Anyone who follows climate change politics knows that China’s coal consumption is a huge concern. As this chart from the U.S. Department of Energy reveals, Chinese production has doubled in the last decade
The international community must accept Iran’s nuclear program. This is not a desirable admission, nor is it a triumph for anyone, lest the Iranians themselves who would better off fixing their faltering economy.
“Bite me” is the dismissive nickname that General McChrystal’s staff officers gave Vice President Joseph Biden, admittedly a frequent subject of mockery in the US because of his many gaffs and his desperate attempts to regain a long lost youthful appearance via hair plugs, facelifts and the like.
Glimpses of post-9/11 anti-terrorism machinery are not particularly edifying, whatever one’s views. The real solution to terrorism is more rule of law, not less.
I want to draw attention to a key point that is frequently overlooked—that, in the context of modern pluralism, we must now regard secularism as one of those worldviews that plays a quite significant role in the direction and nature of the modern state. And, further, once we do this, our whole understanding of the role of religion in the modern state is transformed as well.
Five years before Hezbollah, ten years before Al Qaeda and Hamas, and 15 years before the Taliban, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was founded in northern Sri Lanka in 1976, beginning life as one of many militias fighting for Tamil independence from the predominantly Sinhalese Sri Lanka
I always tell my students, when sitting an exam, that they have to answer the question that has been set rather than one that they feel comfortable with. No analogy is ever perfect, but this one sums up pretty neatly the outcome of the deliberations by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The recent financial crisis marked the fourth systemic transformation of the global capitalist system, comparable to the upheavals that followed the great inflation of the 1970s, the great depression of the 1930s and the period of geopolitical turmoil that culminated with Wellington’s victory over Napoleon in 1815. The new politico-economic system emerging from the crisis can therefore be described as the fourth distinctive version of capitalism: Capitalism 4.0.
The potential “experiments” imagined in the geoengineering literature will be overtly designed to alter the climate. By contrast, the carbon buildup experienced this past century was the unintended byproduct of energy production. Obviously, very difficult (but interesting) global politics problems are associated with both pathways.
The political thought of John Gray offers an unflinching vision of the world, a world divided by refractory ways of life, stressed by the looming conflicts over natural resources and scorched by irreversible patterns of global warming. Gray’s vision of the world is none too cheerful, and prescribed throughout his numerous analyses of today’s most pressing problems is a sobering dose of realism. Gray has repeatedly emphasized that many of our greatest problems are incurable and that the best we can hope to achieve is to minimise their symptoms
