I am looking up at the underside of a Greek chair. Interlocking fibres that form the seat are held in place by three strong cords running from front to back; there are wire supports diagonally linking the chair legs, and the lower front strut now almost touches my forehead. My head and shoulders are on the floor, and the rest of my body is curved up and back over my head so that my feet can rest on the chair seat. This is what I know as hellasana (more accurately, halasana), a shoulder-stand modified to work with props to support different shapes and states of body. But it could be worse. Iyengar yoga, unlike more energetic forms like ashtanga yoga, uses blocks and straps and mats rolled up so that anyone can adopt versions of the ‘asanas’, poses in which we stretch muscles we never knew we had before. And, here in north-west Crete, we have found extraordinary new uses for chairs; we sit sideways, pulling ourselves against the backs, lean back and grasp the sides of the seats, and we even rest upside down with our legs stretched up and heads hanging between two Greek chairs.

Yoga would seem at first glance to be one of the quintessentially spiritual-therapeutic components of New Age subcultures, promising inner growth in the context of meditative postures and a harmonic relation with one's newly discovered self.

Millions of people felt themselves being swept along by a tide of emotion following Diana's death – as if this were a collective process of shock, grief and mourning as much as an individual response, and as if those intertwined individual and collective feelings were always there, waiting to be released at a moment like this. They were not. But we live in a culture which is psychologically structured so that events of this kind evoke certain kinds of feelings about who we are and what our relationship with others is like, and then we feel them with such intensity that we imagine that they must be very deep, and necessarily true.

Rather than reveal some deep underlying psychological nature, however, they express the ways in which we have come to function as psychological beings – and, in particular, the way we absorb and display themes of unconscious emotions as subjects of a psychoanalytic culture. The week between the death and the funeral saw people represent themselves as psychoanalytic selves, and so it is worth reflecting on how this has been accomplished, so that we do not make the mistake of then reading these events as simply confirming psychoanalysis as universally true. We might then also understand better what is really going on.

One of the powerful psychoanalytic motifs of that fraught week was of a rising crescendo of feeling, and a sense that people were experiencing something overwhelming and barely comprehensible.

The word ‘ego’ has become part of everyday language to describe who we are. Sometimes the word evokes a little shiver of recognition, that it comes from the writings of Sigmund Freud, but often those hints at psychoanalysis – sexual repression, objects of desire, the unconscious, and so on – are wiped away so that the ‘ego’ can appear to us as something more innocent than it really is. When the word appeared in English as a psychoanalytic term (alongside the ‘superego’ and the ‘id’) it was actually designed by the translators of Freud to function as a more scientific designation of the everyday German terminology employed by Freud when he spoke of the ‘Ich’, which was our old friend, the ‘I’.

When psychoanalysts describe the bizarre ways that ‘I’ functions – piecing itself together out of images of significant others, splitting itself into bits that are held close or spat out, gluing the whole of our being to it and insisting that others are understood within its frame – it is actually more disturbing to keep in mind that this is what we build our everyday reality upon. This, already, is the stuff of fantasy, this ‘I’. The unconscious material that swells around its edges, and which we like to keep at a distance when we see it represented by those schooled in psychoanalytic theory, is already washing around inside our thoughts, colouring our perceptions of every object around us.

Purpose and Structure

The main aim of this study is to asses the challenges faced by the United Nations in its involvement in countries targeted by foreign military interventions that have not been authorized by the Security Council of the United Nations. The focus is on the United Nations' response to the outcome of the military interventions at two main levels. First, at the level of the Security Council and the decisions taken there on the nature and scope of the involvement of the United Nations in the post-intervention developments in the target state. Second, at the level of the target state, the focus is on the challenges that the United Nations may face in carrying out a given mission.

The structure of the study is as follows. First, the phenomenon of nonauthorized military intervention is defined and cases are selected. Second, the United Nations' responses to the selected cases are outlined. Third, the impact of the United Nations' response on its legitimacy is assessed.

Defining Non-Authorized Military Intervention and Selecting Cases

Non-authorized military interventions

The definition of a non-authorized military intervention to be used in the context of this study is the use of force by one or more states against the territorial integrity of a state against the will of that state, without prior authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations.

The world is passing through a phase of rapidly changing demographic conditions, predominantly, developing countries like India. The resulting slowdown in the growth of the number of children per couple along with the steady increase in the number of elderly persons per household has a direct bearing on both intergenerational and intra-generational equity and solidarity, which constitutes the basic foundation of human society. Population ageing results mainly from reduction of fertility, a phenomenon that has become virtually universal.

