BY DEBORAH BRÄUTIGAM On hearing of one major Chinese deal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an editor at the Financial Times wrote: “Beijing has thrown down its most direct challenge yet to the West’s architecture for aiding Africa’s development.” I think he was right. This challenge is not just about low environmental, governance, [...]
BY RAMKISHEN RAJAN According to a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), “a number of developing countries have emerged as significant sources of foreign direct investment (FDI) in other developing countries, and their investments are now considered a new and important source of capital and production know-how, especially for host [...]
BY JOHN G. DALE The United Nations (UN) established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 to indict, try, and sentence individuals who commit any of four crimes, including war crimes or crimes against humanity. Although neither the United States nor Myanmar are currently signatories to the Rome Statute that created the authority and jurisdiction [...]
BY TONY YANG The completion of the Human Genome Project marked the dawn of a bold new era — the era of the genome in biology and medicine. There has been growing biomedical research on relating population-based genomic analyses to diseases. This is a transformation from investigating a small group of individuals to analyzing the [...]
BY ARNAUD KURZE After over half a century of modern foreign aid practices, a vast literature has addressed the question of aid effectiveness1, particularly with regards to the questionable and perturbing record of poverty alleviation in least developed countries. Since the 1990s, however, post-Soviet countries and the war-torn Balkan region have also appeared on the [...]
BY TONY SAMARA In 2010 Cape Town, South Africa will host a number of soccer matches for the World Cup, including one of the semi-final matches. That same year New Delhi, India, will host the Commonwealth Games, and Shanghai, China the World Expo. Different as they are, all three cities confront an urban population marked [...]
BY SUSAN A. CRATE Imagine making a trip to Siberia stereotypically perceived as the Gulag and a frozen wasteland only to discover an extraordinarily diverse part of the world. Not only in terms of plant and animals—just consider Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest lake in the world holding one-fifth of the world’s fresh water and [...]
BY ERIC MCGLINCHEY The local impact of global climate change is suddenly acutely present in Central Asia. A coincidence of extended drought in Central Asia and Australia and the transfer of food crops to ethanol production have resulted in a dramatic spike in commodity prices throughout Eurasia. Importantly, Central Asia is not alone in confronting [...]
BY LOUISE SHELLEY Human trafficking has recently emerged as a major international policy concern. Its consequences are far-reaching and diverse affecting social, political and economic life in countries across the globe. Trafficking is part of the larger phenomenon of international migration that has assumed an enormous scale in recent decades. But it is also a [...]
BY SADA AKSARTOVA Throughout the 1990s, the most ambitious American efforts to promote market and democracy were directed at Russia and other post-Soviet states. The enormity—physical and symbolic—of the Soviet Union, the rapidity of its collapse and the sheer scale of the economic and political transformation in its successor states presented Western policy makers with [...]