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Nigeria is in a security quandary. The country's security debacles are impacting its socio-economic and political landscapes. Aside from the protracted Boko Haram terrorism, banditry and kidnapping have taken on momentary dimensions in the country. Many studies have attributed this menace to the porous and ill-manned status of Nigerian borders, which lend ambience to unwholesome intrusions and thus render the borders a national burden. This study unpacks the state of Nigeria's borders vis-à-vis the national security experiences of the country. It argues that, beyond the 'porosity' debates and narratives, the lingering cross-border challenges are the effects of patronage networks and internal crises that have engulfed domestic lives and state politics. It submits further that, notwithstanding the subjective colonial status and the uncoordinated management agenda of Nigeria's borders, they have inherent geo-strategic potentials and advantages capable of transforming national lives and enhancing state security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great War and Trianon opened a new chapter in the history, not only of the Kingdom of Hungary, but also of Western Hungary. Besides dividing up the counties of Sopron, Moson and Vas, the newly re-drawn borders also split up most of the railway lines running within them as well. From the territory sliced from the three counties, the previously non-existent province of Austria, Burgenland, was established in 1922. In many cases, the new demarcation lines followed boundaries of old districts or settlements, but it was rare to find natural boundaries among them. As a result, between the two World Wars, the use of the affected railway tracks began to change similar to several contemporary Central European cases, with the exception of GYSEV (Győr–Sopron–Ebenfurth Railway Company), which could remain in its original form. This research paper aims to examine how the shift of borders in this region affected railway transport. It is based on the local historical literature on the railway, regional history and primary resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International boundaries have been mainly considered as barriers in literature on the 'cross-border regional innovation system' (CBRIS), in line with their traditional understanding. In this paper, we underline that such a perspective presents limits, and argue in favour of an understanding of multidimensional borders that are subject to dynamic change over time. By mobilizing conceptualizations from the field of border studies, we examine the various functions of borders to explain the innovation-led development potential in cross-border regions. In this view, international borders can function as an interface, a marker of difference or a symbol, rather than a mere barrier that separates regions. Further, we suggest that these border functions are key factors in explaining the 'fluctuating' integration dynamics of regional innovation systems across the border. Mobilizing evidence from two case studies in European and North American contexts, the paper sheds light on the border as a potential resource for innovation and discusses implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Brian Chikwava's novel Harare North (2009) and its representations of unsuccessful border crossings from the perspective of cosmopolitanism. I argue that through the unnamed protagonist's inability or his own unwillingness to cross different material and symbolic borders, the novel gives articulation to the failure of such cosmopolitan ideals as openness to otherness, acknowledgement of one's own position in the world, and active engagement in transcultural encounters. Chikwava's protagonist seems to be constantly on the "wrong" side of any border that he encounters. As such, he is the unwanted abject figure on whose exclusion different normative subjectivities are constructed. By addressing the problematics of border crossings and cosmopolitan ideals in a globalized world which is increasingly interconnected but also marked by the proliferation and multiplication of borders, this article draws attention to the intertwined issues of mobility and the processes of transculturation that mobility should ideally entail. In so doing, this essay criticizes simplistic tendencies to equate cosmopolitanism with transnational mobility and reduce cosmopolitanism to a mere identity position — a feature that can be observed in current discussions concerning Afropolitanism. Chikwava's novel points at the fact that crossing boundaries and adopting cosmopolitan ethics is not always easy, nor necessarily even desired by those on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s an increasing body of genetic studies of Roma people has been conducted and used to understand their lives. This includes research on health issues such as genetic predispositions to obesity or high cholesterol levels and the migration of European Roma from the Indian subcontinent. Such work needs to be contextualised within the wide-ranging historical oppression of Roma people including their enslavement, the Holocaust, denial of human rights and a lack of access to education. Aligning genetics research to educational policy has often been problematic in the context of discredited, 'race' science; recently more nuanced arguments have promoted 'post-genomic' solutions, such as biosocial strategies, that