Harvard International Review articles from January 2007

Harvard International Review archives from January 2007

Plutonium problem.(CORRESPONDENCE)
January 1, 2007... In assessing Graham Allison's roadmap ("The Will to Prevent: Global Challenges of Nuclear Proliferation," Fall 2006) "to predict and prevent global (nuclear) catastrophe," let's first get down to basics. He tells us, "If terrorists acquired...

Oil honesty.(CORRESPONDENCE)(dependence on oil as a serious threat)
January 1, 2007... Matthew Simmons joins the crowd of oil doomsayers in his article "Shock to the System: The Impending Global Energy Supply Crisis (Fall 2006)." For these doomsayers to be right, we would have to run out of oil relatively soon, without anyone...

Playing marbles: the Gambia's electoral system.(AFRICA)
January 1, 2007... During the 2006 presidential elections held on, citizens of the Republic of The Gambia cast their votes by dropping a marble into a metal drum representing the candidate of their choice. Compared to ultramodern voting techniques involving text...

A new hope: Thailand's economic prospects.(ASIA PACIFIC)
January 1, 2007... Observers around the world looked on with alarm on September 19, 2006, when Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was deposed by the military in a bloodless coup led by General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the commander-in-chief of the armed...

Breaking barriers: fighting Chile's gender inequality.(AMERICAS)
January 1, 2007... Michelle Bachelet is spurring a cultural and political revolution in Chile. As the country's first female president, she has already fulfilled her campaign promise to create Chile's first gender-balanced cabinet and is currently drafting a...

Veil of isolation: Britain tackles the niqab debate.(EUROPE)
January 1, 2007... Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain have recently undergone severe strain because of a call to ban the public wearing of niqabs, or full-face veils. The niqab controversy, instigated by comments from British politicians,...

Think independent: Qatar's education reforms.(MIDDLE EAST)
January 1, 2007... In 1995, Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and his wife introduced an initiative to reform Qatar's higher education arts and sciences program by creating the Qatar Foundation. In stark contrast to other Arab nations, Qatar began a...

Casualty of war: health care in Palestine.(MIDDLE EAST)
January 1, 2007... The Israel-Palestine conflict has raged in the Middle East for many decades, but the effect of its violence is only one contributor to the low quality of life in the Palestinian territories. The poor state of health care in Palestine is a major...

Power and interdependence: uncertainties of Greek-Turkish rapprochement.(PERSPECTIVES)
January 1, 2007... Relations between the Greeks and the Turks often seem to be characterized by antagonism, suspicion, and historical enmity. The two neighboring states have frequently been at odds over the Aegean Sea and Cyprus, and the two peoples share a...

A responsibility to protect: the defining challenge for the global community.(PERSPECTIVES)
January 1, 2007... We live in an age that is dependent on a strong sense of global community. Despite this fact, many of our current problems trace back to how weak that unifying sense truly is. This theme is most tragic when it appears in the form of genocide,...

Underwriting Liberian rebirth: political reform and economic progress.(PERSPECTIVES)(Report)
January 1, 2007... The 3.5 million people of my small West African nation of Liberia ended a most auspicious year on November 8, 2006. That day marked the first anniversary of an historic vote by the people of a nation founded almost 160 years ago, when freed...

A new approach: engaging the Muslim world through public diplomacy.(WORLD IN REVIEW)
January 1, 2007... One does not have to be a pollster or a political scientist to recognize that the current public impression of the United States in the Muslim world is dismal and unlikely to improve substantially without a drastic change in the political...

At a loss: the exodus from Eastern Europe.(WORLD IN REVIEW)(Report)
January 1, 2007... If there is one enduring image from the contentious spring 2005 debate over the ratification of the European Constitution, it is that of the "Polish plumber." Indicating a seemingly universal fear of this phantom, both the fiery...

Innovative age: technology for education in the developing world.(WORLD IN REVIEW)
January 1, 2007... With technology's growth over the last few decades, one obvious application of these advances has been in education. Software, television, teleconferencing, computers, and the Internet have been adapted to aid teaching throughout the world. The...

Toward coexistence: making sense of ethnic conflict.(reversing the trend: ETHNIC CONFLICT)(Cover story)
January 1, 2007... In many respects, the 1990s was the decade of ethnic conflict. Following the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the world witnessed a rapid development of civil wars, secessionist movements, and genocidal conflicts that were all defined...

A security dilemma: ethnic partitioning in Iraq.(reversing the trend: ETHNIC CONFLICT)
January 1, 2007... Anyone following events in Iraq could be forgiven for thinking that we know relatively little about the dynamics of communal civil wars. In addition, anyone who remembers Bosnia and the rest of the "ugly nineties" has observed that the list of...

Constitutional design: promoting multi-ethnic democracy.(reversing the trend: ETHNIC CONFLICT)
January 1, 2007... The crafting of democracy in a fragile and divided state, often ripped apart by internal conflict or buffeted by international and regional storms, is one of the most difficult and important tasks that international politicians face. The...

Ethnic civil wars: securing the post-conflict peace.(reversing the trend: ETHNIC CONFLICT)
January 1, 2007... Present discourse on ethnic conflict is grounded in common sense and advocacy that together form a received wisdom with which everybody is familiar. The task of analytic and quantitative research is to bring us beyond this received wisdom: to...

Exploiting ethnicity: political elites and domestic conflict.(reversing the trend: ETHNIC CONFLICT)
January 1, 2007... Self-serving, perceptive elites tend to exploit ethnic conflict for their own personal benefit. In times of political and social upheaval, when insecurity prevails, ethnic leaders take advantage of uncertainty to consolidate their power and...

Scots to Chechens: how "ethnic" is ethnic conflict?(reversing the trend: ETHNIC CONFLICT)
January 1, 2007... Every autumn in local parks throughout the United States, thousands of Scots come together to have an ethnic conflict. Kilted chieftains from all the major clans--the MacGregors and Campbells, the McDonalds and Wallaces--march along with tartan...

The truth about empire: how empire benefits world order in the 21st century.(AN INTERVIEW WITH NIALL FERGUSON)(Interview)
January 1, 2007... NIALL FERGUSON is Professor of History at Harvard University and Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has written Empire (2003) and Colossus (2004) on the British and American empires, respectively. ...

Practical lessons; Thomson Fontaine reviews the Practice of Economic Management: A Caribbean Perspective.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... In this compelling selection of 22 essays, Dr. Courtney Blackman, the founding governor of the Central Bank of Barbados, lays out a clear and concise description of economic issues affecting the Caribbean within a broader political context. The...

Beyond nationalities: Rachel E. Chung reviews Multiculturalism in Asia.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... What makes multiculturalism in contemporary Asia so intricate and different from the Western model? And how might Asian engagements with multiculturalism help inform and expand concepts of multiculturalism itself? Multiculturalism in Asia,...

Molding the middle class: Kenya's path to greater economic growth.(ENDPAPER)
January 1, 2007... An announcement by Kenya's Central Bank indicating that the country had experienced 5.8 percent economic growth in 2006 was dismissed by the media and the government opposition as political propaganda. Under former President Daniel Arap Moi's...