By Rozina Kanchwala. Two factors at play require us to pay serious attention to the issue of food security: •    A growing population and its growing food demand •    Increasing uncertainty of environmental changes Both of these factors can be addressed by organic agriculture. This is the way forward, not large-scale modern agriculture that currently…Read More…

Politics can have serious consequences for health. We need look no further than the US legislature for examples of the politics of health. The recent deeply partisan budget cuts threatened women’s health across the country and debates over the Health Care Bill easily demonstrates a democracy’s inability to provide basic health for everyone in its…Read More…

Assigning gender identities to perpetrators of wartime sexual violence is a problematic affair. The evolution of modern warfare has ensured that the attributes that have traditionally distinguished men and women are becoming increasingly blurred. Gender can be described as a social construct that is influenced by a variety of different factors; political and economic in/stability,…Read More…

As one of the most-at-risk populations, female sex workers (FSWs) have long been a target of public health interventions aimed at reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS.  Historically, research has been focused on FSWs themselves, with hardly any attention directed toward the vulnerabilities placed on the children of FSWs.  In an article published in the July…Read More…

It doesn’t take an economist to notice that there are key fundamental differences between the economies of developed and developing nations.  Obvious key differences tend to be things like strength of currency, inflation, GDP per capita, etc.  However, a new study which David Leonhardt of the New York Times (article can be viewed here) picked…Read More…

Well a mosque is different from those other two houses of worship in some very important ways, but most obviously, they are different because each structure is designed and built for the purposes of practicing a particular faith. A church, Christianity; a synagogue, Judaism; a mosque, Islam. In the United States, we have all three…Read More…

Something interesting I found on the IPS website today: The United States and South Africa Share Great Challenges July 14, 2010 · By Dedrick Muhammad and Christopher Towne Originally published in The Huffington Post Both the United States and South Africa, despite black leadership and multicultural societies, still labor under the legacy of segregation and…Read More…

In the early 1990s, George Bush was trying to master a plan to create a free, three-way trade agreement with Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The plans were initially secret but in 1992 when President Bush, Prime Minister Mulroney, and Carlos Salinas signed this two-thousand page agreement, the public was let in on the…Read More…

An incident this weekend (which I may or may not go into in a future post) got me thinking about multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Cultural relativism and multiculturalism are too often used as synonyms, when, really, they are two different (if not mutually exclusive) concepts. In the modern state system, multiculturalism is the tolerance of…Read More…