properties over the intra-day period. However, the fractional integration properties of absolute and squared returns, and FIGARCH conditional volatility model estimates, lend strong support to the contention that volatility dynamics results from multiple sources given the invariance of the fractional difference parameter estimates to the degree of intra-day data temporal aggregation.
Moving beyond the simple comparisons of averages typical of most analyses of household income shocks, this article employs quantile analysis to generate a complete distribution of such shocks by type ...of household during the 1995 crisis in Mexico. It compares the distributions across normal and crisis periods to see whether observed differences were due to the crisis or are intrinsic to the household types. Alternatively, it asks whether the distribution of shocks during normal periods was a reasonable predictor of vulnerability to income shocks during crises. It finds large differences in the distribution of shocks by household types both before and during the crisis but little change in their relative positions during the crisis. The impact appears to have been spread fairly evenly. Households headed by people with less education (poor), single mothers, or people working in the informal sector do not appear to experience disproportionate income drops either in normal times or during crises.
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