Ethnic conflict and war crimes in the Balkans:the narratives of denial in post-conflict Serbia

In the years following the fall of Slobodan Milo evic, Serbian social, cultural and political responses to the wars of the 1990s have fallen under intense international scrutiny. But is this scrutiny justfied, and how can these responses be better understood? Jelena Obradovic engages with ideas about post-conflict societies, memory, cultural trauma, and national myths of victimhood and justified war to shed light upon Serbian denial and justification of war crimes - for example, Serbia's reluctant cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Rather than treating denial as a failure to come to terms with the past or as resurgent nationalism, Obradovic argues that the justification of atrocities are often the result of a societal need to understand and incorporate violent events within culturally acceptable boundaries.

Impact of denial of service solutions on network quality of service

The Internet has become a universal communication network tool. It has evolved from a platform that supports best-effort traffic to one that now carries different traffic types including those involving continuous media with quality of service (QoS) requirements. As more services are delivered over the Internet, we face increasing risk to their availability given that malicious attacks on those Internet services continue to increase. Several networks have witnessed denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks over the past few years which have disrupted QoS of network services, thereby violating the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the client and the Internet Service Provider (ISP). Hence DoS or DDoS attacks are major threats to network QoS. In this paper we survey techniques and solutions that have been deployed to thwart DoS and DDoS attacks and we evaluate them in terms of their impact on network QoS for Internet services. We also present vulnerabilities that can be exploited for QoS protocols and also affect QoS if exploited. In addition, we also highlight challenges that still need to be addressed to achieve end-to-end QoS with recently proposed DoS/DDoS solutions. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Packet switching in wide area broadband private networks

B-ISDN is a universal network which supports diverse mixes of service, applications and traffic. ATM has been accepted world-wide as the transport technique for future use in B-ISDN. ATM, being a simple packet oriented transfer technique, provides a flexible means for supporting a continuum of transport rates and is efficient due to possible statistical sharing of network resources by multiple users. In order to fully exploit the potential statistical gain, while at the same time provide diverse service and traffic mixes, an efficient traffic control must be designed. Traffic controls which include congestion and flow control are a fundamental necessity to the success and viability of future B-ISDN. Congestion and flow control is difficult in the broadband environment due to the high speed link, the wide area distance, diverse service requirements and diverse traffic characteristics. Most congestion and flow control approaches in conventional packet switched networks are reactive in nature and are not applicable in the B-ISDN environment. In this research, traffic control procedures mainly based on preventive measures for a private ATM-based network are proposed and their performance evaluated. The various traffic controls include CAC, traffic flow enforcement, priority control and an explicit feedback mechanism. These functions operate at call level and cell level. They are carried out distributively by the end terminals, the network access points and the internal elements of the network. During the connection set-up phase, the CAC decides the acceptance or denial of a connection request and allocates bandwidth to the new connection according to three schemes; peak bit rate, statistical rate and average bit rate. The statistical multiplexing rate is based on a `bufferless fluid flow model' which is simple and robust. The allocation of an average bit rate to data traffic at the expense of delay obviously improves the network bandwidth utilisation.

Ethnicities and values in a changing world

Recent debates about national identity, belonging and community cohesion can appear to suggest that ethnicity is a static entity and that ethnic difference is a source of conflict in itself. "Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World" presents an alternative account of ethnicity and calls into question models of community cohesion that present ethnicity as the source of antagonisms and differences that must be overcome. It suggests instead that ethnicity is itself multiple and changing and is unlikely to be a basis for articulating shared values. This volume brings together an international team of leading scholars in the field of ethnic studies in order to examine innovative articulations of ethnicity and challenge the contention that ethnicity is static or that it necessarily represents traditional values and cultures. Asserting that ethnicity is deployed in part as an expression of values and a model of ethical practice, this book examines displays of ethnicity as assertions of identity and statements about way of life, sense of entitlement and manner of connection to others. "Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World" draws together debates about the articulation of ethnic identity, the nature of our relation to each other and discussions of everyday ethics, thus engaging with discussions of racism, multiculturalism and community cohesion. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but to anyone working in the fields of cultural studies, race and ethnicity, globalization, migration and anthropology. Table of Contents: Introduction: ethnicities, values and old-fashioned racism, Gargi Bhattacharyya; Teaching race and racism in the 21st century: thematic considerations, Howard Winant; Diaspora conversations: ethics, ethicality, work and life; Migrant women's networking: new articulations of transnational ethnicity, Ronit Lentin; 'The people do what the political class isn't able to do': antigypsyism, ethnicity denial and the politics of racism without racism, Robbie McVeigh; Violent urban protest - identities, ethics and Islamism, Max Farrar; Beliefs, boundaries and belonging: African Pentecostals in Ireland, Abel Ugba; On being a 'good' refugee, John Gabriel and Jenny Harding; Narrating lived experience in a binational community in Costa Rica, Carlos Sandoval Garcia; Conclusion: ethnicity and ethicality in an unequal world, Gargi Bhattacharyya; Index.

Disabling a family? Emotional dilemmas experienced in becoming a parent of a child with learning disabilities

Becoming the parent of a child diagnosed with learning disabilities can have a dramatic impact. Chrissie Rogers, the author of this article, is both a lecturer in education studies at Keele University and the mother of a daughter who has learning disabilities. She argues here that the pressures on mothers to produce ‘perfect’ babies and to meet all their needs are immense. These pressures arise from both internalised norms and societal expectations and, in the face of these pressures, parents may feel shock, loss and disappointment. These feelings may lead, in turn, to denial, anxiety and conflict affecting both the parents and the professionals involved with the family. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews and personal narratives, Chrissie Rogers makes a powerful case for the importance of support, whether that support is formal or informal. She suggests that, without the right levels of support and understanding, having a child with a diagnosis of learning disability can disable the whole family.

Knowledge and acknowledgement in Serbia's response to Srebrenica

This article considers some post-Milosevic Serbian responses to the Srebrenica massacre. The focus is on responses which contain strategies of denial or which broadly attempt to explain or justify the massacre without engaging critically with the atrocity itself. These responses are by no means uniform, nor are they the only ones which are available in Serbia. They provide the focus of this article because their presence has usually been misinterpreted as Serbia's failure to come to terms with the past. As this article argues, the existence of denial strategies in politics is predominantly pragmatic, whilst in the media and in private individual narratives are part of a larger process of starting to re-examine the past. This article will focus on several illustrative instances from politics and the media, as well as an individual witness responses, in order to demonstrate the extent to which Srebrenica is still in the process of being understood.