Peace Research Institute Oslo

ABSTRACT This article explores how superdiversity is navigated in non-formal religious education in minority religious settings in Norway, focusing on Catholic and Muslim contexts, both shaped by immigration. First, drawing on survey data on Muslims and existing data on Catholics in Norway, we delineate and explore what superdiversity among Catholics and Muslims in this context entails. We then turn to our qualitative data based on fieldwork in eight Catholic and Muslim religious education settings. We find that linguistic, cultural, national and generational superdiversity is navigated in often pragmatic ways, while teaching methods and languages used are mobilised to address participants’ needs, within limited available resources. Thus, everyday pragmatism – anchored in shared faith and collective purpose – can enable participants to navigate difference without erasing it and may foster cohesion through practice rather than prescription. The insights from Catholic and Muslim experiences discussed in this article, we suggest, can contribute to contemporary debates in religious education research, highlighting how cooperation, flexibility, and shared meaning can sustain community and learning in superdiverse societies.

Abstract Ethics are commonly invoked to mitigate the adverse effects of digitalization on international practices such as diplomacy, humanitarianism, or peacebuilding. However, their productive role in shaping global politics has received little attention. This article elucidates how policy and guidance documents containing ‘PeaceTech’ ethics discursively construct normative vectors, i.e., moral claims that frame risks, suggest responses, and attribute responsibilities. We identify five major tendencies through which this takes place, namely the internationalizing, outsourcing, delegating, localizing, and individualizing of PeaceTech-related risks. These vectors produce a cascade of responsibility that reaches from the international to the local, from the public to the private sector and civil society, and from organizations to end users. Agents placed higher in the cascade mainly deal with abstract and systemic risks, while agents placed lower are responsible for dealing with tangible and personal risks. Yet the latter often have the least resources to respond to these risks, and have to weigh up whether to accept them and maintain critical data collection and analysis functions, or to reduce these risks while potentially jeopardizing PeaceTech. We describe how this can amount to what we call ‘decentred dereliction’, i.e., the abandonment of goals in and through digital peacebuilding.

This study focused on enhancing the facies characterization of a heterogeneous and complex turbidite reservoir, marked by thin intervals and interlaminated lithologies, from the post-salt section of the Albacora Leste Field, Campos Basin. To achieve this goal, a feasibility study and a comparison between Bayesian classification methodologies using seismic attributes were applied. The reliability in predicted sandstone facies reached 80.3% in one of the approaches, while the total accuracy was 76% across the reservoir interval. Interlaminated facies (heterolithic) exhibited complex petroelastic behavior, making their discretization in relation to the other facies not so simple. Therefore, the feasibility study and multi-attribute Bayesian classification proved fundamental in differentiating the oil sand electrofacies from non-reservoir facies in the AB-140 reservoir.

Armed conflict has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes, with long-term negative health effects for current and future generations. This study analyzes birthweight in Colombia, where a long-standing conflict has created multiple stressors that may impair maternal and child health, including high levels of conflict mortality and anti-coca fumigation. We analyze births in 2000-2016 using Demographic and Health Survey data from 2004/2005, 2009/2010 and 2015/2016, which identified women's births in the last five years, combined with monthly information about local organized violence and anti-coca fumigation. Fixed effects models account for the mother's characteristics and pregnancy-related factors. We assess both main effects and heterogeneous effects according to the mother's level of education, exposure during different trimesters and at two levels of spatial aggregation, as well as the compounding risks of being exposed to both violence and fumigation. Our study shows that local exposure to organized violence during pregnancy is detrimental to intrauterine growth, resulting in lower birthweight. More localized exposure to fumigation was not significantly related to birthweight, potentially due to the low share of sampled women being exposed and selection into live birth. However, exposure measured at more aggregated levels significantly predicted reduced intrauterine growth. These within-family effects are particularly strong among less educated mothers. Further, our findings suggest compounding risks of exposure to both hazards. The findings indicate a scarring effect from armed conflict on newborns that may impair their future health and socioeconomic status outcomes. The results highlight the critical role that context plays in shaping individual health outcomes and the importance of intersectional approaches in future research and interventions.