I congratulate the editors, Anthem South Asian Studies, New Delhi, for having brought out this timely publication, ‘Institutional Provisions and Care for the Aged’. This book provides interesting insights into the health care arrangements for the elderly, a topic of increasing importance globally, and it should attract the attention of all interested in the health care of the aged.

Population projections made in the book indicate that the number of the elderly would increase from the current level of 90 million to 298 million in 2051 and to 504 million in 2101. The growth rate of the elderly is much higher than the growth of the general population.

Recognizing the health care needs of the elderly, the Ministry of Health, Government of India, has decided to devote large sums of money to provide holistic care through the establishment of the National Institute of Aging.

Although in common parlance victims of forced displacement are often clubbed together as a single and monolithic category, there are significant variations in the nature and extent of victimhood suffered by them. Thus, the victims of development induced displacement constitute a category separate in many ways from those who have been displaced as a result of say, interethnic conflicts and violence. The first category of victims may have lost their homes or cultivable lands but may continue to subscribe to the same development paradigm and view displacement as one of its necessary costs that one should bear albeit with great pain, in the collective interest of the nation. The same person on the other hand, may look upon ethnic violence as simply macabre and senseless and hence detrimental to the nation and its development. It could as well be the other way round. One who finds ethnic violence as an inevitable and unavoidable means of asserting one's identity is unlikely to discover any virtue in the development of the nation as a vibrant, multicultural entity. The graded nature of victimhood therefore should not escape our notice.

COMMUNICATING RIGHTS CLAIMS

Accordingly, their rights can hardly be of one and the same type. One wonders whether it will ever be possible for us to evolve an agenda of rights common to all of them.

Introduction

Foreign direct investment has been studied for its impacts on development and its impacts on environment, but rarely for both at the same time. Despite an occasional nod to the environment, development scholarship as a whole tends to focus on economic goals—growth, industry upgrading or poverty alleviation. Environmental analysts, on the other hand, often take the economic benefits (or costs) of foreign direct investment (FDI) as a given and seek to uncover evidence of negative or positive externalities for the natural environment.

Using a case study methodology, this paper examines the impacts of FDI on sustainable industrial development—an integrated concept combining economic, environmental and social outcomes. We define sustainable industrial development as evolution along a three-dimensional path delineated by: (1) upgrading of the productive capacities of domestic firms; (2) employment creation, and (3) reduction of the ecological and health impacts of industrial growth and transformation.

For FDI to promote sustainable industrial development, transnational corporations (TNCs) must be linked to local firms, workers and consumers. In particular, they must generate—and host—country firms must absorb-two kinds of knowledge spillovers: technology and skills relevant to domestic industry upgrading and technology and management practices that reduce the ecological footprint of industry. A widespread and dynamic process of industry upgrading, in turn, generates high employment. Without spillovers, especially to local small- and medium-size firms (SMEs), the benefits of FDI tend to be narrowly concentrated in a few, usually urban, enclaves.

Purpose and Structure

The United Nations Security Council has become dramatically more active since the end of the Cold War. This is evident in terms of the number of resolutions adopted, particularly the number of resolutions adopted under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, as well as in the number of peacekeeping missions and mandatory sanctions regimes. The main aim of this study is to assess if this increased activity of the Security Council in the post-Cold War Era has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the effectiveness of the Council. This is done by analyzing the pattern of Security Council reactions to the use of force in inter-state relations. The prohibition of the use of force, other than in self-defence, is one of the most fundamental rules that the Council is assigned the responsibility to uphold. We assess the Security Council's reactions to the use of force in inter-state relations through its pattern of reactions to foreign military interventions.

The structure of the study is as follows. First, the regulation of the use force in the Charter of the United Nations is described, and the main arguments of the international legal debate regarding these regulations are outlined. Second, the activities of the Security Council in the post-Cold War Era are presented. Third, the pattern of Security Council reactions to foreign military interventions is outlined. Fourth, the trends in Security Council behaviour are assessed.

21 Feb 2002

Dearest Aditi

How are you doing, hope things are fine there. You know, I really wished to deliver you better news than what I am writing here. I am sorry for not being able to write earlier, cos I was busy registering for the coming semester at the University. I am sure that you heard about the situation here, tension is increasing, and Sharon (the cow) is increasing things. The rise of the terrible and horrible situation meant to scare the Palestinians and to make them go back. 33 martyrs in 24 hours is a disaster, a catastrophe. Nothing would make them differentiate between a woman, a child, an old man, or anything else. You can say that the people here are full of fear, but they deeply believe that they have no other choice.

