Actorness Beyond the European Union: Comaparing the International Trade Actorness of SADC and ECOWAS

Contains fulltext : 127195.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Actorness is no longer the preserve of the European Union. Due to their participation in interregional relations, other regional organizations are developing and institutionalizing the requirements of international actorness, but insofar as a comparative framework for systematically comparing and contrasting actorness across different organizations is lacking, it is difficult to predict the likely outcomes of such relations. Taking a comparative regionalisms approach, this article develops a comparative and generalizable framework of actorness. Adding to the extremely limited literature on non-EU actorness, the model is tested in an analysis of the actorness of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the field of international trade negotiations. Despite SADC's stronger identity and presence, it is ECOWAS – having more effective decision-making and better capabilities – that possesses greater actorness – a fact likely to impact on inter-regional outcomes.19 p

Non-Tariff Measures Affecting Agricultural Trade in SADC

The establishment of the World Trade Organisation in 1995 and subsequent proliferation of the regional and bilateral trade agreements resulted in the decline of global tariffs. However, other trade and regulatory measures have increased and thus restricted potential trade to some extend. These measures, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have also affected intra-SADC trade as there was no evidence of growth in the trade that needed to accompany the decline in tariffs. The extent of the impact of NTMs on SADC trade is still not fully understood due lack of such data, which effectively affected the quality of research in this area. In this paper data on NTM related to SADC agricultural products for ten countries were compiled to shed some light on these measures as well as to make them transparent. The results confirm that these countries have increased their use of NTMs of the period. As a result, on average one product is subjected to 17 NTMs in 2010. SACU is the leader in the use of NTMs, while Malawi had the least incidences of NTMs. Most of The NTMs are applied on fruits, meat, dairy, vegetables and cereal products. The use of sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures (SPS) and export measures were increasing faster than other categories. Finally, there is an indication that NTMs are used as substitutes for the declining tariffs. NTMs are trade restricting, and if they are not addressed they will continue to reverse the gains of SADC free trade area as well as other initiatives of trade liberalisation.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ragr202017-12-31hb2017Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Developmen

Reshaping the African Internet: From scattered islands to a connected continent

There is an increasing awareness amongst developing regions on the importance of localizing Internet traffic in the quest for fast, affordable, and available Internet access. In this paper, we focus on Africa, where 37 IXPs are currently interconnecting local ISPs, but mostly at the country level. An option to enrich connectivity on the continent and incentivize content providers to establish presence in the region is to interconnect ISPs present at isolated IXPs by creating a distributed IXP layout spanning the continent. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether such IXP interconnection would be possible, and if successful, to estimate the best-case benefits that could be realized in terms of traffic localization and performance. Our hope is that quantitatively demonstrating the benefits will provide incentives for ISPs to intensify their peering relationships in the region. However, it is challenging to estimate this best-case scenario, due to numerous economic, political, and geographical factors influencing the region. Towards this end, we begin with a thorough analysis of the environment in Africa. We then investigate a naive approach to IXP interconnection, which shows that a theoretically optimal solution would be infeasible in practice due to the prevailing socio-economic conditions in the region. We therefore provide an innovative, realistic four-step interconnection scheme to achieve the distributed IXP layout that considers and parameterizes external socio-economic factors using publicly available datasets. We demonstrate that our constrained solution doubles the percentage of continental intra-African paths, reduces their lengths, and drastically decreases the median of their RTTs as well as RTTs to ASes hosting the top 10 global and top 10 regional Alexa websites. Our approach highlights how, given real-world constraints, a solution requires careful considerations in order to be practically realizable.Rodérick Fanou was partially supported by IMDEA Networks Institute, US NSF grant CNS-1414177, and the project BRADE (P2013/ICE-2958) from the Directorate General of Universities and Research, Board of Education, Madrid Regional Governement. Francisco Valera was partially funded by the European Commission under FP7 project LEONE (FP7-317647). Amogh Dhamdhere was partially funded by US NSF grants CNS-1414177 and CNS-1513847.Publicad

Regarding realities: Using photo-based projective techniques to elicit normative and alternative discourses on gender, relationships, and sexuality in Mozambique

This paper argues for the methodological merit of photo-based projective techniques (PT) in formative HIV communication research. We used this technique in Mozambique to study multiple sexual partnerships (MSPs) and the roles of social and gender norms in promoting or discouraging these behaviours. Facilitators used ambiguous photographs and vignettes to ease adult men and women into discussions of sexual risk behaviour and HIV transmission. Visuals upheld a third-person perspective in discussions, enabling participants to safely project their worldviews onto the photographed characters, and indirectly share their attitudes, normative environments, personal and peer experiences, perceived risks and benefits, and theories about motivations for extramarital sex. Visually grounded storylines contained rich detail about the circumstances and interpersonal conversations that contextualise MSP behaviour and norms. The research yielded findings about conflicting social practices of public encouragement and private disapproval. Despite concerns around the verifiability of PTs, the repetition and convergence in the elicited conversations - and confirmation through subsequent campaign design and evaluation - suggest these techniques can reliably elicit information for formative public health and communication research on psychosocial and normative factors