Notions

• war crime and crime against humanity

   the difference lies in the existence or not of a prior concerted plan on which this difference is based. The consequence of this distinction is important: the first crime is prescribed after a period of ten years, the second is imprescriptible.

  Truche,1993

• World cities

  popularized by the American sociologist and economist Saskia Sassen in the form of global cities (1991), the expression designates the metropolises located at the upper level of the urban hierarchy in the global scale. Their characteristics are as follows: they are capable of controlling the world economy, they are the places where the central powers of companies and of the world economy are concentrated. Their emergence results from a dual and paradoxical dynamic of: dispersion (relocation-relocation of goods production activities), centralization of coordination, forecasting and global management functions. The more the economy becomes international, the more the control functions of large firms are clustered in a small number of sites.

  Saskia Sassen, 1991