Roger Corman (born 1926), who turned 81 in April 2007, has assured his place in the history books several times over. A fast and furious director, he established the new land-speed record for no-budget feature filmmaking across the 1950s, outdoing even himself with 1960's Little Shop of Horrors (shooting schedule: two days). Meanwhile, as producer of almost 400 exploitation movies since 1955, he remains the most successful independent filmmaker Hollywood has ever known.

If he'd done nothing but direct the startling X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) or his 1960s cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, films that found the perfect balance between doomy, haunted elegance and bright, trippy Pop hallucination, he would be remembered. But as that turbulent decade wore on, Corman uniquely divined and responded to currents in the air–and to the money burning holes in the pockets of a restless new youth audience–and started making films that reflected the times in ways major studios couldn't comprehend. Nihilistic biker flicks such as The Wild Angels (1966) and head movies like The Trip (1967) led directly to Easy Rider (1969) (which, of course, he was instrumental in getting made) and the subsequent revolution in '70s Hollywood.

His greatest legacy, however, might just be the incredible roster of directing and acting talent he has nurtured. From Jack Nicholson to Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper to Martin Scorsese, almost all of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” generation started out working for him in the 1960s.

The club is a place that condenses everyday life and opens up its contradictions. Here we find distortions of reality in this enclosed space and the production of a different reality. There is concealment and display, but what is concealed is produced as effectively as what is deliberately played out. This is the scene. We are dancing in ‘Sankeys Soap’ in Manchester. We are drinking water. These places are friendlier and safer than the alcohol clubs in north Manchester where people stagger into each other before being sick in the toilets, where meeting someone's eye could mean getting beaten up, where people are uncoordinated and angry. We are coordinated but not regimented. We aren't marching, but we move together fast.

The club is a place of simultaneous anonymity and individualisation. At one and the same moment, it functions as a city site where masses of people are brought together who do not know one another. We go to clubs with friends and we move apart through the course of the evening and encounter each other again from time to time. We may dance in a group, but we cannot speak, and communication is broken and then we become bodies among other bodies. Like much life in the city, there are clusters of distinguishable, recognisable faces amidst a crowd of people who are strangers. Here there is also contact. Some guy pushes past another and their bodies glance against each other. One is rebounding and shouting, and the other shouts back.

I would like to thank the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (CRG) for inviting me to give a series of lectures touching on issues related to Forced Displacement, the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and International Law. […] As I worked very closely with Francis Deng and Walter Kalin in developing the normative framework applicable to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), I hope that these lectures will provide some useful insights into the origins, substantive content and normative character, as well as the impact to date, of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

ORIGIN OF THE UN MANDATE ON IDPs

It was not until the early 1990s that international concern began to increasingly focus on the plight of IDPs, i.e., people forced from their homes as a result of armed conflict, communal violence, serious human rights and humanitarian law abuses and/or natural or man-made disasters and who remain uprooted and at risk within their own countries. Unlike persons who flee across international borders and thereby may be entitled to the status and protective international legal regime applicable to refugees, IDPs remain within their country and, as such, are subject to the jurisdiction of their own government, whose very actions or policies may have caused their displacement and which all too frequently may be unwilling or unable to protect or assist them.

Introduction

The ageing of population is an outcome of successful demographic transition. One of the unprecedented achievements in the medical history of the twentieth century is the prolongation of the lifespan of human beings. Globally, the life expectancy at birth had been around 47 years in the 1950s. This increased tremendously to 67 years in 2008 – 20 added years in a lifespan of about 50 years. Between the more developed regions and the less developed regions, the gain was impressive among the less developed regions with 24 years against a mere 10 years among the more developed regions (United Nations (UN), 2007). However, the problems associated with an ageing population could be located in a developmental context through institutions that have been shaped by this experience. Institutional factors included on the one hand, the norm of a restricted definition of work as market-related productive activity and the association of ageing with ‘non-work’ and dependency, and on the other hand, state and market failures to internalize the interests of heterogeneous groups of the aged population. An important aspect here is the feminization of ageing, including the vulnerability of widows, alongside the greater emphasis on women as caregivers.

The recent emphasis in ageing research in the developing world is attributed to the growing number of elderly persons and the institutional failures to render adequate care for them. Population ageing is generally attributed to continuous decrease in fertility levels and constant increase in life expectancy.

As I reflect on a lifetime of canonical film-watching, I realize that what I've learned is, though not entirely worthless, probably useless. A certain director swerves the camera around emphatically, one employs moody colors, another bores us to death with selfimportantly minimalist narratives, and so forth. Though cinephiles and pedants insist that I should care about matters of style, I am tempted to half-jokingly agree with the Maoists and assent that the enterprise of the cinema–which can now only be repaired with the most radical consciousness-raising–is morally bankrupt and deserving of total abandonment.

