The United States, France and Britain invaded Libya with cruise missiles, stealth bombers, fighter jets and attack jets. In addition, the United Nations and France have been bombing the Ivory Coast to protect civilians. The Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which is being used to legitimate these attacks, is a slippery slope that should be viewed with extreme caution.
From afar, the protests in Arab countries seem broadly similar: economic factors – such as the global recession’s impact on migrant remittances, as well as rising food prices – are being cited as the impetus for the revolts. Yet while economic grievances are not irrelevant, the structural meta-narrative, just like the cultural one, is problematic.
For the first three decades after independence in 1960, Cote d’Ivoire was singular in its prosperity and political stability in West Africa. Along with the now stable, democratic, and prosperous Ghana and emergent Nigeria, it has the potential to pull the entire region out of the quagmire of non-ending conflicts.
The USA is not the only power with key interests in outer space, and will have to pander to other sensitivities in the future. Russia, China, the EU and commercial actors are prevalent in their discussions. We must ask the questions who are we defending from, and to whom are we going to deny the access of space?
While we should scrutinise the ICC’s work in Africa, it is important to recognise that international justice is not the only possible response to atrocity. National and local processes are proving to be vital tools of justice, truth and reconciliation across Africa, more profound and lasting than the prosecution of suspects in The Hague.
The Chinese government has developed the world’s most extensive technical, organizational, and cultural systems for monitoring and filtering the Internet and other forms of communications such as SMS and voice calls. Many Middle Eastern and African countries have bought telecommunications equipment from China, and have tried to emulate its monitoring and filtering regime.
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?
Iran is becoming the proverbial elephant in the room. The idea of a religious Armageddon lying around the corner is unusual in Twenty-First Century statecraft, and few national leaders vocalize such beliefs. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khamenei are stark exceptions. Prudence dictates not discounting the possibility that Ahmadinejad and his cohorts do believe their rhetoric. Vigilance is necessary.
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.
Why does my heart sink when I hear the current UN-mandated action in Libya described as “humanitarian intervention”? After all, over the last 20 years the term has acquired currency — not only among Western politicians but also academics — as a description of coercive, usually military, intervention ostensibly for humanitarian purposes.
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