Practical Model Checking on FPGAs

Software verification is an important stage of the software development process, particularly for mission-critical systems. As the traditional methodology of using unit tests falls short of verifying complex software, developers are increasingly relying on formal verification methods, such as explicit state model checking, to automatically verify that the software functions properly. However, due to the ever-increasing complexity of software designs, model checking cannot be performed in a reasonable amount of time when running on general-purpose cores, leading to the exploration of hardware-accelerated model checking. FPGAs have been demonstrated to be promising verification accelerators, exhibiting nearly three orders of magnitude speedup over software. Unfortunately, the “FPGA programmability wall,” particularly the long synthesis and place-and-route times, block the general adoption of FPGAs for model checking. To address this problem, we designed a runtime-programmable pipeline specifically for model checkers on FPGAs to minimize the “preparation time” before a model can be checked. Our design of the successor state generator and the state validator modules enables FPGA-acceleration of model checking without incurring the time-consuming FPGA implementation stages, reducing the preparation time before checking a model from hours to less than a minute, while incurring only a 26% execution time overhead compared to model-specific implementations.

Cultural Heritage Governance, Policies and Management in Serbia

The article deals with the system of cultural heritage governance and management in Serbia as a successor state of Yugoslavia which faced a number of serious risks. These included not only an economic downturn and public neglect, but also war and systematic destruction based on political and ethnocentric agendas. Since the beginning of the 2010s, the heritage community in Serbia has been provided systematic public support in the form of finance, legislation and priority. The paper tests the effect of these institutional changes in practice by using indicators such as museum visits, scholarly and curatorial activities. It concludes that the rise in the number of visitors in Serbian museums is hampered by low cultural participation of the population and by the lack of sufficient curatorial activity.

The Middle East in the 620s

The narrative halts temporarily, for some analysis of structures. The steep decline of urbanism documented later in the Roman successor state (Byzantium) had not yet set in, but a first stage in the centralization of government functions was already discernible. The costs of the war bore heavily on both belligerents, but there was more strain on Roman finances. The Sasanians were able to draw on the resources of the occupied Roman provinces, but were careful not to increase the rate of taxation. They also showed sensitivity in handling local elites and minimizing changes to administrative practices. At home confidence grew in ultimate victory and preparations were made for its commemoration in monumental rock reliefs.

Ivan IV and the Tatars

Research objectives: To provide a comprehensive overview of Muscovite interaction with Tatars during Ivan IV’s reign, both with each successor state of the Jochid ulus and with Tatars who moved to Muscovy and entered Ivan IV’s service. Research materials: This study is based upon Russian sources from the reign of Ivan IV concerning the Tatars, including narratives such as chronicles and documentary evidence such as diplomatic reports. Results and novelty of the research: Muscovite policy toward the Tatars did not derive from a single dominating motive, neither hostility, such as religious animosity toward Muslims or the drive for imperial territorial expansion, nor the desire to cooperate with Tatars for the sake of commerce or the need for steppe military allies. Ivan adapted his policies to individual circumstances, vassal puppet rulers or outright conquest as needed. Tatars from the vassal khanate of Kasimov helped Ivan conquer Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ and fight Crimea. Nogai merchants sold the Muscovite army horses. Muscovites possessed intimate knowledge of foreign Tatars, but also lived in close proximity to “native” Tatars who lived on Muscovite soil or traveled to Moscow as envoys or merchants. However expertise on the Tatars, borrowing Tatar institutions, enrolling Tatar servitors, and conquering successor states of the Golden Horde did not make Muscovy a successor state of the Golden Horde. Nevertheless the Tatars were a fact of life in Ivan IV’s Muscovy, as both allies and enemies.

Decolonization and Sovereign Debt

The complex state succession cases arising from decolonization generated intense debates within legal circles. This chapter examines the tension between two stylized schools on state succession into debt: the universal succession and clean slate theories. Universal succession refers to the automatic and complete assumption of the colonial power’s rights and obligations by the newly independent state as they relate to its territory. According to the competing clean slate theory, the former colonial power’s obligations (including debts) as they relate to the territory of the newly independent state are extinguished on independence. Because these obligations are personal to a state, they lapsed on independence. The successor state thus starts life with a clean slate. This chapter provides historical insights into this legal controversy by focusing on the two scholars and practitioners of international law who embodied these two schools of thought, Judge Mohamed Bedjaoui and Professor Daniel Patrick O’Connell. We show how the fundamental disagreements between the two schools (and their radically different implications for the conditions under which colonial entities can achieve independence) have left the law on state succession in flux. Ultimately, the solutions adopted in the decolonization context and in later succession disputes remained highly case-specific and typically involved an agreement between the states concerned.

