The Corner House publishes regular briefing papers on a range of topics. We can send you notification via email whenever a new briefing paper is put up on this website or we can email you the full document in either PDF or Text versions. Each briefing is also published in a printed paper format; please contact us for further details.
by Elizabeth L. Krause
briefing | published July 2006 | summary | PDF
Supposedly scientific demographic reports and alarms about low birthrates, ageing and immigration in Italy, and the catastrophic societal consequences that are predicted to flow from them, enable racism by stimulating a climate of fear and anxiety toward immigrants. They reinforce xenophobic notions in which racism is "coded as culture" rather than on supposedly objective somatic or visual differences.
by Richard Minns with Sarah Sexton
briefing | published May 2006 | summary | full document | PDF
This briefing outlines the different ways in which countries have financed both social security for older people and economic production. It describes the rise of the private model of pensions and the influence of pension funds on capital flows around the world. It then summarises and critiques the main justifications given for expanding private pension schemes, and analyses the motivations of the groups that perpetuate this model.
by Anne Hendrixson
briefing | published December 2004 | summary | full document | PDF
'Youth-bulge' theory refers to the large proportion of the world's population under 27 years old who are supposedly prone to violence. Images of angry young men of colour as potential terrorists and veiled young women as victims of repressive regimes support the theory. The implied threat of explosive violence and explosive fertility provides a rationale for US military intervention and population control initiatives in other countries and justifies government surveillance of Muslims and Arabs within US borders.
by Joseph Hanlon
briefing | published October 2004 | summary | full document | PDF
Northern aid donors demand that Southern countries tackle corruption, but continue to require them to implement economic liberalisation policies that increase corruption. In Mozambique, corruption has grown to high levels because of increasing intervention by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and bilateral aid donors in support of liberalisation, facilitated by tacit alliances between donors and a section of the Mozambican elite.
by Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite
briefing | published September 2004 | summary | full document | PDF
When TRIPS was signed in 1994, the United States, Europe and Japan dominated the world's software, pharmaceutical, chemical and entertainment industries. The rest of the world had little to gain by agreeing to these terms of trade for intellectual property. They did so because a failure of democratic processes nationally and internationally enabled a small group of men within the United States to capture the US trade-agenda-setting process, to draft intellectual property principles that became the blueprint for TRIPS and to crush resistance through US trade power.
by Sumati Nair and Preeti Kirbat with Sarah Sexton
briefing | published June 2004 | summary | full document | PDF
This briefing evaluates the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development. It assesses several processes that affect women's reproductive and sexual rights and health: the decline and collapse in health services; neo-liberal economic policies and religious fundamentalisms; and development policies underpinned by neo-Malthusianism.
by Dr Susan Hawley
briefing | published December 2003 | summary | full document | PDF
The taxpayer-backed export credit agencies of industrialised countries are underwriting the bribery and corruption of large, mainly Western, companies operating abroad.
by Dr Pasuk Phongpaichit
briefing | published December 2003 | summary | full document | PDF
Corruption in Thailand has been neither pervasive nor incompatible with economic growth. It is centred on a big business-politics complex whose rise has gone hand-in-hand with globalisation.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published March 2003 | summary | full document | PDF
Disputes about human population increase are less about numbers than about rights, as is suggested by an analysis of the historical context in which Malthus wrote his first story about overpopulation.
by Mike Davis
briefing | published December 2002 | summary | full document | PDF
A revised understanding of nineteenth cenutry famines illuminates many current challenges of 'development' and questions the wisdom of development policies still pursued today.
by Judith Richter
briefing | published February 2002 | summary | full document | PDF
by Mark Mansley and Nicholas Hildyard
briefing | published January 2002 | summary | full document | PDF
Lobbying financial markets has become a major way of halting or lessening the impact of environmentally-damaging and socially-inequitable projects. This briefing provides several case studies, traces the rise of ethical shareholding, and explores the limits and potential pitfalls of financial market activism.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published October 2001 | summary | full document | PDF
by Sarah Sexton
briefing | published July 2001 | summary | full document | PDF
by David Campbell
briefing | published January 2001 | summary | full document | PDF
by Viola Sampson and Larry Lohmann
briefing | published December 2000 | summary | full document | PDF
by Eric B. Ross
briefing | published July 2000 | summary | full document | PDF
The goal of Thomas Malthus, the 19th century originator of a theory about population, was to absolve the state and wealthier segments of society from responsibility for poverty. The briefing explores the theory’s subsequent uses in eugenic, anti-immigration, environmental, Cold War and Green Revolution interests. It explores how population thinking is used today in discussions of globalisation, violent conflict, immigration and the environment.