address social justice issues. This article argues that an economy of knowledge emerges in the 'postgenomic era' that privileges predominantly White European, majority populations and this is particularly apparent in the context of the Roma. The promotion of educational solutions framed by genetics research underpins how cultural capital, in this case scientific knowledge and its framing within social theory such as Deleuzian assemblage will, in all likelihood, maintain the status quo for the Roma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As policing and threats become increasingly transnational and plural, practices of managing risk increasingly use technologies that promise certainty. Drawing on a study of the creation of a new border detection device, and ideas from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that devices deployed as objective tools for risk assessment and management in the policing of borders, and the laboratories that develop them, are not simply linear applications of scientific knowledge to control risk but rather are crucial sites in which multiple and contending conceptions and practices of risk converge. Following the interactions of scientists, border guards, policing agents and the EU shows how an official discourse of risk, a scientific conception and experiential working knowledge of risk all 'danced' together in the development of a portable detection device. In the process experiential/contextual and professional knowledge of risk were often privileged over rationalistic and statistically based risk assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay questions the rise of border humanitarianism in the North-Eastern Moroccan borderlands. The increasing presence of humanitarian organizations in contexts marked by border violence has raised the attention of a number of critical migration scholars. Observers, however, have failed to problematize the presence of humanitarian activities, traditionally connected to emergency contexts, in sites integrated in the "routinary" regulation of mobility. Building on 8 months of fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017, the article addresses this gap, taking the working of border humanitarianism as a vantage point to reflect on the relation of borders to the exception, on the role of violence in border maintenance and, ultimately, on the politics of life and death at the frontier. Drawing on the work of Salter and Vaughan Williams on exceptionalism and biopolitics at the border, the article makes two points. First, I argue that the ordinary functioning of the Spanish–Moroccan border is founded on the bestialization and devaluation of Black lives, often to the point of death. Second, I contend that the integration of the "exception" in border normalcy activates, challenges, and endlessly reproduces the need for emergency interventions. In this dystopian framework, humanitarianism becomes a tool for the ordinary maintenance of migrants' degraded life, transformed by the border into a less-than-citizen, less-than-human form of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about how people moving along state borders – I call them wayfarers – refuse the assumption that they ought to live either a sedentary or a nomadic lifestyle inside or outside states, whether as citizens or as Others. In particular, it looks at how the term saudade helps mobile people to manage friction without falling back into such binaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines saudade as a desire 'for something' and describes it as a characteristic of the 'Portuguese or Brazilian' people. Here, we shall attend however to the saudade evoked by Venezuelans and Warao (defined by the same dictionary as 'members of a South American Indian people inhabiting Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela'). This article patterns a contrast between two ways of evoking the term in comments about movement made by my informants: the first, Precise Saudade, asks for precision about that of which people feel saudade. The second way of evoking the term, Vague Saudade, is, as its name suggests, more comfortable with being vague. The argument put forward by this article is that scholarly and policy texts on 'migrants', 'nomads' and 'refugees' need to make more room for Vague Saudade when translating the talk of wayfarers. It may be tempting to dismiss vagueness as showing ambiguity and imprecision. Yet, as the stories that follow are meant to highlight, Vague Saudade can be useful to wayfarers in several ways: to engage in care, to protect others, to protect themselves and to engage in conversations about alternative worlds. To grant monopoly to Precise Saudade, it is argued, risks hindering wayfarers' ability to do these things. I find this is relevant to how we translate wayfarers, and I suggest it is also germane to how we translate in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a small area of the South West of Bangladesh, thousands of landless farmers cross the border with their family in order to work in the informal sector, mostly in Delhi and Bangalore: as waster pickers for the men, as maids for the women. Based on two ethnographic fieldworks in the villages of origin, this article intends to highlight the reasons leading to this migratory movement, the way this migration is organized and its consequences for the families. In a context where, in India, Bangladeshi migration is mostly felt as a threat, it also