On December 27

On this day in ...
... 1945 (65 years ago today), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development Articles of Agreement, drafted the previous summer at the U.N. Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, took effect. The Articles established what's come to be known as the World Bank, an international organization that provides loans to developing countries. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. (left) (photo credit), it now has 187 states parties.

(Prior December 27 posts are here, here, and here.)

Go On! World Bank conference

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

The Legal Vice Presidency of the World Bank, together with external partners from around the world (including Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States) will sponsor Law, Justice and Development Week 2010 at the beginning in Washington, D.C.

Featured will be a conference entitled "International Financial Institutions in a Post-Crisis World: Legal Challenges and Opportunities," on November 8 and 9 at the International Monetary Fund headquarters.

Cosponsors include the American Society of International Law and the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, as well as numerous law schools in the United States and abroad.

Registration is required; details here.

Battling Maternal Mortality

In anticipation of this week's UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), several UN entities -- the World Health Organization, UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), UN Population Fund (UNFPA), and the World Bank -- released a study of international trends in maternal mortality between 1990 and 2008. This assessment report, which covers 99.8% of births worldwide, is aimed at achieving the fifth MDG: to reduce the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) by three quarters between 1990 and 2015. While reliable data are hard to collect, particularly in the developing world, the news is modestly positive: The estimated 358,000 maternal deaths in 2008 represent a 34% decline from 1990 levels. While this is not quite the rate of change needed to achieve a 75% drop by 2015, it's certainly a step in the right direction.

The good news? A total of 147 countries experienced a decline in their maternal mortality levels, with enormous drops (from 50 to 75%) in several sub-Saharan African nations. These declines are likely due to improved access to health systems and increased female education. The proportion of deliveries attended by skilled health personnel rose in the developing world, as did the percentage of women receiving prenatal care and the proportion of women using contraception. Notably, East Asia, which experienced the greatest decline in maternal mortality levels, has a contraceptive prevalence rate of 86%, while in sub-Saharan Africa, which faced one of the lowest declines, that rate was only 22%.
The bad news? The developing world suffered an estimated 99% (355,000) of these deaths, with sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia accounting for an estimated 87% (313,000) of global maternal deaths. Just eleven countries from these two regions comprised an estimated 65% of all maternal deaths in 2008, with India accounting for the largest number of deaths (63,000). Of greater concern, 23 countries faced an increase in their MMR over the time period studied. The five countries that fared the worst in terms of increasing maternal mortality rates (Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe) are of course part of the region with the highest HIV rates in the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 9% of all maternal deaths were due to HIV/AIDS.
The global disparities in maternal mortality are shocking; the MMR in the developing world (290 deaths per 100,000 live births) was over twenty times that of the developed world (14). In four countries -- Afghanistan, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, and Somalia, the MMR was over 1000. In other words, a 15-year old female in sub-Saharan Africa faces a 1 in 31 chance of maternal death over her lifetime, while a girl of the same age in the developed world faces a 1 in 4300 risk. That girl in Afghanistan? A 1 in 11 risk.
Given that many of the causes of maternal deaths in the developing world are relatively easily addressed through basic prenatal and childbirth care (e.g. hemorrhage and hypertension are responsible for more than half of these deaths), it seems that the goal of 75% decline, though ambitious, should be within reach. In recognition of the need for basic improvements in health care for pregnant women, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon unveiled on Wednesday his $40 billion Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health. Here's hoping it can make a difference for that young girl in Afghanistan.
(credit for photo above left)

Sub-Saharan development & business laws

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post on research to be published as "Informal-Sector Entrepreneurs, Development and Formal Law: A Functional Understanding of Business Law," 59 American Journal of Comparative Law (January 2011), as well as my dedication below to two foremothers)

While discussing the policies of the prior US administration towards his country, a respected Senior Barrister in Cameroon trotted out the old adage:

'Give people fish, and you feed them for today. Teach them to fish, and you have fed them for a lifetime.'

He was, of course, asking that donor institutions and donor states provide tools that reinforce independence rather than mere handouts. This perspective does seem consistent with a trend by the World Bank, among others, to encourage business, including smaller businesses.

Indeed, prodded by economists seeking to encourage development by facilitating business, this international financial institution has over the past half-dozen years paid very serious attention to the role of business laws. Consider, for example, the World Bank’s “Doing Business” reports, annual compilations of studies focused on the contribution of law to the business environment in emerging economies.

