State-building, war and violence : evidence from Latin America

In European history, war has played a major role in state‐building and the state monopoly on violence. But war is a very specific form of organized political violence, and it is decreasing on a global scale. Other patterns of armed violence now dominate, ones that seem to undermine state‐building, thus preventing the replication of European experiences. As a consequence, the main focus of the current state‐building debate is on fragility and a lack of violence control inside these states. Evidence from Latin American history shows that the specific patterns of the termination of both war and violence are more important than the specific patterns of their organization. Hence these patterns can be conceptualized as a critical juncture for state‐building. While military victories in war, the subordination of competing armed actors and the prosecution of perpetrators are conducive for state‐building, negotiated settlements, coexistence, and impunity produce instability due to competing patterns of authority, legitimacy, and social cohesion

SDM:A New Data Set on Self-determination Movements with an Application to the Reputational Theory of Conflict

This dataset, of self-determination movements (SDMs) with universal coverage for the period from 1945 to 2012, corrects the selection bias that characterizes previous efforts to code SDMs and significantly expands coverage relative to the extant literature. For a random sample of cases, we add information on state–movement interactions and several attributes of SDM groups. The data can be used to study the causes of SDMs, the escalation of self-determination (SD) conflicts over time, and several other theoretical arguments concerning separatist conflict that have previously been tested with incomplete or inferior data.The creators request that the associated paper is cited in place of this dataset

Diet and Bioenergetics of Lake-Rearing Juvenile Chinook Salmon in Lake Washington

Abstract.—Use of lake habitats by ocean-type Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha is rare under natural conditions. We studied aspects of the trophic ecology of naturally and hatchery-produced juvenile Chinook salmon rearing in the littoral zone of highly urbanized Lake Washington in Washington State. During February through May, naturally produced juvenile Chinook salmon occupied littoral habitats and consumed mostly epibenthic prey, primarily chironomid pupae (Diptera). In June, they switched to a diet dominated by plankton, specifically Daphnia spp. This diet shift from littoral prey to limnetic prey coincided with increasing temperature, a shift by the fish from littoral to limnetic habitats, the spring bloom of Daphnia, and increasing fish size. Bioenergetics modeling for these populations estimated that naturally produced juvenile Chinook salmon had high consumption rates and were generally feeding close to their maximum ration, even after large numbers of hatchery-produced Chinook salmon entered the lake. The feeding rates, growth rates, and proportions of maximum daily ration from the modeling suggested that under current conditions, both naturally produced and hatchery-produced juvenile Chinook salmon were finding ample food in littoral habitats of Lake Washington. These results further reveal that hatchery-produced Chinook salmon did not compete with naturally produced fish and that this was probably a result of hatchery juveniles enterin

Euclid: I. Overview of the Euclid mission

The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients,dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme of theEuropean Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy,over about 14 000 deg² of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structureformation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range ofscience. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processingsteps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance