Journal of international affairs最新文献

{"title":"National Preparedness Planning: The Historical Context and Current State of the U.S. Public's Readiness, 1940-2005","authors":"I. Redlener, D. Berman","doi":"10.7916/D8KP8BVK","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8KP8BVK","url":null,"abstract":"n the United States, national public preparedness efforts meant to ready individuals and families for disasters have been driven primarily by international threats, actual or anticipated. These include terrorism, war and the potential for global instability such as the millennium Y2K computer error. The national dialogue on public preparedness following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the fall of 2005 is a notable departure from the more typical focus of public preparedness, which is oriented toward terrorism and international threats. However, the response to the hurricanes was largely viewed as an unanticipated test of the public’s readiness for a disaster and the penetration of the public preparedness messages that have been actively promulgated since 11 September 2001. As such, we argue that the poor state of public readiness that was found in the U.S. Gulf Coast region after the hurricanes actually reflects a national state of unpreparedness for emergency events despite the postSeptember 11th calls from all levels of government for the U.S. public to be prepared.1 Since 11 September 2001, a renewed national focus on the U.S. public’s readiness for international aggression emerged. This focus was heightened by the anthrax mailings shortly after September 11th and the alleged threat of an Iraqi attack using unconventional weapons, specifically smallpox, on the U.S. homeland. The postSeptember 11th focus on national public preparedness came almost two years after calls had ended for the public to prepare for the millennium Y2K computer error and its potential to disrupt everything from alarm clocks to the power supply. Prior to the millennium, the national public had engaged in a preparedness dialogue born during the Second World War amid calls for the public to engage in air raid and naval watches that continued throughout the Cold War and its threat of nuclear attacks. The post-September 11th national public preparedness dialogue reignited a","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"59 1","pages":"87-103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71367177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Scoring Millennium Goals: Economic Growth Versus the Washington Consensus","authors":"A. Noman","doi":"10.7916/D8KH0V52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8KH0V52","url":null,"abstract":"According to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, \"[based] on current trends, most Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be met by most countries.\" (1) This assessment, issued in 2004, is widely shared and reinforced by a 2005 United Nations report. (2) The joint Bank-Fund report identifies the first of \"the three essential elements\" urgently needed if most countries are to reach the MDGs as 'Accelerating reforms to achieve stronger economic growth.\" (3) The other two essential elements include increased and improved delivery of human development and related services, and support from developed countries and international agencies. These three elements have also been emphasized by the UN report, which paid particular attention to the case for increasing aid. There is no denying that sustained, rapid economic growth is necessary for reaching the MDGs. (4) Aside from its most obvious and direct bearing on reducing income poverty and halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015, economic growth will also facilitate the provision of resources vital to achieve other MDGs. There is also no disputing the joint IMF-World Bank report in its emphasis on the salience of economic policy reforms rather than just focusing on increased financing for improved growth. But what kinds of reforms are to be accelerated for improved growth? And what role should the providers of development assistance, particularly the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), play in helping to bring them about? The answers to these questions in the joint Bank-Fund report are more controversial, as this paper will show. There are two distinct, though overlapping strands of thinking on these questions. One pertains to development strategies or the content of reforms, particularly the type of policy and institutional reforms advocated by the BWIs and the United States Treasury in the context of adjustment programs. The second theory pertains to a host of other issues, albeit often related, that bear on the effectiveness of external assistance. The BWIs, along with the US Treasury, are often accused of a neo-liberal or \"market fundamentalism\" bias captured in the shorthand of the Washington Consensus. That label has come to refer to a somewhat caricaturized version of the policies that these institutions recommended, particularly in the 1980s and the 1990s. While recognizing that, Joseph Stiglitz observes that: [Whatever its original content and intent, the term 'Washington Consensus,' in the minds of most people around the world, has come to refer to development strategies focusing around privatization, liberalization, and macrostability (meaning mostly price stability); a set of policies predicated upon a strong faith stronger than warranted in unfettered markets and aimed at reducing, or even minimizing, the role of government. That development strategy stands in marked contrast to the successful strategies pursued in East Asia, where the deve","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"58 1","pages":"233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71366980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Children's Rights","authors":"A. LeBas","doi":"10.1163/2352-0272_emho_com_022123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2352-0272_emho_com_022123","url":null,"abstract":"Children's Rights Edited by Jude Fernando (Special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2001) The issues of child poverty and mistreatment occupy that strange no-man's land of discourse in the international community, simultaneously ever-present and peripheral. The abuse of children's rights -- through child labor, the use of children as combatants, and urban poverty -- strings through most discussions of globalization, economic development, democratization, refugee issues, and conflict. However, the on-the-ground realities of children's lives in the developing world are only incompletely understood, leading to the adoption of policies that are often grossly ineffective and culturally inappropriate. This disconnect is well reflected in international efforts to fight child labor. In several developing countries, the use of child labor has decreased substantially due to international pressure and the adoption of children's rights conventions. In most cases, well-intentioned regulations have resulted in a further erosion of children's living standards and the pushing of children into more informal and dangerous occupations. Within the international community, there now seems to be a greater appreciation of the lack of \"fit\" between local context and treaties negotiated at the international level. