It was widely regarded as a rare bright spot in New Labour’s pretentions to an ‘ethical foreign policy’. While domestic reform got bogged down in complexity, and foreign policy in recrimination, British policy in Africa stood for something pure – the ‘one noble cause’ as Blair himself put it. But what is the real legacy of New Labour’s pursuit of the ‘good state’ in Africa?
From the social uprising that toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia on January 11, 2011, to the recent social unrest in Libya to oust the 40 year old reign of Muammar Gadhafi, many political scientists have been left puzzled as to reasons behind the North African revolutionary movement and where it could spread in the coming weeks.
Why does my heart sink when I hear the current UN-mandated action in Libya described as “humanitarian intervention”? After all, over the last 20 years the term has acquired currency — not only among Western politicians but also academics — as a description of coercive, usually military, intervention ostensibly for humanitarian purposes.
The key element in shaping the Libyan intervention’s impact will be whether the operation can overcome the recurrent problems humanitarian interventions have been facing in the past two decades. The West’s reluctance toward renewed humanitarian interventions will only be revised if the operation attains its mission objective without becoming entangled in a protracted internal conflict.
For Jacques Derrida, hospitality is ethics entire. This may well be the case. Yet the rights and wrongs of intervening in Libya (or anywhere else for that matter) from the standpoint of the ethics of hospitality are complicated, not simple.
The ongoing people’s uprisings in the Arab countries against autocratic rulers have provided Iran with both challenges and opportunities in the Middle East and beyond. Will these momentous events enhance Iran’s foreign policy opportunities, or will they ultimately lead to further isolation and strategic loneliness for Iran?
Although all wars may represent a failure of diplomacy, war is often the last resort of diplomacy. This paradox results from two competing ideas of what the supreme objective of diplomacy should be: peace at any cost, or peace by any means. This is the paradox of Libya. The international military intervention resulted from a mixture of an arguably successful strategy of coercive diplomacy at the UN, and a failure of third-party mediations.
The relations within and between the British and Irish islands are now routinely described as never having been better; a description regarded as a cliché. A cliché? Good. It was not so long ago that such a belief would have been dismissed as an attempt at humour.
The Libyan Crisis is in some respects a turning point in the ‘history’ of the responsibility to protect doctrine (RtoP). The case suggests that the international community is beginning to mobilize against rulers who conquer or purchase statehood to gain impunity.
One of the hotly debated topics in leftist circles is religion itself. While most leftists, especially since the birth of Marxism, have criticized religion with the desire of its downfall, there have been attempts by some to unite them, as in liberation theology, Christian communists and Islamic socialists.
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