BY JO-MARIE BURT
In spring 2008, the Transitional/Transnational Justice Working Group, a group of Mason faculty and graduate students interested in issues of global justice and human rights, launched the Human Rights, Global Justice and Democracy Project. The project’s central concern is to examine how societies that experienced mass atrocity cope with the legacies of violence [...]
BY ALAN CHEUSE
Here’s an obscure moment, that when it first happened, seemed to me to be an example of I didn’t know what, but now shines through the fog as a precursor of some news to come: about ten years ago I served on a jury that decided one of the largest international literary prizes [...]
BY TOM C. OWENS
As the United States stood poised to take a more prominent political and cultural role as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, debate raged over the formation and character of distinctively American artistic forms and traditions. Within the art or classical music tradition, this conversation was particularly intense [...]
BY PETER MANDAVILLE
This is real life, engraved on my pages: families dying from starvation whilst the government’s worried about immigration.
— Blind Alphabetz, ‘Concrete Landz’
Like everyone today, Young British Muslims are carrying around iPods full of the latest tunes. Despite the recent phenomenal popularity of a pop-oriented variant of nasheed devotional music—a key artist would be [...]
BY SOLON SIMMONS
There is no part of the world more crucial to the strategic interests of the United States as is the Middle East. While the traditional problems of the regulation of international affairs are at play there, Arab language satellite channels have created a new force in the region, and Al Jazeera is one [...]
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 [...]
BY NICOLE DARNALL
Imagine shopping for house paint. Your local hardware store stocks half a dozen brands that meet your criteria for price and quality. You notice on one can that there is an environmental label. It looks similar to a common nutritional label seen on most food products. The environmental label provides information about the resources and [...]
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 production [...]
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 crisis [...]
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 home [...]