New Al Haq report says governments within their rights to sanction Israel over settlement enterprise

Well-respected Palestinian rights organization Al Haq has published a report about the responsibility of states in relation to Israel’s settlement enterprise. The legal memorandum reviews the Israeli actors, the supportive infrastructure and services, and the associated regime of Israeli laws, policies and practices that compose the “settlement enterprise.” Al Haq’s memorandum provides a solid legal [...]

Recession and suicide

Materialistic/hedonistic lifestyle and Suicide During the Great Depression, the press published dramatic stories of people committing suicide after they had lost their savings, homes, and/or jobs. The World Health Organization (WHO) currently reports that more than 800,000 people kill themselves each year, a rate that has been rising owing to the recent recession. Is there [...]

Popular protests and the crisis of the global political economy

There are a number of essays and books about the new epoch of protest that the world has entered since the recession of 2008-present, which started in the US and spread to other countries. Do deep recessions cause chronic protests, and if that is the case, why did the world not see such trends during [...]

Horizontal Versus Vertical Social Cohesion: Why the Differences Matter

Social cohesion is an underappreciated but crucial element in development, state building, and poverty reduction. It is an especially important factor in determining whether a state is fragile or not. As I argued in Fixing Fragile States: Two factors above all others decide how a country’s political, economic, and societal life evolves: a population’s capacity [...]

Air and Water in the OECD Report

Around the world urban air pollution is expected to become one of the biggest environmental causes of premature death in the coming decades. According to an OECD report by 2050, there could be 3.6 million premature deaths a year from exposure to particulate matter. Most of those deaths are expected to come from China and [...]

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