Torture by Non-state Actors Foreword

Foreword to the Special Issue on Complex Engineering by Violent Non-State Actors

Non-state Actors in Cyberspace Operations

The growing importance of cyberspace to modern society, and its increasing use as an arena for dispute, is becoming a national security concern for governments and armed forces globally. The special characteristics of cyberspace, such as its asymmetric nature, the lack of attribution, the low cost of entry, the legal ambiguity, and its role as an efficient medium for protest, crime, espionage a...

International Non-state Actors and Social Development Policy

This article focuses on two broad groups of actors, international NGOs (INGOs) and international consultancy companies (ICCs), and situates them within wider trends in aid and development policies. In the context of a neo-liberal policy agenda, many leading INGOs reorganised so that they became closer to emerging ICCs, as consulting, outsourcing, and sub-contracting became key features of aid a...

Non-State Actors in International Climate Change Negotiations: A Synthesis

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have, over the past decades, come to play a central role in international environmental negotiations. While this growing NGO participation has attracted considerable academic interest, scant attention has to date been paid to the strategic decisions of NGOs before and during actual negotiations: When do they decide to become active in international politics...

Specifying Finite-State Actors

Programmers often code up asynchronous message-passing systems as communicating finite-state actors. An actor in some state listens for messages, responds to those messages, and transitions to another state. Most of these systems allow messages to carry actor addresses. This paper presents a kernel language for implementing and specifying such systems. A specification consists of finite-state m...