I therefore shun the cineaste's narrow parameters and seek a new art, not a projected frame supervised by commerce and critics but an art that strives for a new, autonomous way of being. Nothing better represents such a praxis than the 1960s Austrian actionist movement, whose principal members–Otto Muehl, Rudolph Schwarzkogler, Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch–scandalized the public with materialistic body art, staged saturnalia, and polymorphous perversity under the banners of the “Vienna Action Group” and the “Institute for Direct Art.” Sometimes the actionists would be jailed on public obscenity charges, and in the 1960s actionist art became the subject of momentous German and Austrian censorship trials. In the early 1990s, Muehl became the subject of a highly politicized trial once again: accused of raping and molesting underage members of his actionist commune, he was imprisoned for seven years.

Introduction

The European population is ageing faster than populations of the other continents. The ageing of the population is a very distinctive demographic event in the European context, considering its unique pace in demographic transition. The available estimates indicate that the elderly population (65+) is expected to increase by 40 million over the next 50 years and those who are in the working age population (15–64) are expected to decline by about 100 million. This process will lead to a decline in the worker–elderly ratio from the current 4:1 to 2:1 by the year 2050 (Economic Policy Committee, 2001). These results highlight the far-reaching transformations in the European population in general and elderly population in particular in the coming years.

This increasing elderly population has already received the attention of planners and policymakers all over the world. The European Commission has played a noteworthy attempt to highlight the issues associated with elderly population in Europe. The tremendous growth of elderly population basically on account of the then post-war baby boom and the resultant child population, has now reached the retirement age. Moreover, fertility has fallen sharply and there has been a considerable increase in the life expectancy of the European population.

Demography of the Elderly

The Netherlands, one of the leading nations in the European Union (EU) is no more an exception to the greying of its population.

The existing rich historiography on cholera in India can be divided into three distinct, albeit occasionally overlapping, strands. David Arnold has looked at how cholera was seen as a disease connected to disorderly crowds. His work has analysed the role of cholera in the imperial British–Indian state's efforts to ‘control’ spaces where large numbers of Indians gathered. Harrison's account of cholera, though also interested in issues of ‘control’, gives greater weight to the numerous internal tensions within the Anglo-Indian medical ureaucracy in speaking and writing about cholera. He gives particularly detailed descriptions of the varied positions maintained by different authorities on the question of the transmission of cholera. Harrison also points out how, being closely implicated in imperial politics, the eventual triumph of any one of these many views depended largely upon political considerations. Dhrub Kumar Singh uses a very similar approach to accent the difference in the medical response to cholera in Britain and India. Apart from these two major strands accenting, respectively, the politics of control and the politics of translating heterogeneous medical opinion to medical policy, a third strand investigates the demographic impact of cholera. Ira Klein's work is particularly significant in this regard. The scope of each of these studies reflects the massive administrative importance that a deadly endemic such as cholera had. Each of these studies draws upon administrative archives of the colonial government and therefore critically reflects the major concerns of those who compiled that archive.

Introduction

Where social or state protection for the aged is weak or inadequate in contexts of steadily eroding age-based hierarchies, secure property right over resources could turn into a crucial dimension of social security. Where age-based hierarchies were strong, dramatic, if highly uneven, social transformations since the colonial period have meant important shifts in family ideology and practices. In the Indian context, immovable property such as land and house have been owned largely by men and devolved among men, the only exceptions being matrilineal societies on the southwest coast and in the north-east (Agarwal, 1994). Despite differences in ‘law’ on a religious basis, which gained coherence through the use of religion to codify and evolve law during the colonial period, customs varied according to region and contiguity of communities. Thus, women's right to property under Islamic law, which provided daughters a lesser share than it did sons but protected that share against testation, was subject to the operation of custom which privileged the dominant practice in the region. Transformation of family relations among ‘Hindus’ through colonial legal interpretation and reform of personal law in the mid 1950s shifted the basis of women's property rights from the category of age to marital status i.e., unmarried daughters, wives and widows (Agnes, 1999). However, the process of transformation since the colonial period also weakened the position of aged men by allowing greater recognition of individual rights very generally over that of the corporate family, which gave aged men greater customary authority.

