Currently viewing the tag: "illicit trade"

This is a lesson in recycling, that the United States government and defense industry have been slow to learn, and the result could look something like an arms race that the United States is waging with itself, in which it provides proxy groups or allies with arms and training. These proxy groups re-form and radicalize or the weapons fall into the hands of groups labeled as terrorists by the United States. In response, the United States invests large amounts of money in military technology to combat terrorism and provides yet more arms to groups that assist it in fighting terrorism globally.

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By Matt Herbert and David Knoll
The MT Smyrni, a Liberian flagged Tanker, was sailing 250 nautical miles off the Omani coast when pirates were sighted. The pirates closed fast, attacking with automatic weapons. The crew was able to drive the pirates off once, but a second attack overwhelmed the Smyrni. Within moments the […]

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In Africa and the War on Drugs, Carrier and Klantschnig provide an insightful overview of the history of African drug production, trade, consumption and policy, with a particular focus on khat and cannabis. While less informative on the history of the trade and use of heroin and cocaine, the book provides important insights into recent […]

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But surely the discovery that there is a political economy of conflict has had more to do with shifting geopolitical winds than a sudden transformation in the nature of warfare itself. This does not mean to suggest that conflict and the global context within which it takes place have not changed at all, but rather to simply point out that the end of the Cold War is what created the political opening to bring political economy more centrally into the study of conflict in the first place.

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