BACKGROUND

It is a well-known fact that in 1949, as soon as Communist China came into existence, it declared its policy to liberate Tibet and to do so the Chinese army marched into Tibet and defeated the small and ill equipped Tibetan army in 1950. As a result, the nationwide resistance by Tibetans culminated in the Tibetan National Uprising in Lhasa on 10 March 1959, demanding total withdrawal of China from Tibet.

The Tibetan National Uprising of 1959 made the Chinese furious and it sent its army once again into Tibet. This time, the Chinese army crushed the uprising with ruthlessness. About 87,000 Tibetans were killed in the Lhasa region alone, monks and the nuns were prime targets. As a result, on 17 March 1959, His Holiness the Dalai Lama along with his 13,000 followers escaped f-rom Lhasa and sought political asylum in India. On 31 March 1959, he arrived at Chuthangmo, an Indian checkpost in the border and from there he went to Tezpur.

The Indian Prime Minister Nehru strongly supported the Tibetan cause on humanitarian grounds. […] In this complicated situation, most of the political leaders from almost all parties, reacted sharply and asked Government of India to extend its helping hand towards Tibetans. As a result, the Government of India allowed another batch of mass exodus of Tibetan refugees, especially women and Children at Bombdilla on 20 May 1959. […] In the next few months, another batch of about 80,000 Tibetan refugees took shelter in India and its neighbouring countries, Bhutan and Nepal.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan drew attention to ‘the growing problem of internally displaced persons’ (IDPs) in his 2005 report on UN reform, In Larger Freedom. Unlike refugees, IDPs do not cross international borders and thus have no well established system of international assistance or protection. IDPs, Annan wrote, ‘often fall into the cracks between different humanitarian bodies’. Despite this acknowledgement of the predicament of IDPs, nowhere in the 2005 UN World Summit document, adopted by heads of government in September, does it spell out how to improve the UN's ability to address the plight of the 20 to 25 million people uprooted within their own countries by violence, ethnic strife and civil war. UN reform must encourage greater national and international involvement with IDPs by promoting the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, giving the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) a broader role with IDPs, and strengthening institutional and military arrangements to defend the physical safety of IDPs.

The millions of people caught in the midst of violent conflict without the basic necessities of life present a political and strategic concern, not to mention a profound humanitarian and human rights problem, requiring international action. Conflict and massive displacement can disrupt stability, turn countries into breeding grounds for lawlessness and terrorism, and undermine regional and international security. […] Unless addressed, situations of displacement can create political and economic turmoil in entire regions.

Bhutan became a party to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) on 31 August 1981. But the situation of Bhutanese refugee women is appalling. Among the 100,000 Bhutanese refugees, around 50 per cent of the population in the refugee camps are women, most of these women are illiterate and they participate less in social activities. In the cultural sphere, the southern Bhutanese women had to bear the brunt of the government's cultural policy. The Bhutanese government forgetting its responsibility towards improving the status of women has deliberately attacked them in this campaign of ethnic cleansing. […] Southern Bhutanese women were deprived of their right to wear their dress; their ceremonial marriage necklaces were stripped off; they were made to cut their hair short. Instead, they were forced to adopt the dress and culture of the northern Bhutanese.

The women have always been the worst hit by government repression. In most cases, their husbands were imprisoned or had to flee the country for fear of persecution. The security forces plundered their homes, tortured, intimidated and raped these helpless women. There are 156 rape victims in Bhutanese refugee camps as per the records of CVICT Nepal. According to Shangri-La Without Human Rights eight women were raped to death. The following testimonies exemplify the extent to which women's rights have been violated by the Bhutanese government.

You are both a Zionist and a supporter of the Palestinians, who has branded Israel's military action in the occupied territories as ‘state terrorism’. How do you explain this dichotomy?

There is no contradiction in being a Zionist and recognizing the national rights of the Palestinians. In common perception, Zionism is synonymous with Palestinian dispossession and colonization. For me, Zionism is completely different – meaning living in a Jewish community, speaking in Hebrew, celebrating Jewish culture and holidays without fear that I shall be persecuted for my Jewishness. But it also does not mean the repression of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, since my arrival in Israel I started to struggle against discrimination of the Palestinians Arabs in Israel and against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip – the Palestinian territories. Two years after my arrival in Israel I founded a students' movement called ‘Campus’, which had both Jewish and Arab students. Some of the Arabs of that movement are today members of Knesset and gained their political experience in that movement. As a Zionist, for me it was clear that if I was against the discrimination of Jews in the Diaspora I must be against the discrimination of the Arabs.

