Trading Freedoms for Protection: Gender and Localised Protection in Libya

Much has been written on the 2011 intervention in Libya and its implications to the R2P principle, but we know less about the lived experience of protection in a context where the post-intervention responsibility for protecting civilians was quickly transferred to the interim authorities who had limited governance capacity. This has resulted in ‘localised protection’ where militias, tribal elders, and family members constitute the main actors providing protection to their respective communities. Although this is in line with the growing emphasis on local ownership underwriting UN and donor discourse, a troubling upshot of the localised protection is that it often disempowers, and at times subjects the protected to further insecurity and violence. The aim of this analysis is to explore this dynamic of protection and insecurity. I draw on feminist theorising of the masculine protection logic and argue that civilians in Libya negotiate multiple, gendered protection bargains that often produce perverse outcomes, by subjecting the ‘protected’ to renewed or increased insecurities, rather than reducing them.

Localizing Global Solidarity: Humanitarian Aid in Lesvos

The so-called “refugee crisis” in Lesvos, Greece provides a poignant example of situated, local suffering that has called for the coordination of global resources to provide relief. Some of the first to respond were local and international Citizen Initiatives for Global Solidarity (CIGS). While a growing role for CIGS has been interpreted as a call for more global involvement, arguments for the increased localization of relief efforts suggest the need for aid agents to maintain a reflexive awareness of the potential for an influx of outside assistance to disempower those most affected. We argue that barriers to implementing the localization of humanitarian aid can be better understood by positioning this localization alongside theories of global solidarity. This paper pairs theoretical contributions from the fields of moral and political philosophy with an analysis of interview material gathered in Lesvos between 2015 and 2019. Our goal is to use narratives of conflicting interests in Lesvos to explore conceptual distinctions concerning solidarity and emphasize the importance of the localization of global solidarity in humanitarian aid. We conclude that while global solidarity represents a demanding effort to identify with distant others and provide aid, the intensity and transformative potential of the process of “making the crisis one’s own” through solidary engagement can overshadow the importance of local ownership of crisis management.

Local Ownership, Legitimacy, and Peacebuilding

This chapter considers two fundamental questions at the core of the local ownership norm—ownership of what and ownership by whom—in light of fragmenting consensus around the very meaning of peacebuilding. In the first place, the referent object of ownership—the idea of a distinct, coherent, and self-contained peace process—is becoming increasingly elusive in most war-to-peace transitions, and increasingly difficult to differentiate from broader social, political, or economic developments that profoundly shape the nature of postwar transitions. At the same time, there has been a deepening polarization of views around who precisely counts as a relevant local for the purposes of peacebuilding, and an ongoing failure to bridge elite-centric and everyday-centric understandings of local agency. Both trends have significant implications for the future of peacebuilding as a coherent project.

Ownership Structure and Financial Performance of Companies Listed at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, Kenya

Performance of firms is predominantly contingent on the deliberate decisions cautiously made and executed by the owners therefore a linkage exists between ownership structure and performance financially. Owners are part of a segment that makes decisions by the virtue of their relationship with the firm. Therefore, the question of what maybe the most efficient ownership structure is relevant. Through the period 2014 to 2018, there was an increase in the listed firms that issued profit warnings with others like Kenya Airways and Uchumi Supermarket running into huge financial losses. This research aims at determining the relationship between structure of ownership on company’s performance financially and are anchored on two explicit objectives: to ascertain whether institutional local ownership impact on performance and to evaluate whether managerial ownership impact on performance. This exploration is built on, stewardship, Agency and stakeholder theories which expound an association of structure of ownership and performance financially of all Kenyan listed firmsthrough2014 to 2018. The examination adopts a causal research design. A census of the 60 listed firms is drawn in this study. Secondary data relating to ownership structure and return on assets is collected using secondary data collection sheet. Panel regression model is utilised to ascertain the relationship between the predictor and dependent variables. The effect of Institutional local ownership on Return on assets is significant as shown by the p values of 0.007. Managerial ownership is found to have an insignificant impact on Return on assets as shown by the p values of 0. 611.The study is recommending that in pursuit for high Return on assets firm can come up with incentives to encourage institutions to invest more in the company to raise performance.