BY AGNIESZKA PACZYNSKA 1 The last two decades have witnessed fundamental shifts in international economic dynamics and the gradual reshaping of global political relationships and collaborations. In particular, emerging powers in the global south are now playing a much more prominent role in the global economy and are beginning to rewrite transnational political frameworks. As their [...]
BY SEAN W. BURGES One of the hot potatoes being passed around the policy branches of most major international development agencies is the question of what to do about the rising group of development actors who are not part of the exclusive club that meets in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance [...]
BY APRIL R. BICCUM Global poverty has become an important global issue in the last 20 years and activism on behalf of the global poor has become increasingly popular. Both a symptom and effect of this popularity, is the increased involvement of individual Hollywood celebrities, activists and advocates in development and the increased visibility of [...]
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 AGNIESZKA PACZYNSKA Over the last three years food and fuel price increases followed by the global financial crisis have placed tremendous strains on fragile and post-conflict states, raising concerns about their ability to maintain political and social stability. At the same time, what these multiple crises have revealed is that even countries in remote [...]
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 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 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 REUBEN E. BRIGETY II One of the greatest convergences in American foreign policy in the last twenty years has been the recognition of the strategic utility of humanitarian and developmental assistance (HDA). While encouraging, this change is not without concern. The principal question posed by this development is this: How can HDA maintain its [...]
BY CARLOS E. SLUZKI No less than 20 million of people, escaping wars, civil wars, persecution, ethnic cleansing and the like, are currently living as refugees beyond the borders of their own countries, and a still larger number are living as displaced persons within the boundaries of their country. Their protection is the core mission [...]