This briefing profiles the leading US border security contractors, their related financial campaign contributions during the 2020 elections, and how they have shaped a bipartisan approach in favor of border militarization for more than three decades. It suggests that a real change in border and immigration policies will require the Democrats to break with the industry that helps finance them.

El presente informe examina las principales contratistas de seguridad de fronteras de Estados Unidos, sus contribuciones financieras durante las elecciones en 2020, y el modo en que han configurado un enfoque bipartidista a favor de la militarización de las fronteras durante más de 30 años. El informe sugiere que para lograr un verdadero cambio en las políticas de fronteras e inmigración los demócratas deberán romper con la industria que ayuda a financiarlas.

The 2020 general election was one of disappointment for ethnic nationality parties in Myanmar. Prior to the polls, expectations were high that they would win a larger number of seats than in previous elections. In the event, the National League for Democracy won another landslide victory. NLD gains were largely at the expense of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party. The position of ethnic parties, in contrast, will remain relatively the same.

ရာစုႏွစ္ တစ္ဝက္ေက်ာ္ၾကာ စစ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးေအာက္မွ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းခ်ိန္ အက်ပ္ အတည္းကာလတစ္ခုတြင္ ၂၀၂၀ ခုႏွစ္ အေထြေထြေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲကို လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ စီစဥ္ထားလ်က္ ရွိသည္။

In January 2019 the World Health Organization issued a collection of formal recommendations to reschedule cannabis and cannabis-related substances. 53 member states of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) are set to vote on these recommendations in December 2020.

The 2020 general election is scheduled to take place at a critical moment in Myanmar’s transition from half a century under military rule.

Following its first-ever critical review of cannabis, in January 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a collection of formal recommendations to reschedule cannabis and cannabis-related substances. 53 member states of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), two of which are Caribbean states, are set to vote on these recommendations in December 2020.

This briefing takes a look at the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for refugees and migrants and its anticipated influence on the border security and control market. What are the direct effects on migrants and refugees who are already living in vulnerable situations? What does it mean for people crossing international borders, seeking asylum and transiting the deadly and treacherous migrant routes across regions, continents and seas? And how are they affected by government responses to the outbreak?

The current economic crisis is merely triggered by COVID-19, argues Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. The real causes reside in the specificity of today’s global economic structure and especially in three key features that lie at its core. In this policy brief he discusses these key features with reference to farming and food and presents building blocks for the construction of resilient alternatives to the current crisis.

El Tratado sobre la Carta de la Energía (TCE) otorga amplios derechos a los inversores extranjeros en el sector de la energía. El TCE puede ser usado para impedir una transición energética e blindar las privatizaciones fallidas en el sector de la energía, entre otros. A pesar de la creciente controversia que envuelve a este tratado, muchos países de África, Asia y América Latina están en el proceso de unirse al TCE. Este informe revela los riesgos para los países del Sur Global y las promesas vacías de quienes presionan para que se sumen nuevos países.

In January 2019 the World Health Organization issued a collection of formal recommendations to reschedule cannabis and cannabis-related substances. These present an opportunity for African governments and civil society to further decolonise drug control approaches on the continent, as well as to strengthen the international legal basis for emerging medicinal cannabis programmes in several African countries.

The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) has been exposed as the fossil fuel industry's powerful secret weapon to keep cooking the planet. It is now on the brink of a massive geographical expansion into Africa, Asia and Latin America, threatening to bind yet more countries to corporate-friendly energy policies. This briefing unpacks the risks for developing countries and the empty promises of those pushing for new countries to join.

