However big the political odds are, a rational-pragmatic input by the FDP could constructively impact the foreign policy discourse in Europe’s largest country
Cutting through the friendly appearance and conciliatory rhetoric of the Obama administration does not detract from the reality that regarding the Middle East, nothing of substance has changed as the Iranian President asserts.
A recent report indicated that President Obama had finally made a security policy related decision—not on his Afghanistan strategy which is yet to be announced– but rather on whether or not his administration would seek to have the US sign the treaty banning the production and use of anti-personnel land mines, a treaty that 156 other nations have already signed.
It is almost ten years to the day since the collapse of the Seattle ministerial, but a new trade deal seems no more likely now that at any other point in the negotiations. This does not necessarily mean that a deal cannot be reached. In fact with sufficient compromise on the part of both developed and developing countries it is even possible, albeit perhaps unlikely, that a deal could be struck in 2010.
If there is no consensus on an international agreement on climate change, it will not be due to some irrelevant ‘-Gate’, but rather, due to the political economy of climate change. What this particular ‘-Gate’ has done is mar the scientists, not the science supporting climate change.
The European Union, in the wake of Lisbon, has become an international actor. It now faces two major external challenges. The first is to develop strategic vision for a potentially tumultuous emerging multi-polar world. The second challenge is to help nudge the other major actors towards a multilateral global grand bargain. The price of failure will be a return to the jungle – a jungle in which European assets will count for very little.
It is not an exaggeration to claim that since the presidential election in June 2009, the ship of the Islamic Republic has been cruising in uncharted waters. The repercussions of the election have not only proved to be politically costly but have fundamentally jeopardised the very survival of the Islamic State.
Contemporary social discourses are relegating the need to keep fighting for gender equality, mistakenly thinking that perhaps ‘addressing’ gender is the same as ‘normalising’ gender politics. It is against this landscape that Lady Catherine Ashton becomes the first High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Thanks to decades of feminist activism within and outside international institutions, the issue of gender inequality is now firmly embedded within contemporary development policy and practice. In this essay I offer a brief overview of some of the debates and policies that inform feminist approaches to development policy and practice.
Whether the issue at hand is security, global governance, nuclear proliferation, peacebuilding or international law, feminist scholars have written extensively about (how) gender matters in global politics and, further, argued that paying analytical attention to gender allows us a range of insights that ‘gender-blind’ approaches do not access.
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