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The International Committee of the Red Cross has witnessed in its work for war victims throughout the world the increasingly devastating effects for civilian populations of the proliferation of weapons, particularly small arms. The difficulties of providing humanitarian assistance in an environment where arms have become widely available to many segments of society are well known to most humanitarian relief agencies today. However, until recently the relationships between the availability of weapons, the worsening situation of civilians during and after conflict and the challenges of providing humanitarian assistance have not been addressed directly.

Metadata only record ; Asia, particularly South Asia, has the highest number of poor people in the world today. Many of these people are rural and depend on natural resources for their livelihoods and growth. If the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals are to be achieved in the region urgent action is needed on rural poverty. The critical linkages between natural resources, growth and poverty alleviation, and governance and democracy are becoming more evident every day. And these linkages and complementarities are providing a powerful framework with which to analyze and attack rural issues. ; Available in SANREM office, FS

How do countries settle disputes in the shadow of the law? Even in the presence of legalized dispute settlement, countries still rely on diplomatic channels to resolve conflicts. But it can be difficult to assess diplomacy's impact on dispute resolution because those channels tend to be opaque. We present both an original theory of the impact of diplomacy on dispute resolution and a novel measure of diplomacy. If countries with close or, conversely, distant relationships use legal channels for dispute resolution, diplomacy will have little impact on dispute settlement; resorting to legal recourse among friends or adversaries likely means that the dispute is intractable. However, diplomacy can increase the chances of settlement between countries with moderate levels of affinity. We test this argument using a protocol-based proxy for diplomatic interactions—gifts given at the occasion of meetings between diplomatic counterparts—that would otherwise be difficult to observe. Using the case of the United States and its disputes in the World Trade Organization, we find support for our argument. This suggests that even when countries resort to legalized methods of dispute settlement, bilateral dealmaking still plays an important role.

The WTO's strict treatment of domestic subsidies has not been well received in the existing literature. An essential reason is that the consequent restriction on domestic efficiency is hardly compatible with the existing theory of government intervention under which the primary objective of using domestic subsidies, domestic efficiency, is not sacrificed for another objective. We develop a trade-agreement model in which the magnitude of a legitimate domestic subsidy with which to address a production externality is private information. We find that an optimal agreement substantially restricts domestic efficiency for the international objective of expanding market access.