IR Misc

Kevin Bales, a slavery activist and co-founder of Free the Slaves, is concerned by the potential impact that mislabelling paid workers as slaves could have on global anti-slavery efforts.

“What we are seeing in Bangladesh and elsewhere is the result of a continuum of exploitation, ranging from breach of labour standards such as unpaid overtime and non-payment of minimum wages, through to unsafe and abusive working conditions to – at the very bottom of the scale – forced labour and slavery,” he says.

“We have to come to the point where all forms of labour abuses and exploitation are considered unacceptable, but pushing a whole labour force into the ‘slavery’ box isn’t going to help. At worst, it’s going to undermine the efforts to reform labour standards and also dilute the reality of life as a person trapped in the worst forms of modern-day slavery, where you have no option, no chance of walking away.”

Kenneth Waltz died yesterday.

Eleni Gabre-Madhin is a woman with a dream. The charismatic Ethiopian economist wants to end hunger in her famine-plagued country. But rather than relying on foreign aid or new agricultural technology, she has a truly radical plan. She has designed the nation’s first commodities exchange, which she hopes will revolutionize an ancient market system whose inefficiencies have been partly responsible for the country’s persistent food shortages.

In April 2008 and after more than a decade of planning, the starting bell rang on the trading floor for the first time. Gabre-Madhin has been running frantically ever since. She attempts to maintain the machinery that keeps her country fed while facing powerful special interests, antiquated farming practices, poor infrastructure, and an unpredictable climate. Not to mention a global economic crisis.

See also:

• Eleni bets future beyond Ethiopian commodities exchange
• How Africa’s first commodity exchange revolutionised Ethiopia’s economy
• The dangerous hype behind Ethiopian Commodity Exchange

This is the Catholic peace movement in which I was raised.

Our tax dollars at “work.”

At the very beginning of the twenty-first century, two concerns ranked high on the military-political agenda of the Western world: humanitarian intervention and terrorism. This is an essay on the ethical issues surrounding the former. The events of September 11, 2001, have understandably increased the concern with terrorism and pushed the problems of humanitarian intervention into the background. But the issue is unlikely to remain offstage for long, if only because the shadows cast by humanitarian disasters such as the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 will continue to darken the conscience of the international community—and there is every prospect that further such shadows will be cast in the future.

But the secret in Bosnia may have been that these dangerous traits in the psyche of the international community were not given full rein. The US population and Congress were very reluctant to become involved in Bosnia – they were still haunted by the humiliation of Black Hawk Down in Somalia, and even by ghosts of Vietnam. When they intervened, they did so tentatively. Their mission was humanitarian: to end a war. The Balkans were not considered an “existential threat”. So there was neither the will nor the mandate to force through a radical programme of “nation-building” in the face of local opposition.

See also this report from the National Security Archives