BY BRIAN FINLAY Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history — the risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up. Nuclear materials that could be sold or stolen and fashioned into a nuclear weapon exist [...]
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 DAVID M. HART THE RISE OF THE GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY AND THE CHALLENGES OF GOVERNANCE Over the past two or three decades, knowledge-intensive industries, such as semiconductor chip design and biotechnology-based drug discovery, have undergone a global restructuring. Globalization now extends beyond markets for goods, unskilled labor, and conventional finance into markets for technology, [...]
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 LISA ECKENWILER Thanks in part to over a century of progress in public health and medicine, many people are enjoying longer lives. These changing demographics are generating a greater need for long-term care (LTC). In the US, while there has been considerable debate concerning the nature and extent of future LTC needs given declining [...]
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 [...]
BY MARIELY LÓPEZ-SANTANA The gaps between legislation, compliance and implementation represent one of the most challenging aspects of policy making and policy change in domestic and international settings. Environmental reforms and discussions about the ability of international law to effect change in states are good examples, highlighting the issues of converting laws into public goods [...]
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 BHAVANI ARABANDI India’s current growth rate of 8 percent has been attributed to the successful implementation of economic liberalization policies in 1991 that opened the economy to global corporations seeking to do business in India. These policies encouraged the formation of partnerships between domestic firms and global corporations, as well as the entry of [...]
BY RANDA KAYYALI Supply and demand has fuelled the circuits of production at the global level for many years now. Like other products, the offerings from higher education institutions have changed over the years. From the 1960s on, student exchanges were the dominant form of international education, but there are newer forms of global outreach [...]