This article focusses on TNCs as global actors, the structures and mechanisms that grant them impunity for wrong doing, and the deepening and widespread popular resistance to TNC extractivism and destruction of the planet.
How is the peace process in Myanmar going? What progress has been made toward reform? After decades under military rule, the 21st Century Panglong Conference has been welcomed as the most encouraging recent initiative to address humanitarian suffering and national instability. It prioritises ethnic peace and political reform at a moment of opportunity for national reconciliation. However, as ethnic conflict and refugee displacement continue worrying failings have started to appear, raising many warnings from the country’s troubled history.
TNI’s work is in the news almost every working day of the year. Together with our partners, we enjoy wide coverage in national and international news outlets from around the world. Here are some of the highlights from 2020 of which we are particularly proud.
What are the implications of the rise of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) for agrarian and environmental transformations, worldwide and in the BRICS countries in particular? This is the main issue with which the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS) has been concerned since 2013, when it was launched in Beijing by a collective of largely BRICS-based research institutions1.
The TNI/CEDD (Colectivo de Estudios Drogas y Derecho / Research Consortium on Drugs and the Law ) Drug Law Reform Project promotes more effective and humane drug policies through analysis of existing drug control policies and by promoting dialogue among key stakeholders and decision-makers. The project is focused on Latin America and hopes to stimulate reforms by pointing out good practices and lessons learned in areas such as proportionality of sentences, prison reform, and the status of the coca leaf in the international conventions.
Around the world, millions of people depend on the cultivation of coca, opium poppy and cannabis for basic subsistence. The 1961 Convention introduced strict controls on the cultivation of these plants and banned centuries-old traditional medicinal, cultural and ceremonial uses. The 1988 Convention reinforced those provisions, obliging states to eradicate illicit cultivation and to impose criminal sanctions.
John Walsh, Martin Jelsma, Tom Blickman, David Bewley-Taylor
19 March 2019
Policy briefing
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD or Expert Committee) released in January 2019 the outcomes of the first-ever critical review of cannabis, recommending a series of changes in the current scheduling of cannabis-related substances under the UN drug control conventions.
Countries that embrace legal regulation find themselves in breach of international law. In this video, we explain a strategy to resolve those treaty tensions and to enable progressive and sustainable change at the global level.
What are drugs and why are they controlled? What are the benefits and harms of taking drugs? How public health policies can address drug use? Learn the answers to these questions and more in the free online course 'Drugs, drug use, drug policy and health'.
Multistakeholderism has become a new buzzword for global governance, shaping standards for products, setting the rules for global initiatives and increasingly entering every arena of global governance including the UN. They are driven by transnational corporations to consolidate power and profits and have disturbing implications for democracy, accountability and for communities most affected by corporate human rights violations.
A week after the US elections, TNI and the Institute for Policy Studies will host a conversation with US and global scholars and activists to analyse the election outcome and look at the global consequences of these unprecedented elections.
Law is fundamentally limited in its potential to challenge corporations' power and their harm, because the law has been created to facilitate capitalist accumulation and therefore the rights of the property-owning class to force others to submit to its will. It cannot, therefore, be expected to have any emancipatory potential.
He was called a "socialist showman" and "elected autocrat", derided as a blind hater of the United States, and ridiculed as a demagogue who splurged his country's great oil wealth on ill-conceived populist schemes, distributed largesse to undeserving regimes in the neighbourhood, ran the nation's economy into the ground, and sharply polarised its society.
The admission by UN's lead agency for drugs, the UNODC, that “the drug market is thriving” in its 2017 World Drug Report is an important one given that it is months away from 2019 – the target date by which governments committed to “significantly reduce or eliminate” the global drug market. At the recent annual gathering of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna, this abysmal failure to claim any progress towards these ‘drug-free’ targets was the backdrop to the latest round of tense negotiations on global drug control.
When the Dutch government liberalised cannabis policy in 1976, they understood that the legalisation and regulation of cannabis was actually the best solution, or at least the least bad one.
