The United Nations Charter confers on the Security Council prime responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. Yet these very concepts are undergoing radical change. More than the absence of war, peace has come to mean harmony both within and among nations. It has acquired a dimension far larger than the original State-centred notion of the Charter. Security connotes inclusion, cohesion, and integration - a sense of belonging to a society and a prevailing international order that is predicated on fairness and respect for differences and human dignity. Today, especially given the rise in conflicts of a non-international character, the Council musturgently review the appropriateness of existing instruments and traditional diplomacy. The author calls for better links between the UN, the Security Council, NGOs, and civil-society organisations; and proposes legal and practical mechanisms both to afford better protection to aid workers and to ensure that, when they are applied, sanctions regimes are effective means of placing pressure on those responsible for the abuse of power.

In the context of economic and technological change in the late twentieth century, the World Bank's World Development Report 1995 combines the themes of labour and the global market, celebrating the triumph of the market in efficient labour-allocation worldwide. The World Bank's emphasis on boosting Africa's agricultural export capacity ignores the prevailing hostile conditions which African products encounter on the world market, and the current tendency towards agricultural labour displacement. `Labour flight', particularly of youth, signals African farmers' own disenchantment with farming under present liberalised market conditions. The narrowness of the W orld Bank's policy vision for Africa avoids the social and political implications of rural labour displacement as well as the need for human-capital investment in rural areas. This article argues that the alternative to human-capital investment now may be war and expensive disaster-relief for decades to come.

Sixty per cent of Peru's urban workforce is employed within the small and micro enterprises (SMEs) which account for 95 per cent ofall business in the country's manufacturing, commercial, and service sectors. But in spite of credit needs of some US$ 1,250 million, in 1994 the combined input from the formal financial sector, international development agencies, and NGOs met only five per cent of this demand. The author examines the six principal mechanisms through which credit is available to SMEs, and describes the work of a Peruvian NGO network- IDESI- which specialises in providing credit and related services to small businesses, and in making strategic linkages between the popular sector and the conventional banking system.

Recent conflicts in the Balkans have been portrayed largely in terms of ethnic and religious divisions, with Western military and diplomatic intervention seen as essential to securing a positive outcome. However, these divisions are the consequence of a deeper process of economic and political fracturing. The re-structuring of the former Yugoslav economy, and the policies of the international financial institutions, have not been sufficiently emphasised. However, the author contends that, far from being the basis for social and economic reconstruction, the application of free-market policies in former Yugoslavia favoured the dismantling of social-welfare structures and contributed to the rapid decline in national economic capacity. The terms of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords suggest that a similar future is in store for the successor states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia.

This article takes an experience fromIrian Jaya to clarify the centrality of popular participation to development. It explores the ways in which a focus on class and gender takes participatory development to a new level; and considers how development agents can support transformational development. Integrating the strengths of political economy and gender planning into a participatory methodology yields an approach that puts people first; that does not isolate or privilege particular sectors; that places subjugation alongside poverty as social evils to be overcome, not simply alleviated. An emancipatory concept and practice of development, inwhichinequalities and inequities are addressedtogether inorder to re-configure society to the benefit of the majority, will empower people to develop themselves as they see fit. This demands a delicate and evolving balance between guidance and support, facilitation and response, on the part of the development agent.

A notable absentee from the ten-point action plan set out by the 1990 World Summit for Children was the issue of street children. Y et such children are a common sight in cities of the developing world, and live in some of the most extreme conditions of poverty. The article looks at the experience of street children in the Mexican city of Puebla. It argues that current research neglects the moral and geographic dimensions of work with street children. This has led to practice that regards street children as a welfare concern (as children), and pays less attention to their geographic context (the street). By contrast, the work of an NGO, JUCONI, indicates that a sensitivity to this distinction can offer critical insights. The article outlines JUCONI's approach and evaluates the implications for `best practice'.

Major efforts have been made bydevelopment organisations tomake their systems ofproject and programme management more participatory, in order to be accountable to local participants (or beneficiaries), while also creating opportunities for them to shape their own processes. These measures may look participatory, but have in effect become new (and often costly) forms of management and control, which do not result in great benefits for project participants. The authors argue that the dominance of three components- projects, professionals, and organisations-has beentaken for granted; andthat theyinvolve practices and processes which are primarily instruments of control, rather than of participation. Attempts to generate participation will thus require a fundamental change in the way in which these components operate. Inthe meantime, the authors call for attentiontobe paidtothe ways inwhichthe current tools of participatory development, including PRA, can be used to promote either participation or control, depending on how they are used.

This paper takes an actor-oriented approach to understanding the significance for policy and practice of field-worker experience at the interface between project and people. It is set in the context of an Indian project which aims to reduce poverty through sustainable, participatory agricultural change, based on low-cost inputs, catalysed by village-based project staff. Diaries kept by such staff are analysed to reveal how the social position of field-workers enables and constrains their interactions within and without the project, and the ways in which ‘street level bureaucrats’ shape projects through their discretionary actions. They show the Village Motivators struggling to communicate project objectives, to establish their roles and distinguish themselves fromother village-level bureaucrats, to negotiate participation, to overcome hostility to Participatory Rural Appraisal, to arbitrate access to consultants and seniors, to interpret project objectives and lobby for changes in these without admission of failure, and finally to develop a shared vocabulary of participation and belief in success. Some of the implications for participatory approaches are that there may be significant contradictions between sustainability and participatory development.

This paper analyses the legacy of the ‘green revolution’ in rural India, going beyond the economic sphere to take into account the comprehensive impact of State-guided development strategies on the lives of ordinary people. Based on information collected during fieldwork in North India, it aims to provide a more finely differentiated picture ofthe nature andramifications of the ‘green revolution’ in the countryside, as well as giving making suggestions for future policy reform. The first section situates the ‘green revolution’ strategy in the broader politicaleconomic context. The second (and more detailed) part addresses some of the contradictionsthe gap between increases in production and growing landlessness and rural poverty- with illustrations from a village case-study.