• Barbara Crossette

    About Barbara Crossette

    Barbara Crossette is a fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of CUNY as well as the United Nations correspondent for The Nation. She is also a board member of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Previously, Crossette was the UN bureau chief for The New York Times from 1994 to 2001 and before that its chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia. She is the author of "So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas," "The Great Hill Stations of Asia" and a Foreign Policy Association study, "India: Old Civilizations in a New World."

    Crossette won the George Polk award for her coverage in India of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and the 2010 Shorenstein Prize for her writing on Asia.

     

    Ban Ki-moon Backs Emergency Steps for Women Raped in Conflict

    by  • April 19, 2013 • Africa, Secretary-General, Uncategorized, Women's Issues • 2 Comments

    Congo women exhibition

    With the issues of emergency contraception — the “morning after” pill — and abortion still topics of tremendous controversy among United Nations members, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has recommended that both should be offered as part of an international response to the rape of women in conflict situations. Writing in his first report on the subject [...]

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    A Traditional Chief Slashes Maternal Deaths in Malawi

    by  • April 18, 2013 • Africa, Health and Population, Women's Issues • 1 Comment

    Joyce Banda and Chief Kwataine of Malawi

    The heroes of safe motherhood campaigns around the world are not always women or large global aid organizations working for their interests. In a district of central Malawi, a small, very poor southern African country, Kwataine, a hereditary chief in a rural area who goes by one name, has almost single-handedly made deaths in pregnancy [...]

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    Burma, a Short History

    by  • April 15, 2013 • Asia, Development • 

    Burma Resistance Day

    When Burma won independence from Britain in 1948, it was a devastated country tormented by multiple crises. Geographical misfortune had placed this otherworldly Buddhist nation in the path of powerful armies in World War II as Japan battled Western allies for control of the strategically placed country. Its capital city, Rangoon, was heavily damaged; the [...]

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    Nations Reject Gender Violence, but the Suffering Endures

    by  • March 27, 2013 • Special Report, Women's Issues • 4 Comments

    Nepal flash mob

    The 57th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women ended in mid-March more with a sigh of relief than with jubilation. The commission, comprising 45 national delegations, managed to reach a final agreement (which it could not do last year) without losing ground on women’s rights that had been gained, at [...]

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    Signals of Greater Times Buoy Developing Nations

    by  • March 13, 2013 • Africa, Asia, Development, Health and Population, Millennium Goals, Special Report • 7 Comments

    A displaced person in Mali.

    For the developing world, the news in the 2013 United Nations Human Development Report is almost all good. (More on that “almost” later.) The title of the report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, sets the tone. New players with global clout, increased South-South trade and investment, strengthening regional institutions [...]

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    A US Diplomat Blasts UN Working Methods and Costs

    by  • March 6, 2013 • General Assembly, US-UN Relations • 

    Joseph M. Torsella, a US ambassador

    Not quite two years into his term as the United States representative for UN management and reform, an angry Ambassador Joseph M. Torsella has had enough. In some recent speeches, Torsella, a former head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (and obviously not a diplomat by training) has turned to exasperation and sarcasm to [...]

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    Giving Parliaments a Bigger Role in Good Governance

    by  • February 25, 2013 • General Assembly, Governance, US-UN Relations • 

    Ireland's representatives at IPU Main Assembly meeting 2012

    Armed with a five-year strategy to strengthen the influence of national legislatures around the world, the Inter-Parliamentary Union is supporting international gatherings of legislators to discuss their role in fostering democracy, good government and effective development policies beyond the 2015 target date of the Millennium Development Goals. The next meeting, with parliamentarians from Asia, Africa [...]

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    Population Trends Disrupt Old Ideas in the Global North and South

    by  • February 5, 2013 • Development, Health and Population, Women's Issues • 1 Comment

    Refugees in Burkina Faso

    RIO GRANDE, Puerto Rico — The line used to be clearer between rich and poorer nations when discussions turned to a country’s ideal population size. In the industrial global north and the tiger economies of East Asia, family sizes shrank steadily over decades and economies grew. Small was good. In poorer countries, fertility often remained [...]

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