Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "The Great Privatization? Industry, Trade and the State in Roman Egypt" "Katelijn Vandorpe" "Ancient History, Leuven" "The transition from Hellenistic (305–30 BC) to Roman (30 BC–284 AD) rule in Egypt is often cast in terms of a ‘Great Privatization’ of the industry and trade sectors. For the first time, the proposed project will provide an in-depth study of these developments, challenging the narrative of a radical break between a state-controlled versus a market economy following the Roman conquest. It will furthermore redefine the terms of the debate, shifting the focus to the effects of change on the economy and society. Abundant evidence for the regulation of industrial and trade activities in Roman Egypt has been preserved through the thousands of papyri unearthed from the desert sand. For a solid theoretical foundation of this research, the project will draw on the framework of Complexity Economics. The results of this analysis will not only have profound implications for our understanding of the economy of Roman Egypt and the welfare and wellbeing of its population, but they will also contribute to wider debates about the impact of empire in the Roman world and the role of markets in pre-industrial economies." "Questioning water modernity. A GIS-approach to the privatization and resilience of common drinking water systems in 16th- and 19thcentury cities, test-case: Antwerp." "Tim Soens" "Centre for Urban History" "This project has the ambition of developing a bottom-up social and spatial approach to the privatization of urban drinking water in 18th- and 19th-century cities. Such approach would not be possible without a micro-level GIS, enabling us to follow private, public or common access to drinking water, its use and users on the level of the household. For 18th- and 19th-century Antwerp the GIStorical Antwerp project (UA-Hercules) offers such infrastructure. At this stage in its development, GIStorical Antwerp offers spatial information on each plot for 1830- 1880 based on cadastral data, with extension into the 18th century and up to 1900 scheduled for next year. Data gathered in this dissertation can hence be framed and analysed using year to year digital maps of the city, and integrated with available data on house ownership, commerce and industry. Thus, micro-level spatial analysis will form the core methodology, an approach that can - quite literally - open doors, analysing changes in, and blurring boundaries between, private, public and common space." "Questioning water modernity: a GIS-approach to the privatization and resilience of common drinking water systems in 18th- and 19th-century cities, test-case: Antwerp (1750-1900)." "Tim Soens" "Centre for Urban History" "This project has the ambition of developing a bottom-up social and spatial approach to the privatization of urban drinking water in 18th- and 19th-century cities. Such approach would not be possible without a micro-level GIS, enabling us to follow private, public or common access to drinking water, its use and users on the level of the household. For 18th- and 19th-century Antwerp the GIStorical Antwerp project (UA-Hercules) offers such infrastructure. At this stage in its development, GIStorical Antwerp offers spatial information on each plot for 1830- 1880 based on cadastral data, with extension into the 18th century and up to 1900 scheduled for next year. Data gathered in this dissertation can hence be framed and analysed using year to year digital maps of the city, and integrated with available data on house ownership, commerce and industry. Thus, micro-levelspatial analysis will form the core methodology, an approach that can - quite literally - open doors, analysing changes in, and blurring boundaries between, private, public and common space." "Liberalization and privatization of essential public services." "Koen Verhoest" "Public Administration & Management" "This project represents a formal research agreement between UA and on the other hand Erasmus Mundus. UA provides Erasmus Mundus research results mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions as stipulated in this contract.This funding provides in the preparation of a PhD by Nurul Amin on the effects of the global trend of liberalisation and the emergence of a multi-level regulatory arrangement on the regulatory effectiveness and market competitiveness in telecom and energy in South Asian countries, in comparison with other parts of the world." "Privatization and liquidity in Iran" "Nancy Huyghebaert" "Finance Research Group (main work address Leuven)" "In a broad definition, liquidity is the ability to trade large quantities of stock quickly at low cost with little price impact. Market practitioners have been concerned with the concept of liquidity for a long time, but more recently liquidity has also been defined more strictlyin many accounting regimes and theoretical and empirical research on ithas gained momentum. The focus of this study is on some of the less explored dimensions of liquidity phenomena including the spillovers upon new listings, and from product markets to stock markets, effect of bankingrelations on firms liquidity, and attempts made by firms to affect their liquidity in order to finance cheaper in stock market." "Cutting Sustenance from the Margins of Oil Extraction: Igbo's Creative Engagement with Distribution and Privatization of Oil Wealth in the Niger Delta" "Filip De Boeck, Mark Breusers" "Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa" "The post-Nigeria-Biafra war reforms centralized the collection and distribution of the Niger Delta’s oil wealth to set up channels through which the oil wealth is distributed and privatized – outlets of oil wealth – that mainly privilege the political office holders, international entrepreneurs and their contractors (the petro-elites). Those who are less favoured in this process deploy different techniques to gain some share of the oil wealth. Kidnapping for ransom, occupying oil installations, the extortion of protection money and manipulation of cases and compensations are some examples of the techniques. These techniques can involve the application of coercion, or armed violence. There are also techniques that do not involve coercion or armed violence, which are favoured by actors in the Igbo-speaking parts of the Delta. Rather than being coercive, the latter creatively engage the outlets of oil wealth, by modifying their traditional practices and alliances.In one instance, the outlet of oil wealth engaged creatively is the compensation paid for land expropriated for oil business. When disputes arising from the distribution of money paid as compensation by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) became a court case, the members of Imosoa, one of the villages involved in the dispute, resorted to throwing a fishing festival (they previously celebrated exclusively)open to the public. Anyone who could pay the stipulated fee could participate. The transformative effect of this was triggered when the latter village introduced sponsorship of every new version of the festival to raise money to fund the court