It is easy for us in the global North, especially as we endure the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, to be cynical about the ability of business laws to facilitate development. Business laws have failed to protect the overall business environment, including the availability of credit.

As we consider what regulations to impose on the largest financial and other companies here, politicians and economists are contemplating the long-term impact on the entire business community. Thus, small businesses should care about the regulations constraining the most powerful actors in their economy. Still, their daily ability to work in sanitary, lighted, safe environments, and to expect the machinery of government to support their commercial contracts, continues to be protected.

In Sub-Saharan Africa,

► To what extent can law restrain the excesses of the most powerful agent, typically the state, while facilitating business on the ground?

► To what extent can laws help create a business environment that most closely mimics that of the global North — where, in the best of circumstances, the most powerful actors are adequately controlled?

The Sub-Saharan business climate is, of course, fundamentally different.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the informal sector represents 40-60% of gross domestic product, according to a study by Friedrich Schneider. International Labor Organization figures state that this sector employs as much as 93% of non-agricultural workers.

The informal sector thus is highly important. Yet formal law does not penetrate easily or predictably there. For this reason, simple transplantation of classic business law from the global North will not be sufficient to protect and support the business either of an informal-sector-market woman or street vendor, or even of the many business people who have a foot in both the formal and informal sectors.

The focus has to be on functionality.

The goal is to serve the informal sector with laws that accomplish there what classic business laws do for the smaller businesses of the global North. Specifically, laws should increase the predictability of transactions while limiting abuse from government and other powerful agents.

The attack should be two-pronged.
► Formal law both can constrain formal-sector actors, such as some landlords transacting with informal-sector businesses, and can mandate that formal-sector actors provide pro-business realities that Northern businesses enjoy, including sanitary work environments. Precisely because these actors are in the formal sector, they are subject to government regulation — even if the landlord is in fact the government.
► The second prong still cannot directly affect the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs, those self-employed workers who typically operating alone or with family, and with very modest sales. These workers will not be directly affected because, almost by definition, they are at best unpredictably subject to formal laws and regulations. On the other hand, nano-entrepreneurs do tend to have a legal regime, or a quasi- legal traditional regime, that affects businesses.

This second prong, in turn, deploys two strategies to allow formal law to have as direct an impact as possible on the informal sector.
►► The first strategy aimed at the informal sector is to have formal laws that reinforce existing business norms. These laws are the most likely to support effectively a North-style predictability, since the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs are primed to comply.
►► The second strategy aimed at the informal sector emphasizes the importance of encouraging coordination of consumers of law. This strategy is especially important when the applicable legal system is highly centralized — as is typically the case in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Discussion of relatively developed countries and their formal economies may be found in Law & Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World (2008), by Columbia Law Professors Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor.)

Laws promoting coordination include West and Central Africa’s Economic Interest Group (specifically, Sections 869-885 of the OHADA Commercial Companies and EIG Uniform Act), as well as other laws that promote cooperatives. A case in point is the self-coordination effort in the Ghanaian chocolate industry, described here. (credit for photo of woman in Ghana holding fair-trade chocolate) (Prior IntLawGrrls post on problems in the chocolate industry.)

In short, the additional strategy aimed at the informal sector workers is to facilitate the formation of cooperatives.

The goal is for business-related laws to achieve in Sub-Saharan Africa the functionality that classic business laws offer, in the best of times, to businesses of the global North.

Institutionalizing Human Rights

On Tuesday, Temple's International Law Colloquium had the pleasure of hosting Galit Sarfaty (pictured left), Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Galit presented her paper, Why Culture Matters in International Institutions: The Marginality of Human Rights at the World Bank, which was published in the October 2009 issue of the American Journal of International Law. (If you are an academic, that means that the article is already sitting on your desk somewhere, and it's well worth the effort to dig it out from under that pile of papers and read it!)
Trained as an anthropologist, Galit analyzes the rich and fascinating results of her doctoral research conducting an ethnography of the World Bank. Largely descriptive, the study seeks to answer the question of why the World Bank has failed to adopt a human rights policy or agenda. From interviews with James Wolfensohn to detailed analysis of the Bank's articles of agreement, the article is a riveting read that raises important questions about human rights standards and international organizations. Galit describes the thorny politics of the Bank's Board of Executive Directors, reflecting North/South struggles over the content and application of international human rights law. She suggests that the Bank's failure to adopt a human rights policy despite several attempts is due to the institution's organizational culture and the interpretive frames used by professional groups within the bank to assess new norms. Galit posits that
to bring about internalization, actors must adapt norms to local meanings and existing cultural values and practices -- that is, they must 'vernacularize' norms.
As explained in her presentation, the central take-away from her article is that human rights norms must be adapted to fit within the Bank's organizational culture, which prizes an economic approach above all else. Galit then poses the crucial question -- if we adapt human rights to this cultural context, will the norms become so diffuse that they will no longer have a significant impact? This is but one of many important thoughts provoked by her excellent article, which is well worth a read.