New York native Barbara Kopple has been a vital and socially progressive voice in documentary filmmaking for the past three decades, bringing a compassionate and unblinking scrutiny to the lives of miners, meatpackers, professional musicians, journalists and even disgraced boxing champ Mike Tyson. In her career-making, hard-hat couplet Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990), Kopple illuminated two of the more shameful episodes in recent U.S. labor history, demonstrating an abiding sympathy for the struggles of ordinary people and training her gimlet eye on the ironies and ignominies of economic oppression.

One of the founding members of the collaborative group that produced Winter Soldier (1972), a soldier's-eye view of atrocities in Vietnam with disturbing parallels to Bush Inc.'s military misadventures, Kopple began making films while attending college in West Virginia. In 1973, she spent a year living in a small Kentucky town filming the ugly, embittered, ultimately violent conflict between workers seeking a union contract from their overlords at Eastover Mining Company, and the gun-wielding scabs sent into their midst by greedy coal operators and their lapdogs in local law enforcement. Kopple, who was targeted by one goon for hoisting a camera during an early-morning picket-line melee (a chilling incident plainly visible in the Criterion DVD of the film), won an Academy Award for Harlan County, U.S.A in 1976.

Introduction

The goal of this chapter is to provide guidelines for public policy for social security and health care of the aged. The varied needs and experiences of the aged were obtained from clusters of populations that were probed as distinct groups in which key aspects of ageing were likely to differ from one another. This study envisaged an interest in understanding the significance of shifts in intergenerational contracts, in emerging institutional failures to cope with the process of ageing and it's implications for social security and health of a highly heterogeneous ageing population in Sri Lanka.

Research Design and Methods

Both time and budget constraints were considered in designing techniques and selecting the sample. Responding to the underlying concerns to capture the dimensions, characteristics and trends related to ageing among different social and economic groups of the aged, the sample was stratified into population clusters from selected locations that used to advantage intracluster homogeneity. Four clusters captured the ethnic variations. The sample of majority ethnic group of Sinhalese was drawn from two locations, one in and around the hill country with its main town, Kandy, which is home to a community that is upholding its own set of traditions, the other from the southern area in and around Galle, from a rural population that has entrenched traditions of its own. Rural agricultural society is represented by a sample from an interior rural location, which continues with traditional peasant agriculture while adopting non-traditional methods as well.

Two pieces of prose fiction selected here represent each year from 1872–1900, in order for the reader to situate the following poems in a broader fin–de–siècle context. The first piece is an extract from a novel or a short story. The second is, usually, ‘non-fictive prose’—an essay, article, autobiography, or other literary tract of the period not always easily accessible to readers, which illuminates some of the wider concerns of the age as whole. Important sensations of the period are also mentioned, such as the Ruskin-Whistler case. Twenty novelists have been selected. Half of these are established Victorian literary figures: Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Stevenson, Trollope, Meredith, Wilde, Pater, Gissing, and Wells. Hardy and Conrad appear three times, as writers of short stories as well as novels. Robert Louis Stevenson is represented as a poet, as well as in his more familiar capacity as the author of Treasure Island (1883) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The other ten novelists are less well known, but are selected on the basis of writing fiction that exemplifies late–nineteenth century imaginative concerns, especially the apocalyptic vision of a utopia or ideal society. This is epitomised in W. H. Mallock's novel, The New Republic.

All the writers are British, with the notable exception of Henry James, whose short story, ‘Daisy Miller’ (1878) was published in England before it appeared in America.

Introduction

In a society like India, where it has not been possible for the state to extend social security to all its citizens, people tend to work as long as they can so that they may be able to support themselves during periods when they have no gainful employment. This applies to interruptions in employment caused by retrenchment, sickness, disablement, as well as advanced old age. Obviously, as old age advances into the seventies and eighties, opportunities for gainful employment get increasingly limited.

The need to engage in gainful employment, even after formal retirement from a given employment may arise due to a variety of reasons:

1. (a) There are specific instances where employees are not entitled to any retirement benefits; eg. casual workers and self-employed persons;

2. (b) In respect of several categories of regularly employed salaried persons, they may be entitled to, at the time of retirement, a onetime payment of gratuity based on salary last drawn and a provident fund based on contributions made during the period of service;

3. (c) In a relatively limited number of cases, salaried employees are entitled to a regular monthly pension in addition to the normal gratuity and provident fund payments.

It is important to note that the maximum pension which civil servants in India are currently entitled to is one half of the basic pay last drawn (plus dearness relief based on cost of living index).

DIFFERENCES?

Differences in culture, ethnicity and nationality are assets, as well as, hazards in a world becoming technically smaller every day. Most of the feuds and wars of the 1990s, all of them catastrophes to millions of people, resulted in cultural, ethnic or religious tensions.

