Current policy-making understands human and ecological systems as independent, leading to the misconception that, though they interact, they can be managed separately. This often leads to policy overlooking the effects that the environment has on human structures, and vice versa. Under environmental stress, this disconnection may cause the community to fail, which can manifest in migration and conflict. In a climate-change scenario, it becomes increasingly important to consider social and environmental structures as one single system, that must be managed as a unit. Also, increasing the resilience of socio-ecological systems becomes a priority to prevent climatic disruptions to cause the system to collapse. This dissertation aims to learn from using systems thinking to interpret the Syrian crisis, following the 2006-2011 drought, and extract insights from using the same methodology in different contexts. This is done through the construction of two diagrams that help visualize socio-ecological system in a more accessible way, offering policy-makers an instrument to understand and manage socio-ecological systems more effectively. Finally, it discusses how these lessons can be helpful for the post-conflict process in Colombia, which shares many structural flaws with pre-conflict Syria, and explores how the methodology can be useful to identify and address these flaws for sustainable peace-building.

This paper will present two cases that deal with the constitutionality of assisted suicide, Washington v. Glucksberg 521 U.S. 702 (1997) of the Supreme Court of the United States and the judgment C – 239/1997 of the Constitutional Court of Colombia. The main purpose is to examine the understanding that each court presents about the rights to liberty and life, how they balance them and the arguments that each one wield to arrive to different decisions. Also, the paper underlines what considers inconsistences in both judgments. To achieve that goal, the paper will present a brief description of the reasoning and holding of each judgment, then, it will discuss the rights at stake, the balancing done by the courts, the need of regulation on the issue, the role of the legislature on this regard, and physicians´ dilemmas. Lastly, it will provide some conclusions. Este documento presentará dos sentencias ques estudian la constitucionalidad del suicidio asistido, Washington v. Glucksberg 521 U.S. 702 (1997) de la Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos y la sentencia C - 239/1997 de la Corte Constitucional de Colombia. El objetivo principal es examinar el análisis que cada tribunal presenta sobre los derechos a la libertad y la vida, cómo los pondera y los argumentos que cada uno maneja para llegar a decisiones diferentes. Además, el artículo subraya qué considera incoherente en cada decisión. Para lograr ese objetivo, el documento presentará una breve descripción del razonamiento y los argumentos de cada sentencia, luego, discutirá los derechos en tensión, la ponderación hecha por los tribunales, la necesidad de regulación sobre el tema, el papel del legislador en este sentido, y los dilemas de los médicos. Por último, proporcionará algunas conclusiones.

This thesis explores how informal property rights are defined and enforced in the business of onstreet parking in Bogota. It establishes that informal businesses could not operate without such property rights and that the value of force has been underestimated in the scant literature devoted to the subject. To contribute to the construction of a currently non-existent informal property rights theory this thesis contrasts the research findings with traditional property rights theory and attempts to redefine classic property rights concepts to fit the context of the urban informal economy. Finally, the thesis explains how mafias can enforce informal property rights, the logic of their actions, and the dangers of their proliferation.

In the last decade, growing recognition has been given to the reparation of the harmful experiences of victims of armed conflicts as a way to transform war torn societies into sustainable peace. In the Colombian case, reparation measures have been introduced within the peace agreements from the mid-2000s onwards. Such initiatives have been oriented towards the reparation of rights, socio-economic improvements and cultural practices of people that have suffered the immediate effects of conflict; namely peasants and inhabitants of rural areas. However, many victimized groups still await reparation and continue to experience the absence of the state in regions, which are formally identified as successful post-conflict scenarios due to the absence of war. Therefore, daily life experiences of those are still being influenced and negatively affected by long-term effects of conflict. Despite the fact that the internal displacement phenomenon has long been addressed by academia, the trajectories and outcomes of unsupported returning processes on victims remain underdeveloped. Thus, this research aims to contribute to these matters by exploring the ways in which the effects of conflict have shaped victims’ livelihoods. Utilizing a mixed methods design, this article combines a variety of interviews and surveys conducted among rural families and key stakeholders. This research reveals how by returning to their territories, people of Pitacapacho found a claim on their agricultural vocation, and a way to avoid being an “urban poor”. However, the transition from self-consumption to wage labor and the change of the agricultural land use to the development of extractive industries are issues that indicate how peasant's ideas and practices towards the territory have been challenged and transformed.

Trajectory planning has recently gained importance in the mobile robot community as a motion planning strategy to solve the problem of guiding the robot from a initial location to a target location in an environment with static or dynamic obstacles. This thesis is concerned with the timed elastic band approach and model predictive control to find the optimal trajectories subject to a differential constraints of a non-holonomic platform. The objective of this thesis is to augment the timed elastic band approach to general kinematics such as the mobile robots with differential drive, the car-like systems and the truck and trailer systems in specific environments. Several cost functions are evaluated to task of obstacle avoidance. For each kinematic, the metrics of traveling time starting from a fixed initial position to a goal location as well as the traversed distance between those states are evaluated. This thesis concludes with a comparative analysis of timed elastic bands with the robot motion planning approach RRT (Rapidly-exploration random tree).