For world's women, recession goes on

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post about my scholarship on women and international economic law)

Goldman Sachs may be out of the woods, but the Great Recession is not over for the world’s women.

Will it ever be?

Consider these "Facts & Figures on Women, Poverty & Economics," compiled by UNIFEM, the U.N. Development Fund for Women:

► Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property.
► Women constitute around 60% to 80% percent of the export manufacturing workforce in the developing world, a sector the World Bank expects to shrink significantly during the economic crisis.
► The global economic crisis is expected to plunge a further 22 million women into unemployment, which would lead to a female unemployment rate of 7.4 percent (versus 7 percent of male unemployment).

The chasm between the rich and the poor has become unfathomable.

As a recent U.N. study explains, global wealth is distributed "as if one person in a group of ten takes 99% of the total pie and the others share the remaining 1%." Few argue that this is inevitable or unimportant, but there is little consensus on how to proceed.

What should be done?

Who should do it?

These questions should not be left entirely to politicians, economists, and celebrities.

In a recent article, "Theories of Poverty/The Poverty of Theory," 2009 Brigham Young Law Review 381, I consider the usefulness (or not) of legal theory. The article explains how liberal theories in particular dominate post-Cold War approaches to poverty, as shown in three major legal instruments. It then introduces other theories of poverty, those of liberalism’s 'discontents,' conspicuously absent from post-Cold War discourse. The article concludes by focusing on the limits of theory itself in a liberal international system that has neither the legal muscle to effectively address global poverty nor the political will to develop it.

A second article, "Jam Tomorrow: The Limits of International Economic Law," forthcoming in the Boston College Third World Journal, asks whether existing international economic law -- including the law governing and generated by the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank -- has the capacity to realize distributive justice. The question takes on special relevance with the election of an American President explicitly committed to reducing economic inequality (at least domestically).

"Distributive justice" is an ambiguous goal. If we simply mean "more fair than what we have now," "distributive justice" is within easy reach, since we could hardly do worse. As a threshold question, accordingly, it should be established what, exactly, is required for actual "distributive justice." I take as a starting point the relatively modest objective of the Millennium Development Goals — to halve the number living in extreme poverty, i.e., subsisting on less than $1 a day, by 2015. As economist Jeffrey Sachs points out, the wealth is still there. It is just a matter of moving it around.

"Jam Tomorrow" argues that this is not going to happen, because:

► 1st, this is not an objective of international economic law; and

► 2d, even if the political will were there, it would not happen because "international economic law" is not a coherent legal subject with the capacity to make it happen. Neoliberalism cannot be relied upon to produce distributive justice, but neoliberalism is not the only game in town.

Constructive alternatives?

Microfinance is fine, but markets are no silver bullet. For further thought, see, for example:

► Human Rights And The Global Marketplace: Economic, Social And Cultural Dimensions, by Jeanne M. Woods, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, and IntLawGrrl Hope Lewis, Northeastern University School of Law;

► Dr. Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago Law School, on the capabilities approach, in her 2001 book Women and Human Development; and

► The brilliant essay on "Exploitation" by Dr. Susan Marks, King's College London, in the 2008 collection that she edited, entitled International Law on the Left.