Taking advantage of the situation in Bhutan, beginning from 1991, the propaganda machinery of the Royal Government of Bhutan has been disseminating information that the present crisis in the country is an ethnic conflict fought between the Buddhist Drukpas (supposedly the sons of the soil) and the Hindu Lhotshampas (alleged to be recent migrants). […] To understand the Bhutanese refugee problem, one needs to understand the ethnic background of the refugees and other groups of population in Bhutan.

The present refugee population in Nepal and a little in India consists of Lhotshampas who are people of Nepali origin; they had migrated to Bhutan from Nepal, through Sikkim and West Bengal, in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were settled in the southern districts of Samchi, Chukha, Chirang, Dagapela, Gaylegphug and Samdrupjonkhar.

Prior to this refugee crisis, foreigners seem not to have known that Bhutan had people of Nepali origin. The tourism booklets depicted Bhutan as the land of the Drukpas. The ruling Ngalungs who are concentrated in the north-west valleys of Haa, Paro and Thimphuinsist that the central Kheng people and eastern Bhutanese (Sharchops) also fall under the nomenclature of Drukpas, as has happened in Nepal, where there exist multiple communities under one nationality.

Introduction

Over the past 25 years, Latin American governments have undertaken a structural-adjustment process including, among other actions, the elimination of trade barriers, privatization of large public domestic firms and deregulation of markets. This move towards deregulation and market reform has included a new embrace of foreign direct investment, even in the strategic oil and gas industries. Considering the former regulations and polices in this sector introduced during the nationalization wave of the 1970s, the transformation has been amazing: foreign investors have not only been welcomed but have even granted proprietary rights over extracted oil. Most Latin American oiland- gas-producing countries agreed to fix royalties at very low levels. Furthermore, the 1990s witnessed the rise of bilateralism (bilateral investment treaties (BITs) plus International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) jurisdiction), which transformed the institutional framework governing the relationship between foreign investors and host states.

Paradoxically, after a decade of market-friendly reforms and neoliberal policies, the beginning of the new millennium was marked by economic crisis, social conflict, and political turmoil.

The Andean countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela) are usually grouped together for analytic purposes. However, the countries on which this chapter focuses (Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela) share some particularities, calling for an analysis separate from the rest (Colombia and Peru).

Can the marginalized speak? Can ‘we’, who have not lost our homes, truly understand the nuances of the words of pain and agony expressed by the displaced/refugees? It is a difficult task no doubt, especially from the point of the theoretical jigsaw, proposed by postmodern writers. But, disregarding such academic nonsense, people in every age have come forward to the suffering humanity – with sympathy to listen to their voices and with commitment stand by them.

Refugee Watch, the committed friend of the refugees/displaced people of the world, has occasionally sought to present such voices to its readers in the form of interviews or sometimes through ‘personal’ correspondence. The literature of marginalized voices, expressed in the forms of personal diaries, letters and interviews, also known as ‘testimonials’, should not be judged as statements of ‘pure’ truth. Beyond the conventional yardsticks of truth or falsity, they can be seen as catharsis – the process of venting out the emotions of the victim/marginalized. Thus, besides having factual and historical importance, they give us a chance to understand ‘the mind’ of the refugees, or rather ‘minds’.

In this section, we have chosen some of this literature, voiced by the victims and also by a sympathetic observer. Needless to say that the issues and problems raised here are very much relevant and living even today.

This volume is a major contribution to a growing body of literature that questions the assumptions of market reforms undertaken in Latin America in recent decades, on the basis that market reforms did not deliver on their basic promise: rapid economic growth. Indeed, even when we take into account the recent period of exceptional conditions in international commodity and capital markets that has facilitated rapid growth in Latin America since 2004, the rate of GDP growth in the region has been 3.3 percent from 1990 to 2007 (and only 2.5 percent if the point of reference is 1980), far short of that achieved during the phase of import-substitution industrialization—or, as I prefer to call it, state-led industrialization—when Latin America grew at an average rate of 5.5 percent a year. Another set of criticisms relates, of course, to the disappointing social effects of market reforms. Again, a simple reflection of this fact is that only in 2005 did Latin America return to the poverty levels of 1980—i.e., the region experienced not a decade, but a quarter century lost in terms of poverty reduction.

The volume concentrates on one of the major aspects of the globalization and liberalization processes: the growing role played by multinational corporations (MNCs) and the opening up of the Latin American economies to foreign direct investment (FDI). Drawing on case studies from about half of the countries in the region, it explores the determinants of FDI, the role that it has played in advancing environmental sustainability, and some political economy issues associated with such investments.