The death of Osama bin Laden is far more important for the United States than it is for Islamic terrorism. While the shooting of Al Qaeda’s leader will certainly damage the morale of would-be jihadists around the world, the most significant impact will be at home.
It can’t be that everyone once considered political theory relevant and now finds it irrelevant, based on mysterious facts about today’s world. Practical men and women have always favoured action over thought. Long ago, Aristotle said that political activists find philosophers contemptible. So these questions are hardly innocent: they put political theory on the defensive. How should political theorists respond?
There is an understandable desire in international relations, as in so many other areas of life, to be able to see into the future, to know what it is that is coming down the track towards us and whether the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed the sunlight of a better future or just an indication that the tunnel is on fire. In recent weeks, in Ivory Coast and Libya, the tunnel has been well and truly alight. This troubled engagement between humanitarian action and the precautionary principle has been discernable since the practice leapt to prominence.
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.
Many international relations commentators are heralding the Western bombing of Libya as marking a return to the 1990s era of humanitarian intervention. The debate is largely over whether this return is to be welcomed or regretted. But a return of the moral or ethical understandings of the humanitarian interventionist 1990s is not a possibility.
History has placed two peoples, both with legitimate claims, in competition for the same land. The brutality of the Murders at Itamar is a reminder that the conflict on the West Bank, indeed the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians in all of its aspects, should be understood as a secular, rather than a religious, event.
The ‘Arab Spring’ is a pivotal moment in the political and social development of the wider Middle East. Some have likened it to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, others to the impact of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Nowhere encapsulates the tensions and contradictory forces now shaping the Arab Spring than Yemen, a state that has become synonymous with the epithets ‘failed’ or ‘failing’.
When security forces, meant to protect people, are instead let loose in a killing spree, the state itself becomes the prime perpetrator of atrocities. With precisely such an unfolding scenario, Libya today is the place and time to redeem or renege on R2P’s solemn pledge.
In January 2011 the South Sudanese voted overwhelmingly for independence from Sudan. Over 98% of registered voters chose separation over unity. Much of the Western media has portrayed this vote as an indicator of a successful end to decades of conflict in the South. When South Sudan celebrates its independence, expected to take place in July 2011, the mood will indeed be jovial. But South Sudan is setting up to be a failed state.
Professor Peter Vale’s provocative piece on “The Responsibility of IR Scholars” deserves comment which I suspect many e-IR readers will provide. Let me offer mine in this blog. I must say that I would hardly claim to be an IR Scholar as I was trained in political economy and government […]
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