(credit for photo of food charity in Australia; credit for woman at handloom in India)

About Gender Action

I just received an e-mail from Gender Action, and thought that other blog readers might be interested in knowing about the recent activities of this Washington, D.C.-based organization. The goal of Gender Action is to ensure equality of participation and benefits for both women and men in the investments of international financial institutions. I attended one of their presentations on gender awareness and World Bank programs.
Here's an excerpt from the e-mail from Gender Action's President Elaine Zuckerman, Programs Director Mande Limbu, and Programs Coordinator Anna Rooke (more information is available on the website):

Gender Action has been hard at work over the past six months developing advocacy campaigns, tools and research publications to hold the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) accountable on their promises to promote gender equality and empower women. Our sixth biannual Update looks back six months at the exciting work we’ve done and great strides we’ve made toward achieving this goal!
New Gender and Climate Change Program!
Last year, Gender Action produced its first paper on gender, climate change and the IFIs in April 2009: Doubling the Damage: World Bank Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) Undermine Climate and Gender Justice. This introductory paper, published with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation, explores the linkages between climate change, gender justice and the World Bank’s new Climate Investment Funds. The paper outlines how the new Funds entirely ignore gender considerations, thus
undermining gender justice and disproportionately harming poor women.
Gender, Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS
Gender Action recently launched a new advocacy campaign called Leveraging IFI Funds for Reproductive Health & HIV/AIDS, which will pressure IFIs to increase and improve their spending on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, as well as remove their loan conditionalities which impede progress toward achieving the reproductive health and HIV/AIDS Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The campaign’s long-term goal is to increase the number of poor women, men, boys and girls with access to high-quality family planning, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS services in the global South. As of June 2009, 27 global and local organizations have joined the campaign!
Linking IFI-Watchers and Gender Justice Groups
Gender Action is bringing gender into the agendas of many existing IFI-watcher groups, which traditionally focused on the environment, transparency and accountability issues but neglected gender dimensions. We are also bringing IFIs into the work of gender justice and women’s rights groups, which have not yet addressed the IFIs.
Gender and Post-Conflict Reconstruction
In early 2009, Gender Action published The Gender Dimensions of Post-Conflict Reconstruction: The Challenges in Development Aid (Elaine Zuckerman & Marcia E. Greenberg) as a chapter in Making Peace Work: The Challenges of Social and Economic Reconstruction (Palgrave MacMillan, UNU-WIDER).

Look On! Considering "Bamako"

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Yes, I know. The movie "Bamako" was made back in 2006, times have changes, and I'm 3 years too late in recommending it. However, I had the opportunity to watch and consider "Bamako" for the first time this weekend, and believe that its message(s) continue(s) to be timely.
In the film, global financial and economic institutions are put on trial in a traditional village. The lives of the villagers go on around the litigants. The film's powerful critiques of the global financial institutions continue to resonate today, highlighting as they do the contradictory effects of development "aid" on African countries. Populations of countries wealthy in resources continue to be poor -- in fact, according to the film's witnesses for the prosecution, the countries and their populations are now poorer than they had been 5 decades ago. The two sides clash over, among other questions, the issue of whether the fault lies with the individual countries' internal corruption and/or incompetence. What is the role of the policies stemming from the ministrations of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank?
Already we are informed that Africa, although not fully integrated into the global economic and financial systems, is suffering the negative effects of the current worldwide crisis. U.K. Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has suggested the restructuring and revision of the global economic and financial system. Consensus on this issue is not imminent and, should one emerge, it will be hard fought.
World leaders and negotiators: Consider "Bamako"!

On September 26

On this day in ...
... 1946, Christine Todd Whitman (left) was born in New Jersey. She was that state's Governor from 1996 to 2001, resigning to serve 2 years as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The author of It's My Party Too (2005), Whitman now leads a consulting firm and is founding co-chair of the Republican Leadership Council, the goal of which "is to support fiscally conservative, socially tolerant candidates and to reclaim the word Republican."
... 2000, thousands of anti-globalization protesters confronted riot police in Prague, Czech Republic, during an International Monetary Fund/World Bank summit. The international meeting would be cut short a day. (photo credit)

On June 11

On this day in ...
... 1963 (45 years ago today), a Buddhist monk burned himself to death in Vietnam, to protest the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Witnesses said the monk, Thich Quang Duc, got out of a car at a busy intersection in the capital city of Saigon, sat in the lotus position as 2 other monks poured gasoline on him, and then ignited the fire, which consumed him in minutes.
... 2005, in London, finance minister from the Group of 8 wealthiest countries agreed to write off $55 billion of the debt owed by 19 of the world's poorest countries. Much of the debt was owed to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the African Development Bank.

