Travelling with medications and medical equipment across international borders

The international traveller needs to plan ahead to ensure medicines are available and used as directed for optimal therapeutic outcome. The planning needs to take account of legal and customs requirements for travelling with medicines for personal use. The standard advice by travel health providers is that travellers should check with the country of destination for requirements when travelling into the country with medicines for personal use. This is akin to introducing a barrier to care for this category of travellers. Innovative method of care for this group of traveller is needed.

Leadership across international borders: A case study of an environmental leader

This paper focuses on the story of a well-respected leader known for his tireless work in promoting and preserving the environment both within Australia and internationally. It highlights the contextual factors that have influenced and continue to influence his thinking about leadership as well as the key values he embodies as a leader. The paper begins by considering some of the salient leadership literature in the field. The next part of the paper reviews the qualitative methodology that steered the research for this paper. Following on, the paper provides a snapshot of the life forces and context that played an important role in shaping the leader’s views and practices. Finally, the paper provides an analytical discussion of the leader’s practices in the light of two well-known leadership frameworks.

The Healthy Trends of International Relations Research

As the end of the Cold War approached in 1989, Caroline Thomas argued: “It is important that the discipline [International Relations, IR] should address the issue of disease and more broadly, health, not simply to facilitate containment of disease transmission across international borders but also because central notions of justice, equity, efficiency and order are involved” (1989:273).1 Ten years later, Craig Murphy echoed these sentiments. Murphy (2001: 352) proposed that IR had yet to grapple with the political consequences of growing inequality between the world’s rich and poor, and areas such as health—where these inequalities were most stark—should become the field’s core business. How IR’s theories and methods would approach these issues was less clear. Bettcher and Yach (1998) cautioned that IR would be unable to develop progressive research projects that explored global health diplomacy as a global public good without adopting new perspectives and methods. Others warned that the expansion of security studies into areas such as global health would weaken the intellectual coherency of the field (Walt 1991:213). Taking its cue from the recent Ng and Prah Ruger (2011) study, this paper returns to these concerns to briefly explore key trends and potential future concerns of research in IR on health...

Cross-Border Unitization and Joint Development Agreements: An International Law Perspective

Okoye, Adaeze, et al, 'Cross-Border Unitization and Joint Development Agreements: An International Law Perspective', Houston Journal of International Law (2007) 29(2) pp.355-425 RAE2008

A virtual contradiction between international migration and human rights

Includes bibliography

A virtual contradiction between international migration and human rights

Abstract If there is a geographical area that will be particularly affected by the tragedy of September 11, that will be the international borders of the United States. It is understandable that a country that enters in a state of war after been attacked with enormous losses, reacts by closing its international borders. Such immediate reaction has now been substituted by a more strict control over everything that crosses the border but, a fact remains, the border life is not going to be what it used to before September 11. In the short run, everything that crosses the border has slowed down by new controls. In the long run many things will return to what it was before that Tuesday, but for a long while, life at the border will not be the same. An intense interaction of more than twelve million people from the two sides of the U.S.-Mexico border have made us live in many instances as if the border does not exist. This is the case among many of us in the way we practice our family life. For the planning of weddings, birthdays, reunions, ceremonies, the border is more virtual than real. This is reversed as we get more serious in what it means to the space where institutions, the laws and the governments reminds us that there is a line that marks the beginning and the end of two different nations.

Engaging autobiography:mobility trauma and international relations

This article outlines the possibilities of autobiographical stories to criticize status quo iterations of International Relations (IR). The article draws on the personal experiences of the author’s deportation order issued by the United Kingdom’s Home Office and its associated Border Agency (UKBA) to challenge the accepted assumptions of a cosmopolitan worldview as it relates to orderly international institutional design. It highlights the possibilities of trauma when border management and personal mobility collide. It suggests that mobility trauma ensues when the expectations of human mobility, outlined in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, infringe the state’s role as security provider. It begins in part one with a challenge to the traditional role and understanding of international borders that sustain order within the international. It examines the unacknowledged role that human vulnerability plays within IR and institutional design while frankly engaging with human vulnerability and trauma in the second section. This section details the experiences of the author when her mobility rights were curtailed and the ensuing identity crisis prompted by such events. The final section investigates the ideas of critical cosmopolitan scholarship demanding that such discourses acknowledge and work through the possibility of failed agency when the demands of state security supersede individual mobility rights. It turns to the possibility of traumatic iterations of IR in order to probe such possibilities. The article suggests, in its conclusion, the possibility of storytelling and psychoanalysis to endorse unorthodox agency, and the possibility of a dynamic international institutional design, that challenges the status quo iterations of IR.

MAGGnet: an international network to foster mitigation of agricultural greenhouse gases.