ဤသုံးသပ္ခ်က္အစီရင္ခံစာအားျဖင့္ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္းရွိ ခါးပတ္လမ္း (BRI) ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈ ဆိုင္ရာ ေဆြးေႏြးမႈမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ ရာတြင္ အေထာက္အကူျပဳနိုင္ဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္ပါသည္။ ရံဖန္ရံခါတြင္ BRI ကို သမၼတရွီက်င္ဖ်င္၏ ခမ္းနားႀကီး က်ယ္သည့္ ဗ်ဴဟာတခု- ဗဟိုမွေသခ်ာအစီအစဥ္ေရးဆြဲကာ ထို႔ေနာက္ လိုက္နာၿပီး နိုင္ငံပိုင္စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္း မ်ားမွလုပ္ေဆာင္ၾကသည့္ ပုံစံျဖင့္ ေျပာဆိုၾကသည္။ နိုင္ငံေပါင္း ၁၃၆ နိုင္ငံ မွ တ႐ုတ္တို႔၏ နိုင္ငံျခားတိုက္ရိုက္ရင္းႏွီး ျမႇုပ္ႏွံမႈပမာဏ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၉၀ ဘီလီယံ လက္ခံရရွိၿပီး တ႐ုတ္နိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ကုန္သြယ္မႈပမာဏ ေဒၚလာ ၆ ထရီလီယံ ရွိသည္။ ထိုေၾကာင့္ BRI သည္ အင္အားႀကီးမားစြာ ေပါင္းစပ္စုစည္းသြားမည့္ တားဆီးေရွာင္လႊဲ၍မရနိုင္ေသာ စီမံကိန္းႀကီး အသြင္ေဆာင္ေနေပသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ယခုအစီရင္ခံစာအေနျဖင့္ နိုင္ငံေရးေဘာဂေဗဒအေျခခံသုံးသပ္ခ်က္မ်ားအသုံးျပဳကာ BRI သည္ ခမ္းနား ႀကီးက်ယ္လွသည့္ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာမဟုတ္ပဲ အမွန္တကယ္တြင္ တ႐ုတ္နိုင္ငံ၏ အရင္းရွင္ စနစ္အၾကပ္ အတည္းကို ေျဖရွင္းဖို႔ရည္ရြယ္ထားသည့္ ေလ်ာ့ရဲက်ယ္ျပန႔္လွသည့္ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားႏွင့္ တည္ေဆာက္ထားသည့္ မူေဘာင္တစ္ခု သာျဖစ္သည္ဟု သုံးသပ္ထားပါသည္။ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံတြင္းရွိ BRI စီမံကိန္း ၄ခုကို တ႐ုတ္ဘာသာစကားအသုံးျပဳထားသည့္ သတင္းအရင္းအျမစ္မ်ားကိုသုံးကာ တ႐ုတ္နိုင္ငံပိုင္စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ႏွင့္ ယူနန္ျပည္နယ္အစိုးရတို႔အေနျဖင့္ တ႐ုတ္ဗဟိုအစိုးရ၏ အေထာက္အပံ့ျဖင့္ ထိုစီမံကိန္းမ်ား ေဆာင္ရြက္နိုင္ရန္ မည္ကဲ့သို႔ စည္း႐ုံးသိမ္းသြင္းမႈမ်ား ေဆာင္ရြက္သည္ကို ေလ့လာမႈျပဳထားပါသည္။

In November 2018, the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination adopted the ‘UN system common position supporting the implementation of the international drug control policy through effective inter-agency collaboration’, expressing the shared drug policy principles of all UN organisations and committing them to speak with one voice.

This briefing aims to deepen discussion on the Belt and Road Iniatiative (BRI) in Myanmar. The BRI is often described as a ‘grand strategy’ led by President Xi Jinping, centrally planned and rolled out by obedient state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The sheer size of the initiative – 136 countries have received US$90 billion in Chinese foreign direct investment and exchanged US$6 trillion in trade with China - can make the BRI appear monolithic and inevitable. However, using a political economy analysis, this briefing demonstrates that the BRI is not a grand strategy, but a broad framework of activities that seek to address a crisis in Chinese capitalism. An examination of four BRI projects in Myanmar using Chinese language sources shows the extent of lobbying by Chinese SOEs and the Yunnan provincial government to promote the projects, with support from the central Chinese government.

In July 2016, the Colombian government enacted Law 1787, which regulates the use of medicinal cannabis and its trade in the country. With this decision and a series of subsequent resolutions, Colombia joined the more than a dozen countries that have put into practice different types of regulation to explore the advantages of this plant as an alternative pharmaceutical.

El Comité de Expertos en Farmacodependencia (ECDD por sus siglas en inglés, o Comité de Expertos) de la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) publicó en enero de 2019 los resultados del primer examen crítico del cannabis, en los que recomienda que se introduzcan algunos cambios en la clasificación actual de las sustancias relacionadas con el cannabis en virtud de los tratados de fiscalización de drogas de las Naciones Unidas.

In order to better understand the situation around, and possibilities for, local and regional cannabis regulation, a series of six country reports were developed. The country reports provide detailed information about the state of cannabis policy, and the possibilities for change, within each country. This briefing identifies some of the key findings and implications for policy makers and advocates from this research.

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.