This essay analyses the extent to which social policy reform in China contributed to the overall human well-being of the Chinese citizen. The analyses will focus on the social policy reforms in the two sectors of healthcare and housing. The analytical categories used for assessing human wellbeing are borrowed from the analytical framework used by Chak Kwan Chan and Graham Bowpitt.

This paper will seek to investigate the ambiguous status of child soldiers looking at their victimhood, their level of agency and the resulting post-conflict implications. It will argue that although local communities and child soldiers themselves understand their inherent duality, the international discourse has yet to incorporate it, which leads to an inadequate response.

The decision for the United States and Britain to go to war with Iraq in 2003 was, and remains, one of the most controversial foreign policy acts that any British government has undertaken. This essay proceeds to compare and contrast the various aspects of the Just War Theory with the causes and outcomes of the war against Iraq in order to determine whether the war conforms to the theory.

The German sociologist Max Weber claimed “the state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly on legitimate physical violence.” This is essentially a statement about state sovereignty. This essay suggests that while only the most extreme and systemic examples of a state abusing its power could properly be called state terrorism, the concept is not a contradiction in terms when derived from dominant conceptions of sovereignty.

The Realist emphasis on military strength does not conclusively explain world politics. For a school of thought focusing on power, Realism misunderstands what it means to ‘have power’. The failure of Israel to gain security demonstrates the contextual and contingent nature of power, and how military capacity is not the means to all ends.