analyses the process of hypervisibility/invisibility to which these migrants are subjected to and the effects that deportability – or actual deportation – have on their life. At last, it examines how migrants experience the discrepancy between the way they see themselves and the way they are largely considered by the Indian authorities and broaden society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city as sanctuary is an ancient concept. As a modern practice in North America and Europe, it has entailed refuge for subjects rendered illegal and placeless by the state, be it asylum-seekers or undocumented immigrants. Sanctuary thus reveals the terms of protection through which liberal democracies recognize and include racial others. In the age of Trumpism, sanctuary jurisdictions have become a key terrain of struggle in the United States, connoting resistance to white nationalism and the defiance of federal immigration policy. However, the concept of sanctuary requires scrutiny. In this paper, I demonstrate that the current meaning of sanctuary in the United States has limited scope, relying on, rather than limiting, police power. Seeking to disrupt such forms of liberal inclusion, I turn to a more expansive ethico-political inquiry concerned with hospitality. Such inquiry demands engagement with colonial and imperial histories. At stake is a rethinking of liberal and cosmopolitan traditions of Western humanism, those that seek to provide sanctuary from the place of Europe or the free city. Once conceptualized as the threshold of empire, these territories are no longer sanctuary for the illegal and placeless but instead expressions of state violence and thus grounds for abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Moria hotspot in Greece as a logistical site which fulfills two different functions within the European migration and border regime. It locates, contains, and sorts individuals locally at the external borders of the EU and creates, inserts, and processes data for controlling people on the move. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece, including interviews with local administrators from the Registration and Identification Service, Médecins du Monde, Frontex and Hellenic Police and a collection of internal and publicly available planning, policy, and management documents and handbooks, the paper scrutinizes how both the movement of migrants and data is organized at the site. By developing an analytic lens of logistics, it outlines a specific mode of infrastructuring which aligns staff from different organizations with databases, devices, and migrants all in one place and organizes mundane practices such as filling out forms, taking fingerprints, signing, and entering datasets along a chain. That way the hotspot is able to locate, sort, and detain those who arrive at the hardened EU border and to create a data infrastructure for controlling, monitoring, and governing further movement by processing data through the bureaucratic channels of the EU's transnational control assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The researchers studied motivating factors of Latinas studying at a university extended campus. Using mixed-methods, the following research question was investigated: What cultural, familial, and financial factors motivate Latinas to pursue a bachelor's degree at a rural border extended campus? Study participants were Latina family studies students attending an extended campus of a university within a southwestern rural border community. Findings yielded familial factors to have the greatest impact on motivations, followed by financial factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Born from the ethical imperative of two sets of wounds, the open sores on the feet of a migrant who crosses the desert and the crucified feet of the One on the cross, this essay compares the U.S.-Mexico border wall and the cross of Jesus through the lives of undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S. From the “third space” of the desert, this essay develops a theology of cross/ing in which the crucified Christ challenges the status quo of state policies that promote injustice, suffering, exploitation, and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Christmas story has been retold so often, through sermons, church plays, popular literature, and movies, that a false memory has been constructed. This memory romanticizes the birth of Jesus, thus masking the radical political implications of the event. All too often, we read the Gospels with privileged eyes, thus transforming the Christmas story into a hopeful salvific tale, if not legend. But the Jesús narratives can be read as anti-colonial literature about a native resident living under an invading colonial foreign power. This article reads the familiar story through the eyes of marginalized Latinxs (Latinos/as), who live under the consequences of colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a spatial sociological conceptualization of the concept of borders. In relational spatial theory, borders have rarely been a theme of interest, just as relational space is all but absent within border studies. In order to understand the empirical existence of container space, without rejecting the insights and challenges of the spatial turn, a concept of borders is developed within a theory of relational space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to the analysis of literary representations