Under the Colombian Flag examines the Colombian state‘s efforts to incorporate the Afro-Caribbean English-speaking Protestant islanders of San Andrés and Providence into the Spanish-speaking Catholic nation. The project analyzes how those cultural struggles and political negotiations shaped the Colombian nation-building process. I illustrate how Colombian political elites largely spoke of islanders‘ ethnic differences in terms of cultural attributes such as language, religion, and customs. In their minds, these characteristics were malleable. The Colombian nation-builders‘ project thus ignored North American and European pseudo-scientific understandings of race in order to incorporate ethnically and racially diverse populations into their homogenizing agenda, which promoted the Spanish language, Hispanic culture, Roman Catholicism, gendered notions of morality, and racial views of health and modernity. San Andrés and Providence islanders had a different understanding of racial and national identities. They tended to formulate their Colombian identity in terms of loyalty, reciprocity, and rights. My work contributes to the growing body of historical scholarship on race and nation-building in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as scholarship investigating the experiences of black communities in the Atlantic world.

When complying with anti-money laundering (AML) regulation, financial institutions faced some problems reflected in the form of risks and costs. In some cases, those problems have legal solutions but, in other cases, place banks in the position to decide between two risks – one being less harmful than the other. The aim of this dissertation is to provide an analysis of such risks and costs handled by financial entities, presenting some solutions provided by courts, but also identifying the gap between regulation and reality. Chapter I includes a general overview of money laundering; it makes reference to Financial Action Task recommendations in this matter and at the end the regulatory context of the crime in United Kingdom (UK). In Chapter II, each subsection refers to the risks banks may have when complying with money laundering regulations; the duality between the risk of being involved in a money laundering offence against the risk of being sued as a constructive trustee, the problem between reporting suspicious transactions against the tipping off offence, the dilemma of whether compliance with AML requirements and breaching contractual duties with customers, and an analysis of how legislation has partially solved the dilemma regarding confidentiality duty. Then, I shall discuss the costs that banks have to assume in implementing the AML system and the perception of the bankers regarding AML regulation.

The thesis focuses the topic of squatter settlements located along borders in twin cities on the Amazon context. The study claims that Twin Cities are integrated by informality, in this case by squatter settlements along borders. In addition to the integration, these squatter settlements are transforming the border from a limit towards a social spatial construction of their territory. Based on that, the study looks for a cross border approach which can be developed by local governments of twin cities in order to manage squatter settlements along borders as a shared and common problem. In order to develop the research, the study has been done in the case of Leticia (Colombia) and Tabatinga (Brazil) twin cities in the Amazon. The thesis is focused in a natural space which has been the border between these twin cities the San Antonio ravine. Along this “natural” limit between Colombia and Brazil has been taken place an occupation of squatter settlements that has transformed the international limit into an “informal” urban space. The thesis developed two approaches in order to study the mentioned case of squatter settlements located along borders in twin cities. First, the study developed a bottom up approach analysing socioeconomic and physical characteristics of squatter settlements inhabitants and comparing both squatter settlements based on fieldwork findings. The comparative study looks for symmetric and asymmetric issues between both squatter settlements which are a key output towards a cross border approach between the twin cities based on needs and characteristics of squatter settlements inhabitants in the Amazon context. On the other hand, the study developed a review of urban policies of Colombia and Brazil looking for aspects that can be taking into account for local government of Leticia and Tabatinga in their local policies for managing squatter settlements on flood prone lands located on the border’s fringe. In addition, the study made a review of the current frontiers policies of both countries in order to find key elements that can used by local government for developing a cross border cooperation for managing squatter settlements in a cooperation and integration framework.Finally, the study looks for a short and long term appropriate approach for managing these two squatter settlements located along the border between the Leticia and Tabatinga twin cities. The recommendations for both terms can be useful input for future housing policies, and urban planning and management instruments in the twin cities based on Amazon characteristics. Moreover, the research methodology developed in the study can be an appropriate research procedure for further urban studies in Leticia and Tabatinga twin cities, especially on squatter settlements along border’s fringe.

Since the creation of the Old Age Pension scheme (Algemene Ouderdomswet, henceforth; AOW) in 1957 some important changes in its regulation have taken place. The purpose of this study is to analyse the redistribution of income for different individuals in the AOW taking into account these changes in regulation and different groups of individuals according to their gender, civil status and income. This comparison is made by using the Generational Accounts approach, initially presented by Auerbach (1991), in which the Net Present Value of the pension benefits received by every individual from the system is subtracted from the Net Present Value of the contributions paid to the system. In this study the database IPO, Documentatierapport Inkomenspanelonderzoek from CBS, Statistics Netherlands, has been used for some specific years after 1977. For the data of 2008 onwards the future contributions and benefits of the individuals will be projected according to the forecasts of the wage increases and pension benefits. A sensitivity analysis is also performed in order to check the changes in the Generational Accounts of the individuals with different discount rates and including the effects of the New Pension Contract.

Over the last decade, the Latin American Cross-Border M&A activity experienced a significant increase in terms of volume, value, and complexity. Between 2002 and 2011, 1483 M&A announcements involving Latin American bidders were found in this study. From this sample 344 were targeting companies in a foreign country. With the purpose of measuring to what extent CB-M&A can be a catalyst of value creation or destruction for the bidder in the short-term, the event study methodology was employed in a sample of 47 observations. I found that on average, the market reaction is positive after the announcement, leading to the short-term value creation for the Latin American acquirers. Regarding the allocation of investments in terms of geographies, the outcome shows that bidders tend to favor countries with similar cultural values and geographically close. The Hofstede’s cultural dimensions along with additional factors such as language, legal origins, and religion were analyzed in order to evaluate to what degree cultural differences affect cross-border acquisitions. However much the results are not statistically significant, it appears that cultural differences tend to have a negative effect on the bidder’s short-term performance.