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (ILO Convention 182), both drafted to allow for greater flexibility for implementing countries, will ultimately be judged according to how well they remedy this lack of fit. In different ways, the two volumes under consideration here address themselves to this tension between the local and the international. The first examines the growing number of street children in the developing world, a commonly neglected aspect of the child labor debate. The authors ambitiously attempt both rich ethnographic description and a more abstract, policy-oriented analysis focused on general causes and cures. The second volume, a collection of articles, makes a case for a more nuanced and culturally-sensitive international strategy on children's rights. The number of street children in the urban centers of the developing world has exploded in the past two decades, and child homelessness has now spread to parts of Africa and Latin America where it had previously been uncommon. The root causes of this increase have yet to be adequately explained, and the ways in which street children live -- the social structures in which they are embedded, the coping mechanisms and strategies they develop -- remain similarly murky. Street Children in Kenya: Voices of Children in Search of a Childhood, co-authored by an American sociologist and two Kenyan social scientists, is not exactly the book its title might suggest. Kilbride, Suda and Njeru have included the ethnographic interviews one would expect, but they ","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"55 1","pages":"217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64617719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Global Organized Crime and International Security","authors":"Dessie P. Zagorcheva","doi":"10.4324/9780429453861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429453861","url":null,"abstract":"Global Organized Crime and International Security Edited by Emilio C. Viano (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 1999) 240 pp. Global Organized Crime and International Security puts together many of the important and contested issues from the current research on global organized crime--the causes of this phenomenon, its recent development, its effects on the political, economic and social structures of the countries it affects, and proposed counter-measures. The book consists of 16 chapters, organized in three parts: the introduction and the chapters in the first part present some of the theoretical issues, which are addressed in more detail with the case studies in the second part and the third part, which presents some initial steps taken towards solving the problems. The 24 authors hail from nine countries and have multiple qualifications (in international relations, law and criminology) and area expertise that illustrate the benefits of discussing organized crime from a political, economic and legal viewpoint. At the same time, however, this diversity contributes to the lack of focus of the book. The purpose of the book is to offer a framework for assessing the economic and political linkages underlying organized crime and its globalization, while the emphasis is on how the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union in particular have boosted development of global organized crime. This phenomenon is defined as one of the most serious threats to international security at present, and has led to a slew of new literature on the issue, which has focused mainly on the supply and demand and the illicit trafficking of nuclear weapons-usable materiel from the former Soviet Union. Viano's book is an additional sign of the heightened concern of policy makers and academics alike about the problems posed by organized crime, a concern which has led Mr. Pino Arlacchi, UN Under-Secretary General, to make this the lead issue at a special UN meeting to be held in 2000. The book is consistent with one of the dominant approaches in the existing literature on organized crime--an economic-political one--which views it as an entrepreneurial activity whose main goal is the pursuit of profit Organization of this activity results from the desire to be more efficient and make bigger profits. Organized crime is thus best understood in economic and political, not just legal terms. In this connection, the contributors to this volume discuss important aspects of organized crime and its globalization. Organized crime has become a \"worldwide phenomenon that has taken great advantage of enabling technology in banking, communication, and transportation to build what is probably the first true `virtual' corporation in the world\" and is now a threat to national and world security That is, it is a: system of transnational alliances with the potential to destabilize democratic values and institutions; distort regional, if not worldwide, economies; and subvert the inte","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"53 1","pages":"750"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70615676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poverty: A Denial of Human Rights","authors":"J. Speth","doi":"10.4324/9781315872599-36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315872599-36","url":null,"abstract":"Development cooperation is in crisis in the true medical sense: its condition will either improve towards recovery or slide into terminal disease. During 1996, official development assistance (ODA) from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) donor countries dropped in 11 of these 21 nations. In the aggregate, total ODA dropped to 0.25 percent of the total gross national product (GNP) of OECD nations, an all-time low and well below the 0.7 percent United Nations target. These telling numbers continue the pattern of recent years, and stand in sharp contradiction to the goals expressed by OECD members, the world's most industrialized nations. Increasing amounts of declining ODA funds are now being channeled to emergency relief. The short-term necessities brought about by increasingly numerous civil conflicts and the growing toll of environmental disasters threaten continued attention to long-term development needs. In a world where absolute numbers of people living in poverty are growing, where vast wealth coexists with the most desperate forms of destitution, development cooperation is more necessary now than ever before. But forms of development cooperation must evolve with today's rapidly changing societies. An end to poverty remains the ultimate goal, and the development community continues to look for entry points to poverty eradication that will most likely bring success. One such new entry point to poverty eradication is the human rights approach to poverty This essay will assert that this approach must be explored in our search for the continued relevance of development cooperation. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has made poverty eradication its overarching priority for many years. In fact, last year's UNDP Human Development Report(1) focused on poverty, introducing the concept of human poverty The World Bank has also increased its efforts to end poverty and will focus on poverty in its World Development Report for the year 2000. Along these lines, the importance of poverty eradication as a dominant theme of development cooperation is shared by a broad range of multilateral development institutions and bilateral donors. In March 1998, the Administrative Committee on Coordination, comprised of the executive heads of all UN agencies, including the Bretton Woods institutions, met to discuss a common approach to poverty eradication. There have been gains in the global effort to end poverty The proportion of people living below national poverty lines has fallen. For example, in China, and in 14 other countries with populations that add up to 1.6 billion, the share of the population living below the national poverty line has been halved in less than 20 years. In the same time period, ten more countries, accounting for almost another billion people, have reduced the proportion of their population living below the poverty line by one-quarter or more.