of Galicia in two discourses of the region: Ukrainian and Polish. They are discussed on the basis of essays by Yurii Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk. For both writers, the narrative of Galicia, understood concurrently as a bordering and post-bordering space, is the starting point for reflection on the epistemology and ontology of Polish–Ukrainian borderlands and Central Europe. A disparity emerges from the perspectives of the two writers which can be described by way of the opposition city/province. Andrukhovych explores the palimpsestic and heterotopic character of the Galician urban sphere, while Stasiuk focuses on the most peripheral regions. The meaning generated by that difference evokes disparate ideological concepts regarding both former Galicia and Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the interest of academia and a range of industries. Much of this appeal is driven by the obsession with military and political supremacy, and a desire to control people and their movements. This article looks at the expansion and impact of AI systems deployed along physical borders on the mobility of illegalised non-citizens and border security in the Global North. Using the case study of Silicon Valley’s Anduril, the article focuses on the US–Mexico border and assesses AI’s role in hindering illegalised mobility and reconfiguring border control. Two key contributions are made in the paper. First, AI advances must become the focus of border criminologies, examined within the milieu from which the technology emerged. Second, virtual walls are commercial, political and anti-humanitarian. They are opaque, resembling alchemy, flawed but with profound consequences. The article adds to the debate on whether AI experiments should be permitted in border control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the borderland of Thailand with Myanmar and analyzes how Burmese women migrant workers are both victimized – Agamben’s homo sacer – by the exceptional space of the borderland, but also are able to actively utilize the opportunities afforded by the particular space of the border to juggle their responsibilities and life options. The article focuses on how women migrant workers arrange their healthcare, childcare and children’s education at the borderland of Mae Sot and in the centerland of Bangkok, and analyzes how they use the opportunities available at the border to manage these tasks. At the same time, the borderland leaves women with very weak protection against violence, cut off from their communities of origin, which offer both protection and control. Although borderlands can provide space for alternatives, this exceptional space compounded with a strict gender regime can pose serious restrictions on women’s agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarly work has focused on borders, both geopolitical and cultural, giving attention to border lives and identities. This article, which focuses on sociocultural practices, addresses what can be calledborder languaculture. With attention on the Texas-Mexico border in North America, the authors discuss three key features of hybrid practices on the US ‘side’: (1) code-mixing that has a strong rhetorical component; (2) cross-border continuation but transformation of ‘traditional’ forms and conventions associated historically with Spain and Mexico; and (3) creation of ‘new’ hybrid forms and cultural products that establish social affiliations and distinctions. These languacultural features support the central point of the article: that self-positioning in this borderland is characterized by the multiplicity, contradictions and syncretism now being labeledmestizaje. Although cultural change has often been explained throughacculturation, the syncretic nature of these border practices is better explained throughtransculturation, which emphasizes mutual influences and shifting power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While globalisation unleashes forces that the Indian State1 finds increasingly difficult to stop and contain, a variety of intermediate institutions has emerged in recent years ranging between a fully securitised State and a State integrated fully into the world economy. These obviously call new configurations of border and border economy into existence as much as contribute to the production of new and hitherto unknown political subjects. Border economy produces the community and not the other way round. Border trade is one of the many instrumentalities through which the flow of persons, goods and services is sought to be contained in order to help making the nation in the border. Ethnicity and ethnic identification serve as a technology for governing the unofficial trade and contributes to the production of ethnic subject. Besides, it is important to understand how a number of people eke out a living by taking advantage of differential pricing across the border. Thus, the labouring life of the subaltern has become an agent, and a moral community thus gets produced, bringing about, in the process, mutation in the dominant discourses of national security and functional integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claudio Magris is a writer of the frontier and of liminal places. This article explores the various dimensions that the border acquires in his work at a cultural, linguistic, philosophical and existential level. It focuses in particular on the image of the border as a barrier