Brown Journal of World Affairs
20.1 Fall/Winter 2013
http://www.bjwa.org/index.php?subpage=currentissue

The Fight is for Women’s Rights
Michael Soussan
Abstract
When Daniel Cruise, Alex Scribner, and I started the Brown Journal of World Affairs 20 years ago, the cause of women’s rights was hardly on the forefront of the international agenda. When we marched for women’s rights causes, it was to support abortion rights in the United States. At the international level, policymakers and academics most often considered women’s rights as a development challenge. Dramatic circumstances have since made women’s rights one of the overarching security challenges of the international system and the single most productive area for investment worldwide in pursuit of further democratization, peace, and prosperity.
The conclusion is not simply derived from either the bad news—such as horrible acts of violence against women spanning from West and East Africa to the Middle East and South Asia, where most of the political instability in the globe persists—or even from the good news—such as advances in microcredit and the proven benefits of family planning, women’s education, and the strengthening of constitutional rights for women. It is derived from a macro-level analysis of the international system as it has evolved in the past 20 years. The following retrospective guides my firm belief today that the central focus of U.S. efforts, as the United States interacts with societies in conflict around the globe, must be on empowering women—and creating a powerful system of incentives and retribution for governments to get on board with this objective.

Meeting the Health Care Needs of Aging Societies
John W. Rowe & Linda P. Fried
Abstract
It is ironic that one of civilization’s greatest accomplishments—the dramatic and progressive increase in life expectancy around the globe—has also yielded one of its greatest challenges. Worldwide, countries struggle to develop effective approaches to design and finance health care services for their rapidly increasing numbers of older persons. Aging is universal in today’s world, and the progressive shift to longer life expectancies and lower fertility rates has led to numerous “aging societies.”
In discussions of national responses to the demographic transition, the observation “developed countries became rich before they grew old while poor countries are growing old before becoming rich” often serves to bifurcate the conversation into separate groups of national experiences and strategies based on GDP. We believe this division of debate into countries grouped by wealth diminishes recognition of the important commonalities both developed and developing nations face in dealing with their populations’ longer lives.

A 20-Year Perspective on Rural Poverty and Sustainability: Where are we Today?
Andrew Shephard
[No abstract]

Decreasing Gender Inequality in Agriculture: Key to Eradicating Hunger
Marcela Villarreal
[No abstract]