What’s the baseline?
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change dates to the June 1992 Earth Summit. The overwhelming majority of nations are parties to this agreement — even the United States, which did not ratify the followup Kyoto Protocol. Essentially, for 20 years the world has been negotiating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions based on reductions from a 1990 baseline.
Liberal Peace Transitions: Towards a Post-Liberal Peace in IR?
It has become generally assumed that ‘Liberal Peace Transitions’ offer a way out of local, civil, regional and international conflict, as well as complex emergences and development problems. All military, humanitarian, diplomatic, political, economic, and social, interventions since the end of the Cold War have been geared to this programme – with limited success.
Oil State Senator
To understand climate politics, one really needs to study both international and domestic factors. My field is international relations and I’ll likely be blogging here a good deal about national interests and state bargaining power. However, it is important to keep in mind internal actors and their interests.
Wanted: trust fund benefactors
Mohamed Nasheed, a former journalist and political prisoner who was elected president of the Republic of Maldives last fall, is relatively pragmatic (and pessimistic) about the future prospects of his nation constituted by 1200 small islands in the Indian Ocean.
Fall class
Believe it or not, two weeks before Labor Day in the U.S., classes started today at my university. I’m teaching an undergraduate course for nearly 50 students on “Global Ecopolitics” — a term used by Dennis Pirages, a professor at Maryland when I was in graduate school.
Ethnic Tension in China: From Guangdong to Xinjiang
The recent clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs illustrate dramatically the difficulties facing China as the existing chasm between the Han majority and the Uyghur minority deepens. Both incidents constitute an enormous setback to China’s minority policy and to government efforts at persuading the minority Uyghurs that they are citizens with equal rights in the new China.
Climate Engineering
It may be August, when many policy wonks take vacation in Washington and other capitals, but Bjørn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center is in the midst of releasing a series of papers analyzing potentially affordable solutions to global climate change.
A Wake Up Call for International Relations?
Should a university continue to ‘sell’ courses in an area that will produce no tangible employment prospects? Is this ethical? If so, that is the very definition of academic in its pejorative sense.
STRATEGICALLY LOST IN AFGHANISTAN
The Obama administration seems to be having big second thoughts about Afghanistan. President Obama in his election campaign promised to make Afghanistan the central front in our unnamed war.
Investment bubbles and climate politics
If you didn’t read Matt Taibbi’s piece “The Great American Bubble Machine” from Rolling Stone, then this is a good time to check it out. The article, which argues that the investment firm Goldman Sachs has been behind a series of disastrous speculative bubbles in recent years, has received a great deal of attention.