(2) Since 1960, in little more than a generation, the rate of ","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"52 1","pages":"277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1998-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70458135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Appraising the U.N. at 50: The Looming Challenge","authors":"R. Falk","doi":"10.4324/9781315235349-12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315235349-12","url":null,"abstract":"IS THE U.N. FAIILING? In the spring of 1994, The Economist had on its cover a ghastly scene: a landscape of utter desolation, the sky and earth blood red, corpses littering the ground with a flagpole in their midst, its U.N. flag flying at half-mast and a large caption entitling the cover story, \"SHAMED ME ME PEACEKEEPERS.\"(1) Such an iconography of failure is sadly expressive of public disappointment with the United Nations' role in world affairs in light of its inability to avert tragedy in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Such an assessment does not provide a promising background for this year's observance of the 50th anniversary of the U.N.'s founding, which, if nothing else, is certain to generate a multitude of discussions on the past, present and future of the Organization. My aim in this article will be to account for this current attitude of disappointment and to interpret expectations of the United Nations within the larger setting of global restructuring, especially the displacement and realignment of the sovereign state. It should be noted by way of introduction that it is the peace and security agenda that serves as the prism through which the U.N. is judged by the media and the public. This is understandable, yet misleading. It is misleading because, even considered mechanically as an aggregate of its multifold distinct activities, actors and arenas, the U.N. consists of such diverse main organs as the Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council and the Secretariat, as well as a long list of specialized agencies, among the most important of which are the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Also formally part of the U.N. family, although fully autonomous in operation, are the international financial institutions, which include the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.(2) The U.N.'s range of activities thus encompasses virtually the whole gamut of human concerns. Its many constructive achievements over the years must be balanced against a plethora of shortcomings, making it complicated to evaluate any particular aspect of U.N. work. At the same time, the tendency to conflate the U.N. in such a way that only the peace and security agenda is sharply profiled is understandable. The main goals of the Organization have always been related to the avoidance of war and the protection of weak states against aggression. That is why the U.N. response to the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait in 1990 seemed such a decisive test of the capacity of the Organization to act in the post-Cold War world, giving then-President George Bush's mobilizing call for \"a new world order\" ","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"48 1","pages":"625"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1995-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70638347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Regionalism and the Quest for Security: ASEAN and the Cambodian Conflict","authors":"Muthiah Alagappa","doi":"10.1080/10357719308445107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10357719308445107","url":null,"abstract":"The reordering of the international system in the absence of a hegemonic war has revitalized the debate on the nature of international politics, and the continued relevance of the realist paradigm.(2) Critics of the realist paradigm contend that as survival has ceased to be a problem for more developed states, they no longer search consistently for relative gains. Their behavior now can only be understood in the context of international institutions that both constrain states and make their actions intelligible to others.(3) Indeed, some argue that multilateral norms and institutions have made significant contributions toward stabilizing the peaceful transformation of the international system, and that they are likely to become increasingly important in the management of change at the regional and global levels.(4) Multilateralism may or may not supplant the self-help approach and become the dominant mode of interaction among states; there is little doubt, however, that its relevance will further increase, as indicated by the important role of international organizations in post-cold War era conflict resolution.(5) This article will examine the effectiveness and limitations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in coping with the Cambodian conflict.(6) An international accord ending the 13-year-old conflict was signed at a U.N.-sponsored peace conference in Paris in October 1991. Although involving states external to the Association, the conflict threatened the security of at least one ASEAN member and also affected the security of the Southeast Asian region as a whole. As ASEAN has frequently been cited as one of the more successful Third World regional organizations, an investigation of its role and effectiveness in the Cambodian conflict should provide valuable insight into the security roles of regional organizations in general. Current interest in security regionalism may be traced to two major developments. First, the lifting of the Cold War overlay has removed the integrating dynamic and increased the discontinuity between the global system and regional subsystems. Combined with increasing resource constraints, the major powers may no longer have the interest or the capability to become involved in regional conflicts as in the past. While conflicts like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait may evoke prompt and substantive response, others less consequential to their interests may not. This could shift the burden of addressing regional problems to local states; but it also presents them with the opportunity to gain greater control over their regional environment. Second, the end of the Cold War has invigorated the U.N. Security Council's role of maintaining international peace and security, which could also strengthen the security function of regional organizations. In a report prepared on the instruction of the Security Council summit meeting, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated: ... In this new era of opportunity, regio","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"46 1","pages":"439"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1993-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10357719308445107","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60102246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Political Transition and the Dilemma of Civil Society in Africa","authors":"P. Lewis","doi":"10.4324/9780429502538-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429502538-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of international affairs","volume":"46 1","pages":"137-158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1992-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70618380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}