Russian toolkit for settling international conflicts and peculiarities of its application

As the successor state of the former superpower USSR, the Russian Federation retains its high status of the “guarantor of peace” for the entire international community due to a range of political, military and economic means, currently being on of the few “police states”. The role of police states is important to such extent that no major conflict can be settled without their participation or approval. Such status of Russia is being maintained by its military power, as well as a number of political privileges. Alongside any police state, Russia has developed its own strategy for interfering or settling the international military conflicts using the existing toolkit. This defines the relevance of analysis of the current state of the Russian range of means and tools for suppression and settlement of the conflicts. The goal of this research consists in examination of the the means available to the Russian Federation for settling military conflicts, as well as in the analysis of the state and prospects of their use in peacekeeping campaigns of the Russian Federation. It is worth noting that the Russian Federation as the successor state of the Soviet Union, and one of the members of the nuclear club and permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, retains and extends the range of tools for handling and settling military conflicts, from the preventive tools of cultural-diplomatic influence such as Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation (commonly known as Rossotrudnichestvo) to high-tech military weapons, which have no analogues among the overwhelming majority of participants of international relations. The presence of such rich arsenal testifies to strong peacekeeping potential of the Russian Federation; however, the currently observed inclination towards the priority of coercive tools can severely undermine the ability of the Russian Federation to settle international military conflicts.

“Where Is Bhutan?” The Production of Bhutan's Asymmetrical Inbetweenness in Geopolitics

In this article, I interrogate the exhaustive “inbetweenness” through which Bhutan is understood and located on a map (“inbetween India and China”). I argue that this understanding naturalizes a contemporary geopolitics with little depth about how this inbetweenness has shifted over the centuries, thereby constructing a timeless, obscure, and remote Bhutan that is “naturally” oriented southward. I trace how the construction of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. I identify and analyze the key economic dynamics of three phases marked by commercial, production, and security interests, through which this asymmetrical inbetweenness was consolidated. Bringing together sources from different disciplines and archival work, this account also challenges some of the dominant historical scholarship on Bhutan in each phase. I conclude by emphasizing that critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is important to the subalternizing of geopolitics, which recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE LEGAL LEGACIES OF EMPIRE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRUSSIA

The traceless disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire from the map and the minds of nineteenth-century Germany was until recently a pervasive historiographical trope. Revisionist scholarship has since uncovered the empire's modern afterlife as a model for federative political order and archetype of the greater German (großdeutsche) nation. This article identifies a different kind of legacy, by examining the empire's role in shaping the constitutional configuration of an individual successor state – Prussia. In a debate over Prussia's unwritten historical constitution unfolding in the 1840s, narratives of the empire's constitutional history became the basis on which the juridical structure of the kingdom's sovereignty was negotiated by jurists and political actors. These included, among others, King Frederick William IV and his brother William, the leaders of the German historical school of jurisprudence Savigny and Eichhorn, and the Prussian statesman Kamptz. The article contrasts two rival interpretations of the imperial legacy: a teleological narrative focusing on the evolution of state sovereignty within the imperial constitution and a genealogical narrative highlighting the origins of sovereignty as a hereditary fiefdom. In doing so, it questions the rigid distinction that historians have drawn between the empire and the statehood that replaced it in 1806.

Human Rights Treaties and the Law of State Succession in the Event of Secession

International practice indicates a tendency that the obligations under human rights treaties continue under the law of State succession. The successor State is thus bound to respect the rights previously granted under a human rights treaty to the inhabitants of a territory it has assumed responsibility for. However, the successor State is not automatically party to the human rights treaty which its predecessor was a party to. As such, the continuity of human rights obligations has not occurred ipso iure. Yet, States have acquiesced to the jurisprudence of the Human Rights Committee and accepted their human rights obligations retroactively upon the ratification of the human rights treaties.