The research conducted in this paper examines the diamond mining permit held by Korean C & K Mining in Cameroon’s Eastern Province, and the company’s relationship with the government, as well as the many other actors with legitimate claims to the same land. With a complete lack of transparency in the sector, poor governmental capacity, dedication and incentives for company oversight, a high level of secrecy in terms of C & K Mining, and the complete lack of an informed and connected civil society, it is the finding of this paper that diamonds will only play into the resource curse. Furthermore, it will be the local communities that will bear the largest costs associated with diamond exploitation, as they will receive no economic benefit and will lose their land, livelihoods, and, for the indigenous Baka, their culture. Legal land ownership and property rights matter, as does good governance, but where all land resources legally belong to the state, and the state is characterized not by the people, but by a bloated crony-styled bureaucracy, the law of the land is, literally, government expropriation and re-appropriation to the entity that will garner the most economic rent. In this way, local communities have no real economic or political bargaining power. In terms of the current state of Cameroonian affairs, coexistence and universal benefit from diamonds at Mobilong are highly unlikely. Instead, what is more likely is the eruption of conflict between the various actors and the further marginalization of the land and those local communities that live off of it.

I intend to show that pre-existing concerns over morality combined with scientific advancements under the auspices of wartime policy, allowing reformers to launch a repressive anti-prostitution campaign. Under no other circumstances could such a militant operation occur across all classes and geographic areas of the American nation.

The World Health Organization (WHO) predicted in 2008 that the number of deaths by non-communicable diseases will increase by 17% in the next ten years. To determine why chronic illness is on the rise, I am examining summaries of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies for 1990, 2000, and 2004, which provide evidence-based evaluations of global health. I am exploring the trends associated with the prevalence of chronic (non-communicable) and infectious (communicable) diseases in developing countries by reviewing quantitative data provided in the GBD reports. I will discuss trends based on reasons gathered from previous studies concerning the rise of chronic diseases in the past ten years. I am gathering information from various news articles and journal publications, which have provided many reasons for the changing profile of disease burden, to provide a more comprehensive study on this subject. My preliminary research has indicated that the burden of chronic illness has deeply impacted developing countries that continue to struggle with infectious diseases. Thus, I am particularly interested in the effects that development and globalization have on the prevalence of chronic diseases as well as the continuous spread of infectious diseases. The importance of this research lies with the readiness of developing countries to take on a new burden of chronic illness. If there is to be an influx of chronic diseases in the developing world, healthcare providers must be prepared in advance with new forms of treatment and professional competencies to provide for the health of their growing populations.

In two essays, I consider a system of ethics in a universe where all possible worlds exist as concretely as our own. In this "modal realism" setting, I engage other authors to argue that only one’s well-being as defined by one’s own subjective experiences should be considered morally relevant to each moral agent. I next propose a system for improving the quality of these subjective experiences. Contrary to popular notions concerning egoism, I argue that love—the selfless caring about things external to oneself—is the most important pleasure for someone interested in improving their subjective experiences. Therefore, even when we are motivated completely by our own best interests, as modal realism provides us good reason to be, we still ought to care about things other than ourselves. I engage literature in both philosophy and psychology to develop this argument. My essays have important implications for philosophical questions of virtue and self-interest dating back to Plato, as well as for new moral problems arising from theories of many worlds. They are therefore relevant both to proponents of the philosophy of modal realism, as well as to general audiences interested in living a more fulfilling life.