BY ERIC MCGLINCHEY Some efforts of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the former Soviet Union have proven more successful than others. Why do some assistance schemes pursued by USAID’s two central political party assistance implementers, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) yield positive results while other strategies [...]
BY AGNIESZKA PACZYNSKA As the victorious great powers surveyed the devastation brought on by World War II and faced the crumbling of old colonial empires two issues came to dominate the international agenda: the reconstruction of countries devastated by the war and the economic and political development of the newly independent states of Africa and Asia. [...]
BY VANDY KANYAKO JR. The Africa Working Group (AWG) at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) is an association of academic practitioners, activists, and students interested in fostering an in-depth understanding of contemporary Africa’s position in the global community. The working group was founded in the early 1990s by ICAR students and faculty as [...]
BY JENNIFER M. BRINKERHOFF The big dilemma this summer was who to root for in the World Cup Games. Like the famous “cricket test” in Britain (cited by Amartya Sen in his new book, Identity and Violence), choosing a team is supposed to be an indication of one’s identity and loyalty. But does that mean [...]
BY DANIELE ARCHIBUGI The two main wars that opened the third millennium, those in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been justified by the United States (US) and its allies with a mixture of arguments. The first, and perhaps foremost, has been self-defense: to eradicate the terrorist roots in Afghanistan and destroy the alleged weapons of mass [...]
BY CHRIS COYNE Among many other problems, the current U.S. occupation of Iraq suffers from a problem of incentive misalignment. From the beginning of the occupation, the United States made very clear its firm commitment to stay the course. This provided a disincentive to members of the Iraqi populace as well as to Iraq’s neighbors [...]
BY DAVID DAVIS The coalition intervention in Iraq of the spring of 2003 was carried out to depose a cruel and heinous dictator, Saddam Hussein. There has been much press and conjecture about other reasons for the intervention. What is little debated however, is that the Iraq that the coalition found was in great need. [...]
BY RICHARD E. RUBENSTEIN There has been some debate, but not nearly as intense or as enlightening as one might have hoped, about the current U.S. administration’s declared policy to promote the spread of democracy around the world. Objections to the program of “exporting democracy” are generally of two sorts. One group—call it the “native [...]
BY LISA PAWLOSKI Obesity is increasingly becoming an epidemic in industrialized nations, particularly in the United States, where one out of every three adults is obese. We are not alone in this emerging public health crisis. In Europe, rates of obesity among adults are as high as 25 percent in the United Kingdom and Germany, [...]