With preparations underway for the new UN Peacebuilding Commission, it is important to consider how to deal with spoilers as a threat to peace and security. This policy brief considers the sources and impact of ‘spoilers’ and ‘spoiling’: groups and tactics that actively seek to hinder, delay, or undermine conflict settlement through a variety of »

There are compelling reasons why technologically advanced and developing countries alike should adopt open source software as part of their ICT policies. In addition to the obvious cost advantages, recent studies of free/libre/open source (FLOSS) communities demonstrate that the process of learning and adapting software enables users to become ‘creators of knowledge’ rather than mere »

The 14-member Franc Zone in West and Central Africa represents the largest monetary union in the southern hemisphere, predating the European Monetary Union by decades. With monetary unions planned for other parts of Africa in the near future, Macroeconomic Policy in the Franc Zone focuses on some of the key challenges facing the Franc Zone »

Les 14 pays membres de la zone franc en Afrique de l’Ouest et en Afrique centrale constituent – avec plusieurs décennies d’avance sur l’Union monétaire européenne – la plus importante union monétaire de l’hémisphère austral. Face à la perspective de création, à court terme, de nouvelles unions monétaires en Afrique, l’étude Macroeconomic Policy in the »

The UNU-WIDER project on ‘Spatial Disparities in Human Development’ has collected and analyzed evidence on the extent of spatial inequalities within developing countries. The studies find that spatial inequalities are high, with disparities between rural and urban areas, and also between geographically advantaged and disadvantaged regions. In many countries such disparities are increasing, partly as »

This document is based on a forthcoming book that examines the feasibility of creating an institution known as the “L20”, a summit of twenty world leaders whose objective would be to break the international deadlock over some of the most pressing problems facing the world. In a climate of despondency over the achievements of existing »

This document is based on a forthcoming book that examines issues in bioprospecting and the search for useful biochemical compounds and genes in nature. Bioprospecting has been the focus of international negotiations for more than a decade, yet the debate on the terms for access to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and benefit-sharing is far from »

This research is extracted from a book proposed for publication by United Nations University Press in 2006 that examines our vulnerability to hazards of natural origin, and explores the opportunities for adopting a pre-emptive rather than a reactive approach to natural disasters. The world may suddenly turn its attention to the suffering victims of catastrophes »