proceedings of the compensation dispute. Thereafter, rather than a gathering of the descendants and associates of Osoa, who is linked with the discovery of the Ịkụazụ lake where the festival is celebrated, each new version of the festival is considered instead as an innovation. Hence, it can be appreciated and supported with money, in the same way that every other good assigned with commodity quality can be treated.The practice of appreciating and encouraging an innovation with money, can be traced to two Igbo traditional practices. The first is compensating a toddler, whose first set of teeth is acknowledged with a fowl by the first public announcer (ile eze). The second is the practice of spraying money on an entertainer, whose display is spectacular (itu ego). But, through the fundraising mechanism of launching/sponsoring popularized by the Igbo town unions, a hometown association that organizes for self-help and community development from the middle of the 20th century onwards, the practice of transforming goods into an innovation, hence capable of being launched or sponsored, has penetrated all aspects of Igbo socio-economic life. The transformation of a traditional festival which has enabled the Imosoa village to sustain their access to oil rent, is an example of how widespread the practice has become.In another instance, the outlet of oil wealth engaged creatively is the creation of autonomous communities. The latter is a sub-federal unit that engages with the oil companies and state’s special agencies for the development of oil producing communities. When the traditional ruler of Ebobi misappropriated and politicized rents paid to the entire community, a set of university undergraduates rallied with some elders with whom they shared an identity to reconstitute themselves into a new autonomous community. This reconstitution was facilitated by histories of migration and settlement that were previously stored as symbolic value. Such symbolic values are now deployed for accessing oil wealth and benefits, which will now accrue directly to them as members of a new autonomous community.Thus, the story of the Niger Delta is not only about elite appropriation of oil wealth and armed struggle for resource control. Actors in the Delta also creatively engage the formal structures established by the dominant actors for oil wealth distribution and privatization, without having to be coercive or engage in armed violence. Scholars have also to pay attention to these forms of bricolage in the resource extraction zones, which the poststructuralist understanding of space-place relations in relational terms helps to engage with. By so doing, analysts can account adequately for the form of social configuration that emerges in the Niger Delta, where investment in oil extraction gains in intensity. So, analysts can also discern alternative ways of organizing the economy." "Penal politics, the state, civil society and the market: examining the origin, scale and breadth of privatisation across the criminal justice systems in Belgium and France." "Marc Cools" "Department of Criminology, Criminal Law and Social Law, Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University" "Over the past decades, neo-liberal ‘minimal state’ governments have increasingly looked towards private enterprise and market-oriented penal reforms for solutions to a wide range of criminal justice issues. These developments have attracted much scholarly attention in the Anglosphere. However, so far few comprehensive criminological studies have empirically and theoretically addressed the more recent and undeniable drive towards privatisation in also some of the ‘strong state’ European countries. Therefore, this innovative research aims to explore the origin, scale and breadth of private sector involvement in criminal justice systems in two such countries; Belgium and France. The focus lies on identifying and explaining market-driven trends in penal policies and criminal justice, and how they shifted the roles and interactions of public, private and voluntary sectors. The results of this cross-national project will advance substantial new understandings on the movement towards and away from modes of privatisation within two under-researched criminal justice systems. Data comes from a variety of sources – e.g. (policy) documents, reports, legislation, interviews. As an analytical framework, this research draws on Bourdieu’s field theory and the specific role of capital to understand policy reform and the privatisation of the criminal justice system. The findings of this study will make an important contribution to the field of criminology, law, political science and economics." "The effect of the privatisaton of the military force on the democratic control on military operations" "Bruno Coppieters" "Political Science" "Particularly since the end of the Cold War, activities traditionally performed by uniformed military personnel have increasingly been outsourced and privatized. In a comparative research design focused on different countries in Western Europe, this project will map the democratic control mechanisms providing oversight of private military companies and will ask how this outsourcing affects the democratic control of military operations." "Achiral and chiral targeted brain metabolomics in volume-limited samples: quest for broad coverage, sensitivity and throughput using chemical derivatization and miniaturized liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry." "Ann Van Eeckhaut" "Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences" "To gain more information on all metabolites in the mouse brain extracellular fluid and their role under physiological and pathophysiological conditions, sensitive, selective and highthroughput LC-MS/MS methods that enable the quantification of a broad range of neurochemicals are needed. Moreover, stereospecific analysis of chiral amino and hydroxy acids is important as also the minor enantiomers have been shown to possess important roles in the brain. In this project, two miniaturized LC-MS/MS methods, one achiral and one chiral, will therefore be developed allowing the sensitive quantification of a large panel of brain metabolites in volume-limited microdialysis samples. Chemical derivatization of the analytes is a promising method to enable the sensitive analysis in a low volume biological sample of a broad range of metabolites with distinct physicochemical properties in one run. For both methods the derivatization reaction, the inclusion of isotope-coded derivatization to obtain an internal standard for all compounds, the LC and mass spectrometry parameters will be optimized using a systematic method optimization approach. Both methods will be applied to study fluctuations in metabolite profiles in brain microdialysis samples upon chemogenetic modulation of astrocytes in a mouse model for epilepsy. As these studies result in complex multivariate data sets, chemometric tools will be used to extract relevant information." "ROMIL:Risk prioitization and development of multi methods for the analyse of migrating ink- and adhezive components through food contact materials in food" "geen abstract"