Ghada Waly is the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna and the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. She holds the rank of Undersecretary-General of the United Nations. She previously served as Minister of Social Solidarity of Egypt and chaired the Executive Council of Arab Ministers of Social Affairs. She has also served as Assistant Resident Representative at the United Nations Development Program. Ms Waly holds an MA and a BA in humanities from Colorado State University.

This essay explores the possibility of universal values. Universal values do not exist as Platonic ideals nor do they exist in clearly defined lists of rules or laws. Rather, universal ethical claims are constructed through the actions of individual political leaders, scholars, and activists. This essay explores how such normative constructions take place. It uses an initiative undertaken by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime to further education around corruption as an example of how such universal values come into existence. The initiative focused on developing teaching materials for higher education. The essay focuses on two particular modules, both their content and the process by which they were written.

An international competition for best papers authored by young criminologists for presentation at the XIX World Congress of Criminology was held in 2019 sponsored by the Education for Justice initiative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Society of Criminology. This preface addresses the priorities and objectives of the Education for Justice initiative and places the competition within that framework.

An international competition was held in 2019 in conjunction with the 19th World Congress of Criminology. It was co-sponsored by the Education for Justice (E4J) Programme of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the International Society of Criminology. Ten papers were selected as winners by an international jury. Their authors received financial support to attend, be recognized and present their work at the Congress. This editorial piece presents details about the competition and the winning papers.

This article uses the lens of disciplinary power to analyze the North–South relationships in efforts to govern drug trafficking in Senegal. Disciplinary surveillance shapes the activities of anti-trafficking units through repetitive examination, correction, and persuasion. These practices produce forms of resistance to the ways in which interdiction occurs, which implicate elites in the country. The result of constant international correction, and subsidiary actor resistance, is a frustrated law enforcement team. The argument deepens the literature on police reform in Africa, acknowledging the effects of international discipline on policing agents, while maintaining that immediate political settings heavily constrain disciplinary techniques and their internalizing effects.