Suchergebnisse

Marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Club of Rome as a formal organization by reviewing its contributions to solving the global problems of population growth, resource depletion, & pollution. The role of Italian industrial manager Aurelio Peccei, together with former British chief science advisor, Alexander King, & Eduard Pestel, Minister of Science of Lower Saxony, in creating the club is discussed, documenting how they assembled 30 experts in sociology, economics, science, industry, & government planning, drawn from different countries with different political ideologies & economic systems, to address common problems. Their classic 1972 report "The Limits of Growth" is reviewed, along with subsequent publications, & the club's development of a computer model of world problems is described. K. Hyatt Stewart

Examines the role of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) regarding refugee protection on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of its operational inception. Although many take the statist view to assert that the UNHCR is dependent on states, two examples are offered from the early Cold War period & the post-Cold War period to demonstrate the UNHCR's relative independence from states. Focus then turns to the UNHCR's role in the decline in international refugee protection. To arrest this decline, it is argued that the UNHCR must raise its protection profile, & some suggestions are offered on how the agency might accomplish this. It is contended that the UNHCR has a key role in convincing states that it is in their national interests to resolve refugee problems; the idea of human rights must be inserted into the contemporary refugee policy debate. J. Zendejas

"By contrast with the two preceding centuries, which were shaped by the impact of the French and Russian Revolution, the twentieth-first century has begun under the sign of the eclipse of utopias. The disappearance of a visible 'horizon of expectation' has generated a charged memory of the twentieth century as a time of violence, totalitarianisms and genocides, encapsulated by the image of their victims. Analyzing the commemorations of May 8, 1945 - the anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the Sétif massacre - we could distinguish three main spaces that define Europe's memories: a Western space shaped by the remembrance of the Holocaust; an Eastern space dominated by the legacy of Communism; and a postcolonial space exhuming the continent's imperial past. In spite of the conflicts that it entails, the conjunction of these different perspectives can prove fruitful both hermeneutically (as a tool for rethinking European history) and politically (as a means of reformulating an idea of citizenship that transcends national divisions)." (author's abstract)