Plenary V: Democracy in Crisis?

In July 2021, the United Nations issued a condemnation against the “dramatic rise” in attacks against “descent-based slaves” in Mali, calling the violence “unacceptable”[i]. The statement was in response to a tragic episode in the eastern region of Kayes, where landowners using machetes and rifles assaulted a group of indentured laborers to prevent them working on the landowners’ fields. Tomoya Okobata, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, said these “assaul ...

Official statistics record more than 4.6 million people as dying of COVID-19 across the world, a population roughly equal to that of New Zealand. About 10,000 people continue to die of the disease every day. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that the number of COVID-19 deaths is underreported in many instances. For example, a continuously updated database of estimated COVID-19 deaths by The Economist suggests that the actual number of deaths across the world could be two to thre ...

La politique en faveur des droits des femmes s'est imposée durant les dernières années comme une politique de l'égalité entre les sexes. Il ne s'agit pas de reconnaître des droits spécifiques aux femmes mais, au contraire, de mettre fin aux discriminations dont elles sont victimes, dans la perspective d’établir une société égalitaire. Au Maroc, pays qui, depuis l’adoption de la Constitution de 2011, se réfère à un universel neutre de la citoyenneté, le Nouveau Modèle de Développemen ...

Bushra Ebadi speaks fast, in an even tone and a very articulate way. This social innovator, a strong personality raised in Mississauga (Canada) by parents who fled their country, Afghanistan, has a lot to say and even more to do. Since July 2021, she is a Network Coordinator for Amnesty International. Her mission: “Establish through a collaborative process a global civil society network on data-surveillance technologies to promote the rights of displaced persons and migrants in the ...

The fifth African Peace and Security Annual Conference (APSACO) was held from June 21-23, 2021, under the theme ‘Women, Peace, and Security in Africa’. The three- day event, hosted and organized by the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS), was composed of four panels and three workshops: • Panel 1: Bolstering Women’s Role in Conflict Prevention and Resolution • Panel 2: Integrating & Reinforcing The Gender Dimension in Security and Defense • Panel 3: Understanding to Act Bett ...

When Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez tested positive for COVID-19 on his 62nd birthday, April 2, 2021 it might not have seemed unusual when there have been almost 200 million cases worldwide. But the leader of Argentina received two doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, on January and in February 2021, a virus terminator advertised by Moscow as potent like almost no other on the globe, with an efficiency rate given by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute at 96.1%. The risk of infec ...

We explore whether improved export sophistication increases women’s participation in wage employment. Using panel data from a large group of developing and emerging economies, and Fixed-effects and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators, we find that export sophistication has significant and mostly positive effects on women’s participation in paid employment in all regions, but these effects are nonlinear, since they become positive only after a threshold level of sophistica ...