In passing: Pearl Cornioley

(Marking the passing of an honorary IntLawGrrl.) Was moved this week by a story about Pearl Cornioley (left), an extraordinary woman who passed away on February 24 in the Loire Valley, France.
She'd been born Cecile Pearl Witherington 93 years earlier in Paris, the daughter of a British family ruined by "[h]er father’s heavy drinking and spendthrift habits." By age 17 she was working as a part-time English teacher. The family fled to London when the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940. But soon after she joined the Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., and was trained to work as an underground courier between Britain and the French Resistance.
Known to her family as Pearl, by code name as Wrestler, by nom de guerre as Pauline, and in wireless transmissions as Marie,

Ms. Cornioley, who was 29 when she was sent to France in 1943, commanded troops who killed 1,000 German soldiers and wounded many more — while suffering only a tiny number of casualties themselves. She presided over the surrender of 18,000 German troops.

After the war she worked as a secretary for the World Bank. She published her memoirs, a book entitled Pauline, in French; English excerpts here. She received many honors, but later in life (right) (photo credits) turned one down because it was aimed at civilians who'd helped Britain:

She sent an icy note saying she had had done nothing remotely 'civil.'

Write On! Transitional Justice & Development

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.) "Transitional Justice and Development" will be the theme of a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Transitional Justice. Editors seek papers for the issue, which, it's hoped, will help to "bridge the gap between the fields of transitional justice, development and peacebuilding" by publishing articles on a host of topics. Here's a sampling of some possible areas of focus:
► establishment of good governance through institutional reform post-conflict
► accountability of state and nonstate actors alike, for wrongdoing such as violations of economic and social rights and economic crimes
► gender, transitional justice, and development
► World Bank policies in post-conflict areas
► poverty and economic development programs as distributive justice or reparations
Deadline for submission, at the journal's website, is June 15, 2008. For further information, e-mail ijtj@csvr.org.za.

African Migration to Europe

President Geoge W. Bush’s trip to Africa last week (he visited Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia) also stimulated some media attention on African migration to Europe. (At left, a 2007 photo of Bush with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.)
African and European policymakers came together at an international conference in Accra, Ghana, to strategize on ways to prevent thousands of deaths and human rights abuses involved in irregular migration flows between the continents. (It's a problem about which IntLawGrrls previously posted here and here; also see report of a similar meeting held in Accra in 2005.)
Migration is not new, nor is it necessarily a “problem.” (See, e.g., a 2007 OECD Report arguing that migration can help improve economic standards in host countries as well as in countries of origin.) Scientists and historians attribute our ancestors' early migrations across Africa and beyond to survival strategies (in response to climate change, hunting patterns, or agricultural needs) and to the desire for conquest, trade, or exploration.
The reasons for contemporary African migrations are familiar: nomadic migrations to follow natural agricultural patterns or trading opportunities, displacement resulting from political persecution or instability, war, famine, or natural disaster.
The Accra conference also focuses on “irregular” economic migration to Europe and the loss of life and human rights abuses that accompany it. Intermittent news stories recount stories of overcrowded and rickety boats going down with dozens of African migrants; estimates put the number of such deaths at more than 1000 per year. Many migrants who arrive by boat come from North Africa. However, due in part to a previously liberal Libyan immigration policy and other recent events, migration from from sub-Saharan Africa is on the increase. Some make dangerous journeys across the Sahara in search of work in North Africa or to boat smugglers who will take them to islands off the mainland of Spain or Italy. More than 20,000 Africans made the boat passage to Italy in 2006 alone. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 7 to 8 million African irregular migrants now live and work in Europe. No one really knows how many have died in the Sahara or on the seas.
Some migrants came from educational and economic backgrounds that allowed them (or their families) to save enough money for the trip. Others simply made their way the best they could.
Migration flows are often gendered in nature—based on the “push” from the home country and the “pull” from the host country. Women and children, for example, make up a large percentage of refugees escaping armed conflict. Male migration seems to predominate in the boat migration to Europe through North Africa.
The complexity of irregular migration status is often ignored by officials in host countries. “Economic migrants,” no matter how difficult their circumstances, are often disparaged and their economic and social rights marginalized. And many such “economic migrants” might also be political asylum seekers who have been persecuted in their home countries. According to the Oxford-based migration researcher Hein de Haas, human rights NGOs have criticized European and Libyan governments for violating the international legal principle of non-refoulement by returning asylum seekers to countries in which they might be tortured or persecuted.
Those who do make it become substantial economic supports for their own families and for home country economies. The World Bank estimates that remittances from African migrants (not all of whom leave the continent) can constitute a significant portion of a home country's GDP. (See World Bank Remittances Factbook 2008 and an AllAfrica.com article discussing the possibility of a World Bank sponsored Diaspora Remittance Investment Fund.
According to the BBC, the Accra conference prioritized two strategies:
1st, the policymakers plan to publicize the life-threatening risks of the migration itself as well as the alienating or abusive conditions many African migrants with irregular status experience while living and working abroad.
2d, conference delegates discussed proposals to increase legally authorized migration targets for African workers with specified skills. Instead of promoting the well-known “brain drain” in which the Global South exports nurses, doctors, and teachers to Europe and North America, some argued for ways to enhance “brain circulation” or “circular migration”—temporary labor migration of skilled workers. The latter approach is not based in altruism; some European countries face labor shortages in certain fields.
Publicizing the dangers is an important start. On the other hand, large-scale temporary work programs may be as controversial in Europe and Africa as they are in the United States. (See 2007 Council on Foreign Relations report on “circular migration.”) But such measures would not address the root causes of large-scale African migrations—the yawning economic and social development gap between Europe and Africa, political instability and the trade in small arms, as well as the human will to risk everything to ensure the survival of those we love.

