Online Journal Articles

The issue of the delivery of urban water and sanitation services in African countries is one of the continent’s greatest development challenges. The purpose of this essay, focusing on Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is to critically analyze the nature and implications of that city’s recent growth spurt on the ability of local government to meet the basic needs of all its citizens, particularly needs for water and sanitation services. The essay finds that while financing water and sanitation services is a major problem, problems of infrastructure and management are of equal if not more importance. In the short-term, this will continue to be a problem as the rate of informal urbanization proceeds at the same pace as official planning. This represents a classical principal–agent problem. Planners and managers might devise well-thought-out and logical plans for the development of both a market-based urban economy and infrastructural capacity, but the realities of population growth and new, unplanned settlement thwart their best efforts.

The concept of sustainability is catching on in the developed world, but how does it fare in the developing world? What does sustainability look like for emerging economies? Does it make sense for nations struggling to modernize and feed their own people? In countries where development requires resources, how can a philosophy marked by minimalism be justified? This paper analyzes these questions through the lens of Niger, a landlocked country in West Africa. It examines the causes of perpetual impoverishment, including the tragedy of the commons, overpopulation and the culture of dependency borne out of the present international aid paradigm. This paper argues that a sustainability framework, defined as a consideration of the future in present decision making, is an essential planning tool for developing countries. Such a tool, however, only reaps enduring solutions when there is effective agreement between each dimension of society: social, environmental, and political. Specific examples of solutions that simultaneously address these dimensions are addressed.

Military means are at the center of current counterterrorism efforts. This article argues that the focus on military means is a mistaken one. Military interventions as well as presence in occupied countries rather contribute to an increase in terrorism. On the other hand, economic causes of terrorism remain under-addressed. A more effective counterterrorism policy would include increased financial and economic foreign aid.

At the 2005 UN World Summit, the largest gathering of heads of state in history made a landmark commitment to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and pledged to intervene when a given state manifestly failed to protect its population from mass atrocity or was the actual perpetrator of these crimes. It is unequivocal that the DPRK has violated this international norm known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). With hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees outside of the country, evidence of crimes against humanity and genocide taking place in North Korea is overwhelming. The DPRK is actively targeting for destruction every group which is protected under the UN Genocide Convention through its policy of killing the half-Chinese children of North Korean women forcibly repatriated by China (genocide on national, ethnical, and racial grounds) and through its systematic annihilation of its indigenous religious population and their families (genocide on religious grounds). The North Korean state is perpetrating crimes against humanity as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court through its treatment of political prisoners and its exploitative and discriminatory food policy which has been the primary cause of millions of deaths.