Rio de Janeiro is infamous for violence. In the city’s large, informal shantytowns known as favelas, violent drug gangs rule with impunity while a corrupt and murderous police force contributes to distrust of formal government. With Rio scheduled to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, pressure to tame the favelas and reduce violent crime is high. Facing the need to try something new, in 2008 Rio’s leadership introduced an innovative, community-oriented policing program known as UPP in an attempt to “pacify” the favelas. The program represents a paradigm shift in policing methods, focused on breaking down the adversarial relationships between favela residents and police and encouraging community involvement and integration. It has shown impressive progress: in favelas that have received UPPs, murder rates have fallen to nearly zero. However, much remains to be done--the UPPs are an expensive fraction of the police force, and skeptics worry that if the UPP’s leave, all progress will be lost. The challenge, then, and the focus of this Task Force, is to ensure that the favelas are integrated and supported in a way that preserves the progress that has been made and fosters permanent change. Each of the 11 chapters within this Task Force presents policy recommendations prepared for the Public Security Secretary of Rio de Janeiro José Beltrame, and as such, are tailored to his position and responsibilities. Subjects include reforms within the police force, such as improvements in police training, organization, and working conditions, as well as policies intended to promote integration of the favelas into the formal city, including methods to improve education and access to healthcare, implementing programs to target at-risk youth, and providing economic opportunities for favela residents.

Evaluation of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict by analysis through a historical framework, centered on the events and ideologies of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa in the early 1990’s, provides a template for enhancing human rights efforts in the present-day Middle Eastern crisis. Comparison of this conflict against a successful internal political shift to promote peace presents the foundation for research in which the synergistic combination of knowledge gained through human rights coursework applies to a current humanitarian dilemma. The cooperative relationship between theories of international studies, historical analysis, and political structural components will help contribute to the ongoing dialogue about the paradigm shift in Israeli-Palestinian relations that is so urgently needed. Methodology for this research relies heavily on the historical framework of the grassroots movement to overthrow the apartheid system in South Africa. Theories of international and national conflicts from coursework in the Jackson School of International Studies, as well as firsthand accounts of the state of affairs in the Middle East gathered through field research in sociology, contextualize the problem within a larger historical and analytical picture. The implications of this research therefore centers on human rights promotion and enhancement with regards to a modern-day conflict. This critical investigation allows for active understanding rather than passive scholarly observance of a deadly and drawn-out battle for land, identity, freedom, and dignity.

Once subjected to an extractive history of British colonial and Indian national imperatives and ignored by development institutions, the mountainous region of Kumaon, Uttarakhand now thrives in its current development trends. Given that developers and donors disregarded the region while much of the rest of India prospered, it seems incongruous that the region should now be succeeding in its own development. This project asks why the isolated and “underdeveloped” region of Kumaon that was “left behind” by mainstream development and has only recently emerged is now able to succeed in its own grassroots development. My thesis posits an answer grounded in the notions of agency and identity politics in regional social movements and development vision. I examine the interdependency between the environment and social and historical processes, which informs my analysis of local development strategy regarding regional preferences for grass use in livelihood practices. The analysis employs data collected through qualitative, ethnographic interview processes and participant observation in the field. Supplementing the primary data with literature on identity assertion as a response to colonial and neocolonial processes, I argue that Kumaon has thrived and created significant agricultural development, notwithstanding the lack of outside aid, because development there is inextricably linked to regional movements for social change. These social movements have distinguished Kumaon from national trends of development and have led to the emergence of a conservationist and rights-oriented regional identity, which has helped form a particular vision for Kumaoni development focused on the environmental rights of the people.

Since the international ban on the ivory trade in 1989, environmental science has been constructed as a ‘value-neutral’ and ‘objective’ realm in which elephant conservation is expressed as a universal reality. However, preservationist formulations of environmental science have been privileged over their utilitarian counterparts, precluding many Southern African countries from employing science-based arguments in favor of sustainable ivory harvesting. Concurrently, the relatively recent global transition from consuming elephant bodies to consuming elephant imageries has facilitated the production of a wildlife-based international tourism market, as well as reinforced the belief in delineated conservation areas. In this context, transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) have gained traction as a means of simultaneously restoring historic elephant ranges and promoting regional tourism to benefit African elephants and economies alike. As a result, environmental science as a political tool has been utilized to produce elephants as either regional or global resources, silencing local and national claims to elephant populations and related management. In the process, placed-based frustrations for local communities associated with problematic elephant populations and related human-wildlife conflict have been subsumed under the importance of the regional environment and national economic development. To explore science’s role in framing and understanding environmental problems, I analyze how scientific concepts such as biodiversity and the precautionary principle are utilized in international conservation policy and the elephant management debate, with particular emphasis on Botswana. I aim to show that science is neither ‘objective’ nor ‘neutral’ but instead is a field with international politics that recommend vastly different philosophical and ethical ways of understanding humanity’s role in the environment.

The Arctic is receving global attention as climate change transforms the region. With increased interest in natural resources and sovereignty issues, the security discourse in the Arctic is also changing. This Taskforce report seeks to understand Arctic security as the capacity for communities and states to build sustainable and resilient systems and to assert a representative voice, in arenas of diplomacy and negotiating power. The Taskforce group spent one week in Quebec City and Ottawa, Canada gathering research with scholars, government officials, and Inuit leaders. This report combines relevant literature with these engagements to understand the evolution of Arctic security. Aspects of security discussed include: the Northwest Passage, devolution of resources, Quebec’s Arctic policy, tourism, food security, biodiversity, homelessness, education, the Arctic Council, and China’s role in the Arctic. Each chapter provides specific policy options that together form a model for building capacity for communities.