Catherine Lutz, Matthew C. Gutmann, and Keith Brown
Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
Systematic patterns of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) have emerged around UN peacekeeping missions over the course of many years.1 Reports of abuse by peacekeepers in Cambodia and the Balkans in the 1990s were followed by news of similar problems in West African missions in 2001 and 2002. The Secretary General subsequently issued a 2003 Bulletin outlining a zero-tolerance policy, but the abuse continued. In 2004, peacekeeper misconduct became widely known through mainstream media reports that UN personnel in MONUC, the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, had been engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) of local women and children. The SEA included, most egregiously, peacekeepers' exchange of UN food supplies or money for sex with young girls and sometimes boys. SEA has been a particular problem in mission areas where extreme poverty and conflict or post-conflict trauma and social dislocation drive local people to sell their bodies, but it has occurred in more developed contexts as well, such as Cyprus and Kosovo. The UN response to these problems has been to establish, in 2005, a Conduct and Discipline Unit with offices in New York and mission areas, charged with addressing the problem in a variety of ways. SEA continues to occur since then, with serious incidents revealed in Sudan, Liberia, Haiti, Cote d'Ivoire, and again in the Congo.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Corruption, Crime, Gender Issues, Sex Trafficking, and Peacekeeping
Political Geography:
United States, New York, Sudan, Kosovo, Cambodia, Haiti, Liberia, West Africa, and Cyprus
This World Leaders Forum program features a keynote address by William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, followed by a question and answer session with the audience.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Global Recession, and Financial Crisis
His program, featuring Mayors Michael Bloomberg of New York and Boris Johnson of London, is the keystone of a three-day conference in New York planned as the kickoff for continuing discussion between these two great cities. During the conference and beyond, invited participants will focus on major issues facing New York and London: the future of their financial sectors, the diversification of their economies, building and maintaining their capital plants, and expanding housing affordability.
Topic:
Globalization, International Political Economy, and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
United States, New York, United Kingdom, Europe, and London
In Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military , Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, a visiting scholar at New York University's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, discusses a contested area in the lives of Palestinians in Israel: Arabs—albeit a minority—joining the Israeli military. Considering the preexisting rigid national/ ethnic conflict and contradictions between Palestinian and Jewish citizens within a state that defines itself as Jewish, the author skillfully asks why some Palestinian Arabs voluntarily join the Israeli military. Although the phenomenon of Arab soldiering in Israel represents only a minority of this group, it remains worth exploring and this is what Kanaaneh undertakes in this book.
The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes, by Avraham Burg. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. vii + 242 pages. Notes to p. 246. Index to p. 253. $26.95 hard; $16.00 paper. Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance, by Yaron Peleg. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 148 pages. Bibliography to p. 151. Index to p. 156. $60.00 hard. Simona Sharoni, associate professor of gender and women's studies and chair of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at the State University of New York, is the author of Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women's Resistance (Syracuse University Press, 1995)
Following the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, a mythology was instantly created around his person and legacy. Used extensively in the political campaign that became known as the “Cedar Revolution,” television programs, documentaries, and songs idolizing the ex-prime minister also started to fill the Lebanese airwaves and canonize Hariri as an unadulterated symbol of Lebanese nationalism, independence, and modernity. Nicholas Blanford's Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East , far from casting a critical eye on this mode of history-writing, reproduces elements of this mythology.
The principal and worthwhile contribution of this book is to resituate the debate about moral realism where it belongs, in terms of its pragmatic employment and its ability to accommodate ideals and values.
Hatoyama Yukio led the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to a landslide victory in the Aug. 30 Lower House election and was elected prime minister after a spirited campaign for change both in the form and substance of policymaking. Exit polls showed that the public had grown weary of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) but had not necessarily embraced the agenda of the coalition government Hatoyama would subsequently form with an eye toward consolidating power in an Upper House election next summer. Though the election centered primarily on domestic policy, Hatoyama began his tenure by outlining foreign policy priorities during visits to the UN in New York and the G20 summit in Pittsburgh less than a week after he took office.