A team of researchers at the NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Social Science Division and Oxford University have published a new study that explores the extent that violence in a country affects uncertainty of the age at death, also referred to as lifetime uncertainty, a key – yet often underappreciated – public health indicator. After hypothesizing...
Shaking a traditional rattle, Brazil’s incoming head of Indigenous affairs recently walked through every corner of the agency’s headquarters — even its coffee room — as she invoked help from ancestors during a ritual cleansing. The ritual carried extra meaning for Joenia Wapichana, Brazil’s first Indigenous woman to command the agency charged with protecting the...
In the waning hours of the year’s biggest climate change conference – COP27 – we learned of a deal to create a loss and damage fund. This is essentially a source of finance to compensate poor countries for the pain they are incurring because of climate change. An often-cited example of such suffering is the...
Mothers in Egypt, where women’s employment remains ‘concerningly low’, can play an important part in shaping their daughters’ employment stability from a young age, says new research by Lancaster University. The study, by Dr. Mariam Abouelenin and Professor Yang Hu, of Lancaster University, looked at Egyptian mothers’ employment during their daughter’s adolescence and found that...
Yordán Díaz Gonzales pulled weeds from his fields with a tractor until Cuba’s summer rainy season turned them into foot-deep red mud. Now it takes five farmhands to tend to Díaz’s crop. That shrinks Diaz’s profit margin and lowers Cuba‘s agricultural productivity, already burdened by a U.S. embargo and an unproductive state-controlled economy. Like the...
Transmigration programs are known to have relocated millions of people from the centers of domestic economies to the national geographical peripheries to support a more equitable resource distribution. The practice is salient to the nation-building process in many developing countries, most notably in Indonesia, dating back to the 1905 Dutch settlement programs pre-independence. The transmigration...
The Atacama desert, which stretches for approximately 1,600 km along the western coast of the cone of South America, is the driest place on Earth. Some weather stations there have never recorded rainfall throughout their existence. But it‘s far from barren: many species live here that occur nowhere else, adapted to its extreme conditions. And...
It was a deal that brought together oligarchs from some of America’s top adversaries. “The key is the cash,” the oil broker wrote in a text message, offering a deep discount on Venezuelan crude shipments to an associate who claimed to be fronting for the owner of Russia’s biggest aluminum company. “As soon as you...
An estimated 281 million migrants span the globe. The remittances they send home get a lot of attention from policymakers and development agencies like the World Bank due to their positive impacts on developing economies. This is because the movement of money is – for the most part – quantifiable, as much of it goes...
A movement known as “new animism,” which seeks to secure personhood rights for nonhuman beings through legal means, is gaining a following around the globe. New animist environmental activists are not the only ones using the term. Animism itself has become fashionable. Some spirituality bloggers talk about animism as a way to deepen one’s spiritual...
