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This article compares two very different wars—the civil war in Sierra Leone and the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq—and finds some significant similarities. It notes that both wars can be seen as systems which promise (and deliver) benefits for relatively privileged actors and promise (but do not deliver) benefits for ordinary combatants. The article also examines the extent to which the recruitment of Sierra Leoneans and the recruitment of Americans were made possible by the existence of 'failing states'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suggests ways in which employers and financial officers can control increasing health care costs in the United States. Reasons for the increase in health plan premiums and physician costs; Auditing of health plans' approach to cost containment; Support for the development and application of quality/outcomes monitoring; Importance of increasing local health plans' ability to resist cost shifting.

The Covid-19 crises in the United Kingdom and the United States show how democracies may struggle to confront disasters that are increasingly impinging on the Global North. This paper highlights the extent to which disasters are now 'coming home' to Western democracies and it looks at some of the principal reasons why democracy has not been especially protective, at least in the case of the UK and the US. These include: reconceptualising disaster as a good thing (via 'herd immunity'); the influence of neoliberalism; and the limitations in the circulation of information. A key pandemic-related danger is the conclusion that democracy itself is discredited. Disasters, though, call for a reinvigoration of democracy, not a knee-jerk invocation of autocratic 'emergency' rule. A fundamental problem in the UK and US is that these countries were not democratic enough. The paper underlines the risk of a move towards a disaster-producing system that is self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting., (© 2021 The Authors Disasters © 2021 Overseas Development Institute.)