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11. South Africa: A Science Lesson

Author:
Melanie Smuts
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa—Xoliswa, 11 years old, was given a science assignment in class. The worksheet, written in English and handed to her on Monday, was due that Friday. The task was to build a model solar system using paper maché, newspaper, paint, wire, polystyrene, and balloons. Xoliswa's mother, who earns a precarious living through child-care and occasional laundry orders, speaks little English and could offer no assistance. Worse yet, Xoliswa had never heard of paper maché or polystyrene. She arrived with a small packet of water balloons at the Learning Center—an afterschool institution in the affordable housing apartment block where she lives—and wondered if the Center could help her complete the task at hand.
Political Geography:
Africa and South Africa

12. Palestine: Children Laboring

Author:
Matt Surrusco
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
ZBEIDAT, West Bank—The electricity in the village went out for the third time on a warm July night. But the young men, some in their teens, didn't want to stop playing cards. A few took out their mobile phones to project some light on the patio's low table outside Amjad's house, the regular hangout for a dozen or so of the young men of Zbeidat, a village of 1,870 in the northern West Bank. Three minutes later, the lights flicked back on, illuminating the cards strewn across the table, the young men's grinning faces, and a few additional patio areas outside other Zbeidat homes, where men were drinking tea or coffee and talking. On Amjad's patio, Hamza Zbeidat, a Palestinian from the village, and Christopher Whitman, a New Englander from the United States, were sitting with the guys, some teenagers in high school, others in their twenties and working or in universities.
Political Geography:
United States

13. Hunting Witches

Author:
Gary Foxcroft
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
LANCASTER, England—More than 400 years ago, King James of Scot-land amended Exodus 22.18to read: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
Political Geography:
England

14. Romania: Land for Sale

Author:
Maurizio Bongioanni
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
BUCHAREST, Romania—Mauro, 28, and Adrian, 27, are two brothers from the southern Italian region of Puglia, who were sent by their father to cultivate 750 acres of corn in southern Romania, not far from the Bulgarian border. Their plot is small by Romanian standards. The two brothers are considered tiny landowners. Country life is hard, they confess, and they live in an area where they often go without electricity for days. “Here, the goal is quantity, not quality,” one of them says. “For months we have had a single young worker—young because the older ones have a concept of working that is light years away from farming as we understand it. At the same time, we know many of our people who were cheated, who have had all their possessions stolen. Because here, Romanian workers see us as rich western entrepreneurs from whom they can steal as much as possible instead of seeing us as people who can employ them, and offer them a future. Even the [Romanian] state shares the same point of view. Sometimes we must give a gift to someone, paying for attention.”

15. Vietnam's Second Revolution

Author:
Elizabeth Pond
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
HANOI, Vietnam—The best way to feel the sheer energy of Vietnam's under-29 population is to ride pillion on Do Duyen's motorbike. Like most Hanoi drivers (except when they drink too much rice wine at Tet or at weddings), Duyen has a sixth sense of how others will react in the flood of motorbikes and intruding cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, and village peddlers balancing bamboo poles across their shoulders. Never mind that motorcyclists routinely make illegal turns at intersections by plunging left against traffic that is hurtling right. Everyone else simply swerves to accommodate this anomaly in his or her own way, and the collective streams of traffic glide on.
Political Geography:
Vietnam

16. Currency Wars

Author:
David A. Andelman
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
At noon on August 10, 1978, I arrived at the frontier between Austria and Czechoslovakia in my rickety old Opel sedan that was The New York Times bureau car. I'd driven up from Belgrade, where I was then based, covering an Eastern Europe thoroughly in the grip of communism. Now, when I arrived at the frontier, I steeled myself. I was about to pass through what Winston Churchill had 32 years earlier dubbed the Iron Curtain, separating East from West. These were difficult times. Communism and capitalism were very much at each others' throats, and there was no more extreme a contrast than in some of these heavily-fortified border points where the favored few could cross in both directions, provided they had all the right papers. Indeed, I had my American passport, my Czechoslovak visa, a fistful of dollars, my notebooks, and some background material, from which I had carefully expunged any Czech contacts and sliced off the letterhead of Radio Free Europe Research, the virulently anti-communist, American-backed propaganda source, that would likely have landed me in hot water with the ever-vigilant border police.
Political Geography:
New York and Europe

17. Change Management

Publication Date:
06-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
Pocket change-mountains of it can shape or re-shape society, politics, and most certainly the economy. The rise and fall of governments, democracies, and tyrannies are all too often at the mercy of the ebb and flow of plain, hard cash. Currencies today are very much the defining feature of nations, individually and collectively. A flailing and fragmented Europe seeks to hang together-retain its global reach-on the strength of a single currency that has taken on a life or neardeath of its own, its very existence becoming an end in itself. Across Africa and Asia, the Americas north and south, continents and peoples are all too often held hostage by forces unleashed in the name of money. It is this kaleidoscope of silver, gold, and paper, often in the magnitude of tsunamis, that we set out to explore in the Summer issue of World Policy Journal.
Political Geography:
Africa, America, Europe, and Asia

18. The Big Question: How much confidence do you have in your nation's banking system?

Author:
Ann Lee, Theodore Pelagidis, Leila Fourie, Fernando Marques, José Antonio Ocampo, Massimo Antonini, Prithvi Naik, and Neil Britto
Publication Date:
06-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
The global banking system is the fundamental conduit of value within nations and across borders. Since the last global financial crisis, however, the role of banks as a repository of value has come increasingly into question. Today, with a fragile recovery in so much of the world, banks and those who manage and regulate them are under attack. We asked our panel of global experts how this crisis of confidence is playing out in their nation or region.

19. Coins of the Realm

Author:
Shailendra Bhandare
Publication Date:
06-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
OXFORD, England—We live in a globalized world where financial developments in one region can have an impact on a vastly different and geographically disparate location. The forces joining them are those of money, wealth, and finance, which are deeply interlinked, or so we tend to think. But the world around us has always been globalized, albeit to different degrees and involving different shades of financial undercurrents. An interesting prism to see this continual globalization is through the role itinerant and global currencies and monetary unions have played.
Political Geography:
England

20. Sugar Daddies of Global Finance

Author:
Stanley Pignal
Publication Date:
06-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
LONDON—One of the cornerstones of Marxist-Leninist thinking is that the state should control the "commanding heights" of an economy—industry, agriculture, infrastructure, and, perhaps above all, money and banking. That vision has largely perished, with one gaping exception. Government remains omnipotent in the financial system, not only on Wall Street or Threadneedle Street, but far beyond. Across the world, the state weighs in on all sides of the ledger, insuring both a bank's assets (mortgages and loans) and its liabilities (deposits). State intervention in banking ranges from muscular day-to-day regulation through to crisis-time bailouts, and is an entirely accepted feature of the financial system. Financiers complain about excessive red tape, because that is what all businessmen do. But absent the state's involvement in their sector, it is a safe guess far fewer would still be gainfully employed following the carnage of 2008. Those who survived would likely find their ensuing careers to be nasty, brutish, short, and entirely devoid of outsized bonuses.
Political Geography:
London