Despite Kofi Annan’s warning that ‘the United Nations is passing through the gravest crisis of its existence’ and a burst of diplomatic activity at the World Summit in 2005, reform of the UNSC has not been easy to achieve. This essay will explore the reasons behind the impasse as well as briefly considering possible alternatives. It will critically analyse the notion that failure to reform represents a ‘crisis’ at the UN.
In the very first sentence of the book entitled ‘Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid’, Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Harrison pose the following question: “Is development a failure?” (1998: 1). It might seem rhetorical at first, but by no means is it so.
Realists maintain that the nature of International Politics is a constant, at times blood thirsty, struggle for power in an anarchical environment. The occurrence of fundamental change, such as the end of power politics, a self-interested human nature, and the threat of war, in the nature of International Politics is considered flawed. Realists provide evidence for this by pointing firstly to the consistency of human nature, the structure of power, and thirdly to patterns in history.
The spectre of a debt crisis, the first signs of which were seen in the Third World in the 1970s, and the fear of world finances’ disintegration, led the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) to propose Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) to the developing world. This essay will start with a description of the long term advantages of SAPs, as advocated by the IMF and the WB (including elements of the neo-liberal philosophy presented as an ideological basis for the programmes) before assessing the short term disadvantages of SAPs – largely revolving around unsustainable growth.
The policies of the Bush Administration and the conduct of the United States and its allies in counteracting the threat of terrorism have received a wealth of criticism, much of which has been aired publicly. This essay focuses on a critique that does not see much light beyond academic literature: the successful construction of a terrorist threat which has legitimised a war in its name.
Using theories of cognitive consistency and identity, this essay seeks to understand the impact of a conflict’s portrayal on the decision to intervene. To illustrate, the essay analyses the inaction of the United Nations in the face of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
This essay argues that, for the English School, war is an essential component of international relations that is regulated by “norms”. Prominent English School thinkers believe that war should be waged with reference to morality and justice (with rules formulated to that effect) and that the purpose and existence of war is as an instrument of international society used to enforce international justice.
This essay argues that neoliberalism seeks to frame highly political and morally-charged operations within a bland discourse that insists on the neutrality of the market. Thus it is necessarily flawed in its contribution to the study of offshore, because it attempts to disguise the invariably political and pragmatic functions of offshore in the contemporary global political economy.
It is a trite but commonplace observation that we are witnessing a resurgence in religion and religious fundamentalism; that the secularist progression envisaged by linear models of social development has not come to fruition. This essay seeks both to contest the notion that secularisation can be seen as a universal or absolute process and, further, to problematise certain critical approaches which understand ‘religion’ as a site of autonomy and resistance against these totalising discourses.
This essay first considers the ideological and discursive background to China’s one-child policy, before employing the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopower to outline how these techniques of control are effected – looking specifically at non-coercive examples, which tend to be overlooked in discussions and popular conceptions of the People’s Republic.
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