Satoru Mikami

• PhD
• Professor at Ehime University

The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) has been the subject of growing criticism over its perceived lack of impact on the ground by many Congolese people. Politically motivated disinformation campaigns have exacerbated the mismatch between local perceptions and expectations and the missio...

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sparked a series of resolutions by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) condemning Russia. However, the responses to these initiatives were far from uniform, as they failed to isolate a blatant violator of territorial integrity in the 21st century. To explain the unexpectedly diverse reactions among states, th...

This study proposes a practical method of forecasting resilience before a possible incoming shock, using household-level resilience in terms of food security to the nationwide lockdown as an example. The datasets utilized for the construction of the forecasting model, as well as for the test of its prediction accuracy, are the World Bank’s Living S...

The purpose of this study is to examine whether social desirability bias increases when reliance on self-reporting as a measurement strategy is coupled with a participatory approach to intervention in the context of a development aid project. Using the field experiment data carried out in Uganda, where the outcome of intervention was measured by bo...

Most aid project output does not last long after the departure of external donors. This inconvenient truth remains unchanged despite the introduction decades ago of participatory approaches and the alignment of aid content, on the belief that they would cure this problem via the generation of a sense of ownership and the reduction in recurrent cost...

Resilience is a buzzword in many disciplines, but it is plagued by conceptual confusion and little practical use. The purpose of this paper is to make resilience more analytically useful. Following a review of pre-existing definitions and operationalizations, this paper proposes a versatile framework that defines a resilience level as the consequen...

The shortage of qualified human capital is a major impediment to development. In the field of international development cooperation, training programs (TPs) have been widely employed to enhance the capacity of workforces in developing countries. This paper investigates the conditions in which these programs can contribute not only to individual hum...

This paper tests the hypotheses that the tide of globalization undermines or reinforces the traditional types of social capital. Using the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey data and applying two-level logit regression analysis, this paper found that social capital related to sense of trust or human nature and interpersonal relations can be augmented by glo...

Technical cooperation at the implementation stage is indispensable for translating the effects of fund flows by way of budgetary support into the actual delivery of public services on the ground. An increasing demand for the streamlining of development aid, however, dictates that donors should contract out technical cooperation to local technical a...

This chapter explores whether and how opinions of Muslims and non-Muslims differ, using the survey data collected in four countries in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The surveys in Indonesia and Malaysia are nationwide while those in the Philippines and Thailand focus on certain regions, namely the National Capit...

The shortage of qualified human capital is a major impediment to development. In the field of international development cooperation, training programs (TPs) have been widely employed to enhance the capacity of workforces in developing countries. This paper investigates the conditions in which TPs can contribute not only to individual human resource...

Using a survey-embedded experiment, this paper tests whether the active provision of information can generate support, albeit tentatively, for ODA and/or the intention to participate in development aid among Japanese citizens. Results reveal that the treatment can increase the level of support for ODA on average, especially in terms of the efficien...

The purpose of this paper is to verify empirically whether foreign interventions concerning property restitution in Bosnia and Herzegovina were effective in promoting the return of forced migrants, both refugees and internally displaced persons. The paper reviews the activities carried out by the international community to promote restitution, and...

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the origins of inter-ethnic hostility, which need to be addressed if the centripetalism institutions are to function properly. Using intention of ethnic voting as an indicator of inter-group discrimination, this paper tests several classic hypotheses adapted from social psychology based on the surveys cond...

The adoption by donors of the recipient country’s system, rather than a parallel donor system, in implementing aid projects has been highly recommended within the aid community in recent years. However, the assumption behind this policy that using a country’s own system would enhance the recipient’s bureaucratic capability and result in improved pu...

When a group of people feel they are excluded from decision-making processes, they are likely to question the legitimacy of such processes. Collective feelings of alienation may lead to violent confrontations, especially when people perceive the exclusion of their group from the political arena to be the major cause of the deterioration in their li...

In recent years an increasing amount of both qualitative and quantitative research has shown that the presence of severe inequalities between ‘culturally’ defined groups such as ethnic or religious groups — or what Stewart (2002) has termed horizontal inequalities (His) — makes countries more susceptible to a range of political disturbances, includ...

This article investigates the political attitudes of Thai citizens, who have been exposed to a harsh political climate in recent years. Two questions we address here are: (a) how people perceived the quality of governance under the Thaksin administration and the subsequent provisional military government, and (b) what impacts, if any, the populist...

Scholars in the 1960s and 70s have argued that for the successful functioning of democratic institutions, certain attitudinal characteristics must be shared by the people living under the system. This old hypothesis, after years of neglect by the elite-centric transitologists, has recently attracted renewed interest with the surge of practical conc...

This paper tests the hypotheses that the tide of globalization undermines or reinforces the traditional types of social capital. Using the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey data and applying two-level logit regression analysis, this paper found that social capital related to sense of trust or human nature and interpersonal relations can be augmented by glo...

This article examines the cross-level causal relationship between macro-political settings and micro-political attitudes in eleven Asian societies using the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey (China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) and the 2006 South Asian Survey (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). After extracting the...

When and why does breakdown of political systems occur? Recent empirical works on regime changes have failed to address this question properly because their frameworks conventionally treat onset and outcome of political transitions as the same problem. Conceptualizing the dependent variable more precisely and using an original data set that covers...