BY JEFFREY W. MANTZ Nobody likes to hear about blood diamonds, that something venerated as our culture’s highest token of commitment and affection comes to us haunted by specters of oppression, cruelty and murder. It took a 2006 film with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the role of a diamond-embezzling South African mercenary and a $100 million [...]
BY LISA BREGLIA Across the frontlines of energy production in the Global South, an oil crisis is long simmering. This is not an oil crisis as we already know it: in other words, a crisis stimulated by market models of supply and demand, or a crisis abstractly negotiated by giddy futures speculators, or even a [...]
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 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 [...]
BY STEVEN A. BARNES In early March 2006, I visited a graveyard in the empty Central Asian steppe near Spassk, just south of the city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. This cemetery held the unmarked remains of prisoners of the former Soviet Union’s Gulag—the notorious system of forced labor concentration camps and internal exile—and the multi-national [...]
BY REUBEN E. BRIGETY, II It isn’t every day that I find myself in northern Kenya visiting a camp with 150,000 Somali refugees, or hearing an American soldier talk about the strategic importance of vaccinating sheep in Djibouti as part of the Global War on Terror. But neither is it every day that, as a [...]
BY DAWN C. PARKER WITH MACTION KOMWA Although HIV/AIDS has no boundaries, the most affected region is sub-Saharan Africa, where 25 of the 40 million people globally living with the virus live. The epidemic has eroded the ability of rural African households to produce food and other agricultural products, generate income, and care for and [...]
BY LISA PAWLOSKI Adolescent girls in developing countries are often considered a nutritionally at-risk group. Nutritional anthropologists study the impact of nutrition on adolescent growth and development and the sociocultural factors which influence nutritional status. Ten years ago, I examined the nutritional status of adolescent girls living in Mali, West Africa, and found them to [...]
BY CURTISS SWEZY Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have long played a key role in providing health care in the US. Originally referred to as PVOs, or private voluntary organizations, these charitable hospitals and inner city resettlement homes provided some of the first health and social safety net care for remote and disenfranchised populations from the western [...]