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 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 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 SANDRA I. CHELDELIN AND SUSAN F. HIRSCH In 2004, in collaboration with a local NGO in Dushanbe, our faculty at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution launched a multiyear project to increase conflict resolution capacities of local actors in Tajikistan. We worked with government, religious and academic leaders, created a conflict resolution resource [...]
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 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 [...]
BY RITA CHI-YING CHUNG One outcome of globalization is the increased movement of people by either legal or illegal means. Recently there has been increased media attention to human trafficking that has exposed the clandestine nature of this illegal migration. There are various definitions of human trafficking supplied by the United Nations, the International Organization [...]
BY DAVID R. IRVINE Not far from Stratford, on the river Avon, stands Warwick Castle. This thousand year-old relic is one of Britain’s premier historical attractions. The dungeons and torture chamber, with the rack and press, the thumbscrews and iron maiden, are popular tour stops as visitors ponder the dark barbarity of the age of [...]
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 [...]