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 is too early to evaluate the impact of WikiLeaks on world affairs. But more than ever in this changed and more porous world, Woodrow Wilson’s call for “open covenants, openly arrived at” remains a superior guide to foreign policy to Machiavelli’s recommendation that governments be strong like a lion but also clever like a fox. It may be that WikiLeaks goes too far, but enlightened policy makers should welcome publication of how good decisions—and bad—came about.
Strategic theory offers an exact and coherent basis for investigating social phenomena. It is able to de-conflict the attempt to assess social activity designed to achieve goals from arbitrary moral valuations. It facilitates clarity of understanding, and is thereby, mind opening and intellectually liberating.
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?
Last week, in his regular religion column for the Louisville Courier Journal, journalist Peter Smith discussed the results of a recent survey about climate change. As per usual in the U.S. context, the survey asked whether particular people believed in global warming — as if the science on this question was not largely settled.
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.
Modern Iran represents one of the biggest waiting games of the world today. A beautiful, civilised, and hospitable country containing one of the nicer peoples on earth, and with a distinguished history to boast, has become one of the world’s most rejected nations ruled by those with standards and practices more suitable to the middle ages than the 21st Century.
Intervention to stabilize and reconstruct failed, failing, fragile, and even re-orient hostile countries may not be avoidable for the U.S. and also for its E.U. partners. But for intervention to be successful it must be undertaken cautiously, preemptively when possible, and swiftly, with coalitions of willing partners.
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.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is considered a defining moment because the Islamic Republic replaced an authoritarian monarchy that was friendly to the West. The revolution, moreover, linked religion to politics in an unprecedented way. The books reviewed herein demonstrate that the idea of a “monolithic Islam” is not only wrong, it is dangerous.
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