by Dr Susan Hawley
briefing | published June 2000 | summary | full document | PDF
by Stephen J. Pyne with Larry Lohmann
briefing | published February 2000 | summary | full document
by Frank Barnaby
briefing | published December 1999 | summary | full document
Plutonium is radioactive by-product of nuclear reactors and one of the most toxic substances known. The nuclear industry argues that producing mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel would reduce plutonium stockpiles. It is unlikely to do so and instead would encourage the risk of nuclear terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons.
by Sarah Sexton
briefing | published October 1999 | summary | full document | PDF
Most discussions about human embryo cloning focus on ethics and potential health benefits. In the process, the many social, economic and environmental aspects of health and disease are increasingly hidden, while issues such as how the potential benefits of biotech would be obtained and distributed are sidelined. It has therefore become hard to raise key questions about the increased geneticisation of our lives and societies.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published July 1999 | summary | full document
This briefing questions the view that tree plantations are a viable way of mitigating the climatic effects of industrial carbon-dioxide emissions. This “solution” to global warming is based on bad science, enlarges society’s ecological footprint, and reinforces neo-colonialist structures of power.
by Nicholas Hildyard
briefing | published June 1999 | summary | full document
Projects backed by export credit agencies are frequently environmentally destructive, socially oppressive or financially unviable. It is the poorest in these countries who end up paying the bill. With rare exceptions, the major ECAs lack mandatory environmental and development standards, and are secretive and unaccountable.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published January 1999 | summary | full document
Some strains of environmentalism treat “cultures” as fixed, closed systems with impermeable boundaries. Racism is neither a theory nor a collection of beliefs, sentiments or intentions, but rather a process of social control which functions to block inquiry and attempts to live with difference. Illustrated with a case study from Northern Thailand.
by Mark Duffield
briefing | published January 1999 | summary | full document
Many internal wars in Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, far from representing societal breakdown, can be seen as a rational response on the part of rulers (and would-be rulers) to ensure their economic and political survival in a context of globalisation and the changing nation-state.
by Nicholas Hildyard
briefing | published January 1999 | summary | full document
by Nicholas Hildyard (traduction: C. Bertrand)
briefing | published January 1999 | summary | full document
by Sarah Sexton, Nicholas Hildyard and Larry Lohmann
briefing | published October 1998 | summary | full document
The biotechnology industry claims that genetic engineering in agriculture is necessary to feed a growing world population. Yet, far from preventing world starvation, genetic engineering threatens to exacerbate the social and ecological causes of hunger by forcing farmers to pay for their right to fertile seeds, threatening crop yields, undermining biodiversity and reducing the access of poorer people to food.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published August 1998 | summary | full document
by Nicholas Hildyard
briefing | published August 1998 | summary | full document
Popular opposition and changing macro-economic policies have disproved the claim that large-scale hydrolectric dams provide a cheap, reliable and economic source of power.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published May 1998 | summary | full document
Opinion polls and cost-benefit analysis, like public relations, attempt to construct new, simplified “publics” which are friendly to bureaucracies, politicians and corporations. The success of these attempts is limited by popular resistance at many levels.
by Judith Richter
briefing | published March 1998 | summary | full document
Corporations use public relations techniques to limit campaigns against the socially-irresponsible or environmentally-destructive practices of transnational companies. Taking the infant food industry as a case study, this briefing discusses the risks of ‘dialogue’ with company or industry organizations.
by Nicholas Hildyard
briefing | published March 1998 | summary | full document
by Nicholas Hildyard, Pandurang Hegde, Paul Wolverkamp and Somersekhave Reddy
briefing | published February 1998 | summary | full document
by Aubrey Meyer and Nicholas Hildyard
briefing | published December 1997 | summary | full document
by Frank Barnaby
briefing | published November 1997 | summary | full document
by Alan Simpson, MP, and Nicholas Hildyard and Sarah Sexton
briefing | published September 1997 | summary | full document
Living organisms can now be patented as “inventions” if they are the result of genetic engineering techniques or of the transfer of genes between totally unrelated species of plants, animals and micro-organisms. Yet patents can hinder research, legalise biopiracy and restrict both competition and people’s access to health treatment.