ABSTRACT As technologies acquire self-operating capabilities – whether automated or autonomous – their safe use demands human oversight. Yet these capabilities create challenges for the existing oversight regime in safety rules. This paper identifies regulatory challenges for the human oversight of civil drones as found in the European Union (EU) rules on the operational (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/947), design (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/945), and traffic (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/664) safety of civil drones. Accordingly, the oversight regime is challenged by self-operating systems in three ways: (a) due to a problematic definition of the term ‘remote pilot’; (b) because (fully) autonomous operations are treated paradoxically; and (c) due to inadequacies of design rules. Collectively, these challenges have implications for the human-centrism to which the EU remains committed. Such challenges can be addressed by revisiting different human roles as well as the ‘operation-centric’ regulatory approach of EU drone law.

Decades of research support the generalization that human males tend to be more aggressive than females. However, most of that research has examined aggression between unrelated individuals. Data drawn from 24 societies around the globe (n = 4,013) indicate that this generalization does not hold in the context of sibling relationships. In retrospective self-reports, females report being at least as aggressive as males toward their siblings, often more so. This holds for direct as well as indirect aggression, and for aggression between adult siblings as well as aggression that occurred during childhood. Consistent with prior research on sex differences, males reported engaging in more direct aggression toward nonkin than did females in the majority of societies. The results suggest that the dynamics of aggression within the family are different from those outside of it, and ultimately that understanding the role of sex in aggressive tendencies depends on context and target.

Most existing literature on business and crisis frames a crisis as a singular event that a business must navigate to survive or thrive. What we do not know is how firms survive through a series of intersecting and overlapping crises (i.e., a polycrisis environment) and how their strategies differ when operating amid perpetual crises. In Lebanon, overlapping crises grounded in weak political institutions, economic instability, and disasters have profoundly impacted small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Beirut SMEs operate in a complex urban environment, where neighboring conflicts, urban insecurity, and sectarian divisions impact operations. These firms are often promoted in economic development discourses as engines of resilient livelihood creation, but do SMEs negotiate these conditions in productive ways for the community, and can a perpetual crisis operating mentality deliver positive societal or economic dividends? This article addresses these questions by developing a framework that conceptualizes SME strategies for perpetual crises that draws on 34 in-depth qualitative interviews with SME owners in Beirut. We found that SMEs use nuanced strategies to contend with multidimensional crises that are distinct from singular crisis approaches and discuss how urban crises may shape our understanding of SMEs as peace and development actors. We use these findings to advance theory on the role of SMEs in perpetual crisis and on how survival strategies in such settings can upend business resilience.

Big data-based governance requires both compatible modes of computing data and interoperable databases. While interoperability is often portrayed as a logical imperative, we understand it as socially co-produced within a political choice for algorithmic governance. We use the case of the European Union's border management regime to show how its reconfiguration towards increasing reliance on data governance carries political and societal consequences, specifically the side-lining of civil society. In concrete, we focus on EU-funded Research and Development (R&D) for security, which has seen an increase in projects addressing the realization of interoperability. Based on an original dataset of Civil Society Organization's (CSO) participation in EU security research and a mixed-methods approach combining digital methods, ethnographic methods, and semi-structured interviews, we find that civil society has largely remained side-lined in making interoperability – not as mere unintended consequence, but by design. Additionally, and in line with our socio-technical approach to the topic, our findings show how interoperability is a polysemic concept that different actors understand in very different ways, opening up for negotiation and political contestation. Although CSOs at times participate in interoperability R&D projects, the political objectives of R&D in terms of achieving interoperability are defined in other spatial and temporal settings outside of the ‘laboratory’ of the project. At a more general level, our findings contribute to uncover the modes in which the public relates with big data governance in the field of security.