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?
Terrorism has existed for centuries as a way of creating disruption and fear. Yet, to declare a war against it has created numerous questions as to how to fight this multifaceted idea. Individual groups do indeed hold ideological stances, just as legitimate political parties do, but to brand all terrorism and terrorists as the same would be incorrect.
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.
Women’s roles in working towards peace have become increasingly celebrated. The core issue with the association of women with peace activism is that it raises, and reinforces, gendered norms, through the assumptions of what it means to be a woman. In academic literature, these assumptions of Maternalism and Essentialism deny women agency.
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.
Because of the deep mutual mistrust from both sides, especially the US concern over China’s military build-up, friction and cooperation will coexist in the development of the China-US naval relationship. Only when political mutual trust reaches a high level, can the military relationship stride forward beyond the stop and go cycle of the last 30 years.
The key element in shaping the Libyan intervention’s impact will be whether the operation can overcome the recurrent problems humanitarian interventions have been facing in the past two decades. The West’s reluctance toward renewed humanitarian interventions will only be revised if the operation attains its mission objective without becoming entangled in a protracted internal conflict.
While the lessons of the Libyan crisis for international relations are many, the most important lesson is the need to change the way that humanitarian interventions are conducted, as the violence experienced by civilians since the foreign intervention has increased substantially.
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