and a bridge, and on the poetics of ‘the other side’. Through an analysis of Magris’s major works of fiction and literary criticism, it individuates the relevance of geographical time, placed in dialogue and often in contrast to historical time, and investigates Magris’s geo-cultural, geo-literary, geo-historical and geo-linguistic approaches to his idea of culture. The last section of the article is devoted to the novel Un altro mare (1991; A Different Sea, 1993) and to the discussion of how the cultural heritage of the Hapsburg Empire reaches deeply, as a liminal cultural space, into the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The identity of the people in the Indo-Myanmar border in Northeast India is that they belong to the Indo-Mongoloid racial stock and speak languages belonging to the Tibeto-Burman group. Most of these groups trace their origin to some part of Southeast Asia. The historical routes both constrain and empower movements across borders and cultures. But traffic across borders has been controlled by the articulation of homelands or safe spaces assigned to a group of a particular identity. Inspite of political division, the ethnically and culturally similar people inhabiting both sides of the international border have maintained constant cross-border movements. It is a shared landscape divided politically. This people with lives on both sides of the international border often find themselves victimised for crimes against the state. For this people besides the territorial road, there is also an extraterritorial road to the other side of the political border. This is a reality which is the basis of their identity. This article proposes a framework for international trade between ‘local border points’ in the Indo-Myanmar border, where only the residents in immediately neighbouring provinces/states can cross borders and trade freely. It is a hope that this will negotiate the conversion of a common shared space to a transnational space in this globalised world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose. To test the effectiveness of ¡Vamos a Caminar! (Let's Walk!), an intervention for Mexican-American women living in economically disadvantaged, poorly urbanized areas in the South Texas border region. Design. This was a nonexperimental, one-group, pretest and posttest intervention with a duration of 12 weeks. Setting. The intervention was conducted in Hidalgo County, Texas, 1 of the 10 poorest, counties in the. United States, located at the border with Mexico. Participants resided in areas known as colonias, which are unincorporated and impoverished settlements along the border where many people live in trailers or self-built houses and lack basic services. Subjects. Spanish-speaking Mexican-American women (n = 16) 18 years of age and older. Intervention. The program was home-based, culturally sensitive, theoretically driven, and facilitated by community health workers. Measures. Changes in walking levels, depressive symptoms, and stress levels were assessed. Analysis. Descriptive statistics and the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test were used. Results. A majority of participants were unemployed, had low levels of education, were born in Mexico, and were obese. After exposure to the program, the participants reported a significant increase in walking (915.8 metabolic, equivalent min/wk; p = . 002) and lower depressive symptoms (p = . 055) and stress level scores (p = .017). Conclusions. Culturally sensitive programs promoting walking in underserved, minority populations are promising in reducing physical activity disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tests the extent of speakers' linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward interpretation of accommodation, and findings are considered in terms of evidence required for such an account. Implications for the notion of salience in explanations of contact-induced language change are also considered, as is the significance of the "interviewer effect" in the compilation of data sets for use in quantitative studies of phonological variation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Mann was the Executive Producer for the first two seasons of Miami Vice during the mid-1980s. This article argues that his worldview is deeply imprinted on the series. Mann's worldview thinks of society as organized by law and that, outside of the law, there is unregulated violence. In Miami Vice this view organizes the relationship between the United States and the world beyond its boundaries--a world of gunrunners, drug lords, and others who are threatening the integrity of the United States. Most especially, this United States is threatened by Latin Americans whose illegal activities have to be stopped by the Miami Organized Crime Bureau. While Miami Vice has been praised for its avant-garde, postmodern emphasis on style, this article argues that it was actually the show's politics--so reassuring for mainstream, white America--that provided the basis for Miami Vice's remarkable popularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participants who received Pies Sanos, a 15-min intervention designed to improve diabetes self-efficacy and foot self-care behaviors in adult patients with type 2 diabetes who lived in a predominantly Mexican American community, performed more-complete foot self-care 1 month later in their homes. Recruited when they presented for nonurgent care to the emergency department in two community hospitals near the U.S.