Marketing Jihad: the rhetoric of recruitment

ABSTRACT

The key question from a marketing perspective is why has Islamic State (IS) been so successful and how did it displace Al Qaeda (AQ) as the most prominent brand of global jihad from 2014 to 2016? The political and military elements have been examined but comparatively little attention has been paid to the ability of IS to commandeer the AQ narrative by appropriating and extending key themes and using them via social media to market itself as a choice for disaffected youth. It is suggested that IS has done this by making skilful use of rhetoric to position its brand and facilitate recruitment. To illustrate this, eight major themes of jihadi social media communications are identified and then analysed. Then a comparison is made between the way that AQ has used these themes in the online journal Inspire and the way that IS has used them in their online journals, Dabiq and Rumiyah.     

Modelling agricultural land use allocation in regional Australia

An analysis of the drivers of agricultural land use is important for policy makers as the issues of climate change and food security become increasingly prominent in the political landscape. This paper analyses the role of prices, total land holdings and climate on land use in Australia. The analysis relates to a unique comprehensive coverage of commodity types at a regional level. An explicit treatment of missing data and the novel use of cluster analysis is employed within a partial adjustment framework for modelling land allocation. The majority of commodity types across regions exhibit significant degrees of slow partial adjustment for land allocation, the frequency of slow adjustment is greatest with crops and livestock and weakest for vegetables. In general, relative own and cross prices, total land holdings and rainfall only have a minor impact on short‐term land allocations, however numerous individual commodity/regional combinations have identified significant short‐run impacts.     

Recurrent Neural Networks for Time Series Forecasting: Current status and future directions

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have become competitive forecasting methods, as most notably shown in the winning method of the recent M4 competition. However, established statistical models such as exponential smoothing (ETS) and the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) gain their popularity not only from their high accuracy, but also because they are suitable for non-expert users in that they are robust, efficient, and automatic. In these areas, RNNs have still a long way to go. We present an extensive empirical study and an open-source software framework of existing RNN architectures for forecasting, and we develop guidelines and best practices for their use. For example, we conclude that RNNs are capable of modelling seasonality directly if the series in the dataset possess homogeneous seasonal patterns; otherwise, we recommend a deseasonalisation step. Comparisons against ETS and ARIMA demonstrate that (semi-) automatic RNN models are not silver bullets, but they are nevertheless competitive alternatives in many situations.     

How Desirable is the South Asian Free Trade Area? A Quantitative Economic Assessment

The proliferation of preferential trading agreements (PTAs) in different regions of the world has been a significant development over the last two decades. South Asian countries have been slowly moving towards a South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA) in recent years. The desirability of SAFTA has been questioned by some observers recently. Will SAFTA create gains for its members or not? Is it better for South Asian countries to promote non‐discriminatory trade liberalisation rather than SAFTA? The main objective of this paper is to address the above questions, especially the desirability of SAFTA, using a global computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. From the existing empirical and theoretical studies, we have identified three viewpoints on the desirability (or viability) of SAFTA: pessimistic, optimistic, and moderate. The results from two policy scenarios (unilateral liberalisation and SAFTA) confirm the pessimistic view by showing that unilateral liberalisation would benefit South Asian countries much more than preferential liberalisation (SAFTA). In fact, under preferential liberalisation, small countries in the region would gain little or even lose. The present political climate in South Asia also seems to support the pessimistic view.     

University - profession partnership in accounting education: the case of Sri Lanka

This paper analyses accounting education in Sri Lanka with particular reference to the university-profession partnership. In terms of the establishment of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Sri Lanka (ICASL) in 1959, the availability of accounting degree programmes in the university, and the on-going British influence in accounting, one might expect to find a vigorous accountancy profession in place, actively seeking to produce highly competent accounting professionals in adequate numbers suitable for its country's economic needs. However, such a situation would be misplaced. Over the past four decades ICASL has produced only 1800 qualified accountants in a country of 18 million population. Drawing upon a theoretical framework of professional accounting education, this paper explains the lack of a proper partnership between the university and the professional body over the last four decades in Sri Lanka, and speculates as to whether ICASL purposely exerts control over the supply of accountants by limiting the membership only to those who complete its own examinations.