This work is an analysis of the power relations between Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) and the apex trafficking States of the Dominican Republic, Suriname, Venezuela, French Guiana, Martinique and Guadeloupe in the second decade of the 21st Century. This analysis focuses on the business models of TOC groups involved in these apex trafficking states of the Caribbean Basin, their trafficking methodology and the response of the State in their war on drugs to the operational presence of these TOC groups. What is apparent is the inability, the complicity and the unwillingness of the ruling elites and the agents of the State to grapple with the threat posed by TOC to these apex trafficking States. The war on drugs is then a lie, an instrument of power to effect social control in favour of the ruling oligarchs and a geopolitical instrument which indicates your subservience to the USA and the rest of the North Atlantic. The war on drugs is then an instrument to effect white power/hegemony over the neo-colonial world, the South. In these States studied the reality of the North Atlantic's war on drugs being joined at the head with TOC, hence inseparable, is affirmed with evidence, for as you beget the war on drugs TOC exploits your geographic position to transship drugs to the North Atlantic, but you are unable to resist materially and at the level of the idea, given your state of economic and mental subservience arsing from white supremacist colonial/neo-colonial imperial domination. Transnational Organized Crime then in these States have already or are aggressively moving to capture the State. The wages of embracing the white supremacist war on drugs is TOC exerting hegemony over our social order.

This is a deconstruction of Qur'anic discourse for the 21st century where the salient discursive concepts of Qur'anic discourse are located and deconstructed to reveal their meanings in English through the use of a most reputable Concordance of the Qur'an. The key linchpin discursive concepts found under the rubric of the Divine Names and Attributes of Almighty Allah (SWT) in Qur'anic discourse are all deconstructed revealing the Qur'anic praxis driven by its methodology and instruments of power, its Order of Power, through its application to self, the believer renovates and refurbishes the total self at the level of the idea, discourse and action, Qur'anic praxis, to attain the Bliss in the second creation and the outpouring of the Sakinah in the present life.

The Global Study on Homicide 2013 is based on comprehensive data from more than 200 countries/territories, and examines and analyses patterns and trends in homicide at the global, regional, national and sub-national levels. Such analysis is fundamental to understanding the various factors and dynamics that drive homicide, so that measures can be developed to reduce violent crime. The Study provides a typology of homicide, including homicide related to crime, coexistence-related homicide, and socio-political homicide. The nature of crime in several countries emerging from conflict, the role of various mechanisms in killing, and the response of the criminal justice system to homicide are also analyzed. A further chapter examines homicide at the sub-national level, and includes analysis at the city-level for selected global cities.

Contents: Complexity, Change, and Challenge; The 1980s in Retrospect: Geopolitics, Militarization, Intervention, and Instability; The Changing Strategic Environment: Meaning of Security, Global Military and Political Power, Economic Relationships, and Rethinking Policy Priorities; Territorial Disputes; Caribbean Geonarcotics: Trafficking Patterns, Modus Operandi, National Countermeasures, Regional and International Countermeasures; Security Collaboration: Why Collaborate?, Regional Security System; Strengthening Democracy.

Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 192 countries and a group of select territories are used by policy makers, the media, international corporations, and civic activists and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. Press accounts of the survey findings appear in hundreds of influential newspapers in the United States and abroad and form the basis of numerous radio and television reports. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.

There is long-standing debate on how population growth affects national economies. A new report from Population Matters examines the history of this debate and synthesizes current research on the topic. The authors, led by Harvard economist David Bloom, conclude that population age structure, more than size or growth per se, affects economic development, and that reducing high fertility can create opportunities for economic growth if the right kinds of educational, health, and labor-market policies are in place. The report also examines specific regions of the world and how their differing policy environments have affected the relationship between population change and economic development.

This book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.

Latin America and the Caribbean will soon face the challenges of an aging population. This process, which took over a century in the rich world, will occur in two or three decades in the developing world; seven of the 25 countries that will age more rapidly are in LAC. Population aging will pose challenges and offer opportunities. This book explores three sets of issues. First is a group of issues related to the support of the aging and poverty in the life cycle. This covers questions of work and retirement, income and wealth, and living arrangements and intergenerational transfers. It also explores the relation between the life cycle and poverty. Second is the question of the health transition. How does the demographic transition impact the health status of the population and the demand for health care? And how advanced is the health transition in LAC? Third is an understanding of the fiscal pressures that are likely to accompany population aging and to disentangle the role of demography from the role of policy in that process. This book provides an introduction to the concepts and techniques at the intersection of demography and economics. It summarizes the policy debate about potential reforms needed to make population aging an opportunity for development.