-Mexico border, participants were randomized into one of three groups. At follow-up, there was a significant difference in observed foot self-care behaviors between groups, F(2, 135) = 2.99, p < .05, as well as a significant difference within the intervention, t (47) = -4.32, p < .01, and control group, t (46) = -2.06, p < .05, for baseline and follow-up self-reported foot self-care behaviors. Baseline diabetes self-efficacy was significantly and positively correlated with both baseline (r = .335, p < .001) and follow-up (r = .174, p < .05) foot self-care behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews concerned with barriers to ceusus enumeration in colonias (irregular migrant settlements along the United States-Mexico border) and Mexican migration to the United States, we argue that recent ethnography has overemphasized the role of domination and resistance. While power is fundamental to cultural analysis, we also need to examine behavior we call slantwise, that is, actions that are obliquely or only indirectly related to power relations. Ethnographic fieldwork from both sides of the United States-Mexico border uncovered a range of behaviors (including unorthodox building techniques in colonias, hybrid language practices, complex and fluid household structures, nonlinear mobility patterns, and unpredictable political loyalties of migrants) that do not fit neatly into the domination-resistance axis. We argue for the relevance of the slantwise concept for understanding such behaviors, not as a replacement for studies of naturalized domination and resistance, but as a complement to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes the prevalence of alcohol and drug use, abuse, and dependence among adults on the Texas-Mexico border in 2002-2003. The findings are based on survey responses from a random sample of 1,200 adults living in households in three communities: El Paso, a densely populated city in west Texas; the less dense urbanized areas of the lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas; and rural or semirural colonias—unregulated settlements characterized by lack of basic public services—in south Texas. The findings revealed similarity in drug use across the three sites but higher rates of binge drinking and alcohol dependence in the colonias. Border alcohol and drug use appeared similar or lower than use among residents of Texas as a whole or Hispanics nationwide; however, problems of abuse and dependence appeared somewhat higher on the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short story uses satire to depict political and cultural posturing at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings. The story describes the encounter of a female working-class Mexican American graduate student with upper-middle-class Anglo professors and the miscommunications that ensue. The story illustrates and parodies Anglo-Mexican ethnic relations within the academy and along the U.S.-Mexico border from the standpoint of a Chicana graduate student. The underlying theme of the work is the attraction (and repulsion) Mexican Americans feel for Anglo culture and vice versa as well as the need for intellectuals to take themselves less seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic and population growth in the U.S.-Mexico border region has had a negative impact on the region's water resources. Although water-related problems along the border are binational in nature, the presence of interdependence alone might not be sufficient to overcome the considerable obstacles to binational collaboration. This study seeks to explain the presence and absence of binational civil society collaboration to address water-related problems in the U.S.-Mexico border region. To do so, the research compares levels of binational civil society collaboration in the Tijuana-San Diego, Ambos Nogales, Paso del Norte, and Los Dos Laredos areas. The study finds that while interdependence is a powerful concept, domestic political institutions create opportunities to pursue policy concerns through domestic channels. While transnational institutions exist, only the Border 2012 program currently produces binational civil society collaboration. Successful cooperation is dependent on key network actors that can bridge differences across the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of digital government, citizen-centric governance is a central aim—one that is often predicated on more efficient and responsive service owed through digital connectivity. Antiterrorism efforts accentuate this focus, albeit with a very different set of aims. Governments have been quick to establish new antiterrorism and homeland security measures that create new and expanded capacities for gathering, analyzing, and sharing information. In doing so, tensions have arisen with respect to the appropriate scope of governmental action, and the proper mix of secrecy and transparency. Such tensions also extend beyond borders, as North American governance faces new and rising pressures to adapt to a post-September 11, 2001, nexus of security, technology, and democracy. This article argues that the culture of secrecy already prevalent within security authorities is being extended to continentally under the guise of interoperability without sufficient effort to ensure openness and public accountability within and between countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]