Human Rights
Review: ‘The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon’

Review: ‘The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon’

“Many will take offense to this book — on both the defense side and the humanitarian side,” write Mary Kaldor and Shannon D. Beebe in the concluding paragraphs of their latest book The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon. Indeed, throughout their book Kaldor and Beebe try to find a common ground between what are often thought of as innate opposites: the military and civilian agencies. Their book is an attempt to provide a viable human security alternative to the conventional military responses to warfare.

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Postcard From…Tolemaida

Postcard From…Tolemaida

On August 3 and 4, eight U.S. human-rights activists demonstrated at the Tolemaida military base in Colombia. They were denouncing the U.S.-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) signed last October, through which the United States plans to lease seven Colombian military bases for 10 years, including the one at Tolemaida.

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Wrestling with the Khmer Rouge Legacy

Wrestling with the Khmer Rouge Legacy

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal delivered its first verdict in July against Kaing Guek Euv, alias “Duch,” the director of the notorious S-21 prison, a torture and extermination center under the rule of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. After a 77-day trial, the five judges — two international and three Cambodian — unanimously convicted Duch of committing crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

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What You Will Not Hear About Iraq

Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.

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Beating Swords Into Ploughshares

In last month’s blitzkrieg tour of Central and Southeast Asia, two of the four stops Secretary Clinton made share the unfortunate bond of enduring an invasion by U.S. air and ground forces. In the space of a few days, Clinton visited both Vietnam and Afghanistan, thus physically linking what had once been, and then what has now become the United States’ longest war. One of the more insidious links that tie these conflicts together was highlighted in a few of the news stories about Clinton’s trip. That link, in a word, is agribusiness.

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The Gambia: A Dictator’s Anti-Media War

Since the 1994 coup d’état that saw President Yahya Jammeh rise to power, the Gambian media has been forced to work under repressive and restrictive conditions. The disappearance of editors and journalists, destruction of property and threat of imprisonment and harm by Jammeh’s National Intelligence Agency officers mean Gambian media outlets must either praise the ruling party or close their doors. Alagi Yorro Jallow, once an editor of a now closed private Gambian publication, discusses the Gambian government crackdown on the media and regulations under which a Gambian journalist must work.

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