Vallecas, Madrid, SPAIN – The police came at 7am. There were more than a dozen of them, garbed in anti-riot gear and armed with batons and a sledgehammer. Fifty-three-year-old Pedro Uyahuare, his wife Maria and their 12-year-old son were waiting for them upstairs, huddled on the queen-sized mattress in the master bedroom of their three-bedroom, two-story flat in Vallecas, a working-class barrio on the outskirts of Madrid.

SANT MARTÍN, BARCELONA, Spain — Despite the imam’s best efforts, the Catalan Islamic Cultural Centre, an NGO that also serves as a mosque for the local Muslim community, looks from the outside more like a travel agency firm than a place to commune with God. Square and squat, the carved wooden door is framed by uneven concrete, just another storefront on an industrial block dotted with corner-store bodegas, pawnshops and a solitary car repair garage. Inside, the ceiling is low, and the cavernous interior dimly lit with flickering fluorescent lights.

MALLORCA, SPAIN -- "I've always loved the expression 'turn your poison into medicine'," playwright and activist Eve Ensler confides to me over a cheese omelette at a bar in Mallorca, a tropical island off the coast of Spain, where she is holidaying. "Because if I look back at my life, where have I really grown? Surviving sexual abuse by my father. Surviving cancer. It's the places of hardest conflict where you grow the most, where you come to find yourself, find your muscles and your voice. So I love that expression." Energetic and youthful at the age of 61, Ensler's body of work embodies this philosophy...

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA: It is nearly one o'clock in the morning. According to traditional Korean Buddhist temple etiquette, the crack of the moktak--a fish-shaped wooden percussion instrument played by Korean monks to signal the beginning of their day--will awaken practitioners in exactly two hours for the morning meditation. Nodding off, I jerk my eyes back to the kong-an--a Korean Buddhist word play meant to facilitate contemplation--written on the tearoom whiteboard that has been the focus of my meditation for the past six hours.

LONGWA, NAGALAND: “You should have brought whiskey,” the king of the Naga headhunters told me, looking despondently into his empty flask. My traditional offering—five pounds of dry tea leaves and three packs of assorted biscuits—had been discarded disdainfully on the dirt floor a few feet away. The headhunter king (called “Ang” in Nagamese) was dressed in a leather cowboy hat, a fire engine red vest, shorts and plastic flip-flops. Only a brass necklace that hung heavy like a museum plaque around his neck indicated his royal position, labeling him in stylized English script to be “Shri Ngowang, Chieftain of Long- wa.”

PUNJAB, INDIA: One day in 2006, 18-year-old Gubachan “Gary” Singh, an illegal immigrant in Manila, Philippines, was on his way to work when he was approached by four stocky Filipinos. One pulled out a gun, pressing the barrel into the small of his back, while another blindfolded him and shoved him into a van. Singh spent the next two months in a small, windowless pink room. “I couldn’t tell if it was day or night,” he says. The ransom demand of Rs 22 lakh was made to his parents back home in Ludhiana. The person who made it was the same travel agent, or smuggler, who had helped Singh illegally enter the Philippines.

It's no secret that China has taken a shine to Africa in recent years, showering cash on the continent in a quest for influence and ...

MACAU--Walk into a massage parlor in this Chinese enclave, and you'll likely meet beautiful young women--some of whom aren't there voluntarily. So it goes in Asia's sin city, where gambling and legalized prostitution go hand in hand. That Macau has a thriving sex industry is not news. But many of these women are victims of modern-day slavery.

PHOENIX, ARIZONA -- When Alfonso Uribe was 2 years old, he started banging his head against a wall. Alarmed, his mother took him to a doctor. The doctor didn't speak Spanish, and Eulalia Uribe didn't speak English. There was no translator. The pediatrician told Uribe that nothing was wrong with her son. It would take another five years before Alfonso would finally be diagnosed with autism. That's the kind of thing social worker Alberto Serpas sees every day. There was the father who abandoned his family when he learned his 13-year-old daughter had autism, leaving his stay-at-home wife and two kids to fend for themselves. The wife was undocumented, with little education or money, and no car. Now she works a series of low-paying jobs at fast-food restaurants and supermarkets to put food on the table. She's been fired repeatedly because she often has to leave work early to take her daughter to therapy. When she's not working, she's on the phone with the state or her daughter's school, attempting to fight for services in a language she doesn't speak.

PHOENIX, ARIZONA: Twice a week, Teresa has a nightmare. It is almost always the same. She and her husband, Michael, are driving home in their gray Chevy pickup, sleepy and content after a long day with family. It is a cool, clear night. Their chatty 2-year-old daughter, Adrianna, is buckled snugly into her car seat. Teresa's husband speeds up as they approach the highway on-ramp, narrowly cutting off another car. There is the wailing of a siren, the flashing of red and blue lights. Her heart begins to thump as her husband pulls over onto the gravelly shoulder. A police officer ambles up to the car window. He is the tallest man she has ever seen — pale, with dark hair, and opaque aviator glasses. She cannot see his eyes, just her own frightened expression, and her husband's boyish face reflected back at her. Her husband rolls down the window, and the officer asks him for his driver's license in a flat, uninflected voice. Then he asks for her identification.

ARIZONA: Border Patrol Agent Elizier Vasquez gets out of his car on Elephants Head Road, a smear of dirt and gravel wedged between two slices of desert. His eyes comb the rust-colored Arizona dirt that stretches for miles to the north, south, and west, its stark beauty marred by scattered piles of trash. A few miles to the east of us is Highway I-19, which shoots straight from Nogales to Tucson, and past that there's more desert. We came here from the U.S.-Mexico border, about 25 miles to the south. The

Hyderabad, INDIA: Vellulla is a sleepy town where clusters of white-washed buildings are set amid a patchwork quilt of small grassy farming plots and waving palms. Women walk down dusty lanes in brightly-coloured saris, infants balanced on their hips. Men are harder to find. At any given time, between 800 and 1,000 people, mostly men, of the village’s population of 9,000 are in West Asia, according to Sai Reddy, the local sarpanch (village council head). And in the past four years, there have been 15 deaths—most due to worksite and traffic accidents, heart attacks and stroke. Reddy, a slim man with long, spidery limbs, cups his hand over his face to shade his eyes from the sun, and points out a house with bleached white walls. “That man died in Muscat,” he says. Reddy jerks his head in the direction of another lane a few hundred metres away and adds, “One from that house died in Saudi.”