Research networks provide a framework for review, synthesis and systematic testing of theories by multiple scientists across international borders critical for addressing global-scale issues. In 2012, a GHG research network referred to as MAGGnet (Managing Agricultural Greenhouse Gases Network) was established within the Croplands Research Group of the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases (GRA). With involvement from 46 alliance member countries, MAGGnet seeks to provide a platform for the inventory and analysis of agricultural GHG mitigation research throughout the world. To date, metadata from 315 experimental studies in 20 countries have been compiled using a standardized spreadsheet. Most studies were completed (74%) and conducted within a 1-3-year duration (68%). Soil carbon and nitrous oxide emissions were measured in over 80% of the studies. Among plant variables, grain yield was assessed across studies most frequently (56%), followed by stover (35%) and root (9%) biomass. MAGGnet has contributed to modeling efforts and has spurred other research groups in the GRA to collect experimental site metadata using an adapted spreadsheet. With continued growth and investment, MAGGnet will leverage limited-resource investments by any one country to produce an inclusive, globally shared meta-database focused on the science of GHG mitigation.

Which way up? Reading and drawing maps of the blogosphere

Mapping the physical world, the arrangement of continents and oceans, cities and villages, mountains and deserts, while not without its own contentious aspects, can at least draw upon centuries of previous work in cartography and discovery. To map virtual spaces is another challenge altogether. Are cartographic conventions applicable to depictions of the blogosphere, or the internet in general? Is a more mathematical approach required to even start to make sense of the shape of the blogosphere, to understand the network created by and between blogs? With my research comparing information flows in the Australian and French political blogs, visualising the data obtained is important as it can demonstrate the spread of ideas and topics across blogs. However, how best to depict the flows, links, and the spaces between is still unclear. Is network theory and systems of hubs and nodes more relevant than mass communication theories to the research at hand, influencing the nature of any map produced? Is it even a good idea to try and apply boundaries like ‘Australian’ and ‘French’ to parts of a map that does not reflect international borders or the Mercator projection? While drawing upon some of my work-in-progress, this paper will also evaluate previous maps of the blogosphere and approaches to depicting networks of blogs. As such, the paper will provide a greater awareness of the tools available and the strengths and limitations of mapping methodologies, helping to shape the direction of my research in a field still very much under development.

Water rights and water governance : a cautionary tale and the case for interdisciplinary governance

Although Australia is the world’s driest continent without the complication of international borders and a generally good governance reputation, its record of water governance is very poor. This chapter considers some of the potentially general lessons that might be derived for water governance. These include: the difficulties of delineatingwater rights; the apparent preference for creating property rights in unsustainable uses of water while failing to deliver basic water rights; the inter twining of carbon and water crises; the dangers of privatising networks that form natural monopolies; the dangers of disciplinary hubris where interdisciplinary understanding is critical. It concludes by starting to address some of the water governance issues raised by globalisation.

Why do nurses migrate? – a review of recent literature

Aim  To identify the reasons why nurses continue migrating across international borders. Background  International nurse recruitment and migration have been increasing in the last decade and recent trends show an increase in the movement of nurses between developing and developed countries, resulting in a worldwide shortage of nurses. Methods  A manual and electronic database literature search was conducted from January 2004 to May 2010. Qualitative content analysis was completed for the final 17 articles that satisfied the inclusion criteria. Results  Motivators to nurse migration were linked to financial, professional, political, social and personal factors. Although economic factors were the most commonly reported, they were not the only reason for migration. This was especially evident among nurses migrating between developed countries. Conclusion  Nurses migrate for a wide variety of reasons as they respond to push and pull factors. Implications for nursing management  It is important for nurse managers in the source countries to advocate incentives to retain nurses. In the recipient countries the number of international nurses continues to increase implying the need for more innovative ways to mentor and orientate these nurses.

Spatial Patterns of Malaria Reported Deaths in Yunnan Province, China

Malaria has been a heavy social and health burden in the remote and poor areas in southern China. Analyses of malaria epidemic patterns can uncover important features of malaria transmission. This study identified spatial clusters, seasonal patterns, and geographic variations of malaria deaths at a county level in Yunnan, China, during 1991–2010. A discrete Poisson model was used to identify purely spatial clusters of malaria deaths. Logistic regression analysis was performed to detect changes in geographic patterns. The results show that malaria mortality had declined in Yunnan over the study period and the most likely spatial clusters (relative risk [RR] = 23.03–32.06, P < 0.001) of malaria deaths were identified in western Yunnan along the China–Myanmar border. The highest risk of malaria deaths occurred in autumn (RR = 58.91, P < 0.001) and summer (RR = 31.91, P < 0.001). The results suggested that the geographic distribution of malaria deaths was significantly changed with longitude, which indicated there was decreased mortality of malaria in eastern areas over the last two decades, although there was no significant change in latitude during the same period. Public health interventions should target populations in western Yunnan along border areas, especially focusing on floating populations crossing international borders.

National security and pandemics

Pandemics are for the most part disease outbreaks that become widespread as a result of the spread of human-to-human infection. Beyond the debilitating, sometimes fatal, consequences for those directly affected, pandemics have a range of negative social, economic and political consequences. These tend to be greater where the pandemic is a novel pathogen, has a high mortality and/or hospitalization rate and is easily spread. According to Lee Jong-wook, former Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), pandemics do not respect international borders. Therefore, they have the potential to weaken many societies, political systems and economies simultaneously.