REFUGEES

The term ‘refugee’ is a term of art, i. e. a term with a content, verifiable according to principles of general international law. In ordinary usage, it has a broader, looser meaning, signifying someone in flight, who seeks to escape conditions or personal circumstances found to be intolerable. The destination is not relevant; the flight is to freedom, to safety. Likewise, the reasons for flight may be many – flight from oppression, from a threat to life or liberty, flight from prosecution; flight from deprivation, from grinding poverty; flight from war or civil strife; flight from natural disasters – earthquakes, flood, drought and famine. Implicit in the ordinary meaning of the word ‘refugee’ lies an assumption that the person concerned is worthy of being, and ought to be, assisted, and, if necessary, protected from the causes and consequences of flight. The ‘fugitive’ from justice, the person fleeing criminal prosecution for breach of the law in its ordinary and non-political aspect, is therefore often exempted from this category of refugees.

For the purposes of international law, states have further limited the concept of the refugee. For example, ‘economic refugees’ – the term is generally disfavoured – are not included. The solution to their problem, perhaps, lies more within the province of international aid and development, rather than in the institution of asylum, considered as protection of whatever duration on the territory of another state.

Introduction

In India, several mechanisms exist to provide economic and social safety nets to the economically and socially vulnerable groups. In broad terms, they are achieved through a formal or informal social security system that ensures equitable justice in society (Heller, 2003). This notion of the safety net enabled all societies to go in for the social security system. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has defined social security as ‘the protection which society provides for its members, through a series of public measures, against economic and social distress otherwise caused by the stoppage or substantial reduction of earnings resulting from sickness, maternity, employment injury, unemployment, invalidity, old age and death’ (ILO, 1942). Sir William Beveridge, father of the British social security system, defined it as, ‘security of an income to take the place of earning when they are interrupted by unemployment, sickness, or accident; to provide retirement benefits, to provide against loss of support by the death of the other person and to meet exceptional expenditure such as those connected with birth, death and marriage’ (Beveridge, 1943). According to Pierre Laroque, former president of the National Social Security Fund in France, social security represents ‘a guarantee by the whole community to all its members of the maintenance of their standard of living or at least tolerant living conditions by means of a redistribution of income based on national solidarity’ (Laroque, 1969). Leal de Araujo has viewed social security systems as ‘supplementary machineries or economic agents for redistribution of income’ (de Araujo, 1972).

The reason why we should pay attention to the issues of power, fear and ethics in studies of ‘humanitarian politics’ – a name under which a significant chunk of the international politics of war and peace goes on is because without examination of these we cannot lodge human rights and humanitarianism at the heart of a politics of justice. I wish to inquire into the entire problematic in terms of a look into the management of refugee care. In the process, I also wish to continue my inquiry into the nature of constitutionalism and legalism of the existing kind that limits our capacity to resolve conflicts and generate an ethic of care, kindness, hospitality and responsibility.

The new mix of forced and illegal population flows and the inadequate appreciation of the new phenomenon in refugee studies raises the problem of method from several angles. It is important to note the following in this context. First, studies of forced population movements have been hitherto pursued from economic and demographic angles. The link between state formation (particularly postcolonial) and population flow cannot be seen through rose-tinted glasses. Second, the notion of forced is so narrowly defined, that the structural violence permeating these societies escapes our attention, though violence and coercion are considered as benchmarks in determination of refugees.

Introduction

After a long history of dependence on a few traditional exports, followed by import substitution in the 1960s and 1970s, and a debt crisis in the early 1980s, Costa Rica launched an aggressive attempt at diversifying production and exports in 1985. The new approach to development consisted of two main elements: pursuit of free trade agreements and the attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI). Costa Rica has been remarkably successful in attracting FDI. It is the only country in Latin America where most FDI has gone to manufacturing over the last decade, and it stands out even further for its ability to attract FDI in high-tech sectors.

In this article we analyze why Costa Rica was an attractive destination for transnational corporations (MNCs), and the impact FDI has had on economic development in the country. We show that FDI in the Free Zones has had a beneficial impact primarily at the macroeconomic level, through employment and trade balance effects. At the microeconomic level, however, the impact has been rather limited as backward linkages and technological spillovers are small in both absolute and relative terms.

The limited extent of backward linkages from FDI is due to the limited potential for spillovers for part of the foreign investment as well as to the limited domestic absorptive capacity for linkages. Ultimately, we argue, the lack of a coherent long-term development strategy has hindered the ability of the country to take more advantage of high-tech FDI.