(photo above right courtesy of Office of U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees)

Guest blogger: Bernadette Atuahene

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to announce today's guest appearance by Professor Bernadette Atuahene (left) of the Chicago-Kent College of Law in 2005, where she focuses her scholarship on confiscation and restitution of property. Before joining the Kent Law faculty she held a number of positions in law and international development: legal consultant for the World Bank; associate at New York's Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton; and human rights investigator for the Center for Economic and Social Rights. While at the last of these, Bernadette received Amnesty International’s Patrick Stewart Human Rights Award on account of her work with human rights organizations in South America. As a Fulbright Scholar, she served as a judicial clerk to Justices Tholie Madala and Sandile Ngcobo of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Bernadette's just headed back to that country for several months' fieldwork.
In her guest post below, Bernadette presents her most recent work, From Reparation to Restoration.
Heartfelt welcome!

On July 26, ...

... 1952 (55 years ago today), Argentina's 1st Lady, Eva Perón, died from cancer in Buenos Aires, "at the presidential residence in the company of her husband General Juan Domingo Perón." Born Maria Eva Duarte 33 years earlier, the daughter of a "poor village landowner who had been separated from his first wife," she would become "one of the most influential women in the Western hemisphere." Supporters deemed her "a dazzling goddess"; her detractors, a "blonde upstart" feted by fascist leaders in Europe. Her life story's the subject of the musical "Evita," noted for its balcony scene and the song "Don't Cry for me, Argentina."
... 1956, after the World Bank refused to support the Aswan High Dam project, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in order to fund the project. He further blockaded Israel's outlet to the Red Sea. Later in the year, Israel would enter Egypt's Sinai peninsula, and Britain and France, whose nationals owned the Company, entered the canal zone. A a ceasefire agreement was reached in November.

Migration Benefits Women

The World Bank recently released a report on International Migration, Economic Development, and Policy that indicates that women are the primary beneficiaries of migration. For example, girls in Pakistan see their rate of school attendance rise 54%, as against 7% for boys, when a family member migrates – the money sent home means the family can afford to send girls, as well as boys, to school. In both Pakistan and Central America, these girls tend to stay in school two years longer than girls without a migrant family member. Migration also seems to affect birthrates, as migrants tend to adopt the behavior prevailing in the countries they work in. For example, wives of Turkish and Moroccan men who have gone to work in Europe have fewer children than do other Turkish and Moroccan women, whereas wives of Egyptian men who go to work in the Gulf countries do not have the same experience. So when we work to implement thoughtful, humane immigration policies, we may also be working to improve female literacy and the numerous benefits that can accompany lower birth rates.

A not so sweet deal?

À propos of the post above respecting a new politics of "global governance," check out "Noblesse Oblige at the World Bank," new column by our colleague José E. Alvarez, President of the American Society of International Law. It raises cogent questions about the "60 year old cozy handshake deal" by which the United States names the head of the World Bank and Europe the head of the International Monetary Fund. (The occasion for these questions is, of course, the hasty departure of Paul Wolfowitz and, consequently, President George W. Bush's nomination of Robert Zoellick.) Alvarez concludes:

Changing the way the Bank chooses its President and making sure that that President is above reproach are good ideas as matters of principle. They also make sense practically – if the Bank is to overcome the perception in borrowing countries that the Bank’s rule-of-law projects are the least effective of its efforts.