Through a genealogy of Jamaican disaster management, shows how participatory and mitigation techniques were deterritorialized from marginalized experiences of disaster and reterritorialized into mitigation policies through the confluence of local disaster events and the global emergence of sustainable development and resilience theory.
Analyzes current urban governance policies and the spatial politics of resistance embraced by communities under siege in Brazil. Space matters not only in terms of defining one's access to the polis, but also as a deadly tool through which police killings, economic marginalization, and mass incarceration produce the very geographies (here referred to as 'the black necropolis') that the state aims to counteract in its war against the black urban poor.
Haiti's election debacle of November 28 can be directly linked to the 1991 and 2004 coups. The political upheaval in both cases allowed the de facto president to unilaterally select members of the electoral council, bypassing constitutional provisions requiring popular representation. The result this time: the arbitrary banning of 14 political parties, including Haiti's largest and most representative, the Fanmi Lavalas party of ousted, exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
160 p., Chronicles the history of slavery in Haiti through a recitation of the brutality of the colonisers and the often mundane and trivial ways in which they attempted to dehumanize Haitians. It seeks to illustrate how Haitians' 300-year journey to freedom was illuminated by the African philosophy of Ubuntu, a world view that embodies human solidarity, respect, dignity, justice, liberty, and love. In this philosophy, Africans found an unmatched strength to resist slavery.
Seventeen years after Guyana introduced a positive, liberal abortion law, the government, professional bodies and civil society together have failed to give any leadership in implementing that law. How can one explain that after an outstanding campaign of extensive ministerial and parliamentary consultation, as well as widespread engagement from religious organisations and the media, so little has been done by way of implementing the law? This paper seeks to trace some aspects of the campaign for law reform and to learn from the difficulties of providing services over the last seventeen years.
Argues that the current proposal to reform the local government sector in Trinidad and Tobago stems from an eclectic application of various strands of thought that are in no way in keeping with the realities of the social and political environment of the country.
Discusses the importance of US leadership in the reconstruction of Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake. Attention is given to unity of effort & the primacy of security in Haiti.
Focuses on the notion of environmental citizenship in examining how black and minority ethnic groups in Britain talk about environmental "rights" alongside environmental responsibilities. The authors conducted ten semi-structured interviews with community key informants and ten focus groups with African-Caribbean or Indian communities. Four environmental responsibility discourses in the participants' talk were identified. These were variously defined by issues of trust, social equity, off-loading of responsibility and government intervention and that served to shift environmental responsibility away from the individual onto "institutional others". Concludes by suggesting policy implications for the environmental and sustainability policy and planning community.
The underlying thesis of this paper is that contemporary Caribbean economy and society
maintain certain basic structural features rooted in slavery and the plantation system.
It traces changes that have occurred in the economic, demographic, educational, social
structural, and political realms, particularly during the 1960s. The picture that emerges is one of "change and continuity."
Examines how post-earthquake conditions in Haiti have left women and girls in a heightened state of vulnerability as well as the ineffectiveness of the U.N. and government to uphold obligations under international law to include grassroots women's leadership in the planning and implementation sessions to address sexual violence in displacement camps.
