President Obama and other senior US officials make constant reference to America being “a nation at war.” This is politically necessary to say and obviously the case because the US has nearly a hundred thousand troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan and reports combat casualties daily.
In 1993 Ghana initiated the partial liberalisation of its most significant economic export, cocoa beans. Having resisted World Bank pressure to liberalise fully, the Cocoa Marketing Board retained its monopoly on exports through the Cocoa Marketing Company. It thus sustained its farm-to-port quality control system of every sack and its authority to determine the terms of trade
During the apparent peak of the so-called Global Financial Crisis in 2009, a flurry of descriptions of the crisis as a ‘mancession’ emerged. To ignore or trivialise gender in the global economy is to fail to appreciate the power of a basic and fundamental system of identification through which we understand the world; a system that organises how we respond to our environments, our abilities to survive, our goals in life, and how we approach our relationships.
As the drift of this (admittedly) curmudgeonly blog suggests, I’m keen to invest in a T-shirt which is carrying a somewhat different slogan, “FICK FUFA”!
Despite growth, women continue to constitute only 19% of all parliamentarians worldwide. Quotas are a diverse set of measures that can reach the political agenda for both feminist and non-feminist reasons, leading to diverse effects on the election and empowerment of women. Whilst necessary, more systematic research is needed in order to determine their impact on women as a group.
What is multiculturalism? Is it a concept that is often uncritically used in the contemporary ‘civic’ and academic discourse, whereby those who employ it rarely feel the need to define it? Is it the state of affairs in some countries, the fact that several cultures coexist there, or perhaps some ideal that is still to be reached, something that implies political and social changes in a society? What if three cultures on the same territory promote cultural dogmas which are mutually irreconcilable?
Greece is tiny, its economy only 3 per cent of the EU. But just as the world appeared to be clawing its way out of financial turmoil and recession, Greece reminded the markets that countries, as well as banks, can go bust. The EU has changed its poorer members less than its founders imagined. Perhaps this crisis—the most serious in the EU since its creation, according to Angela Merkel—will finally persuade Greece, and the other weaker economies, to make the reforms they have ducked since joining the euro.
A historically unprecedented 142 women MPs were elected in the UK on May 6th. The election also saw the first Muslim women MPs; the first Black and first ‘out’ lesbian Conservative women MPs; and the first Green party MP was a woman too. But women continue to be under represented.
To the extent that The Wire has had anything to say about the events of 9/11, which it implicitly comments upon during its five seasons, it is the message of continuity that stands out. Too much has been made about how the world changed on 9/11. And while it would be altogether fraught to claim that nothing has changed, it is also true that the world which existed before 9/11 continues to exist today.
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats share a deep-rooted ideological background. This vision is founded on the promotion of civil liberties over government expansion. Both are committed to making individuals responsible for their own lives, be this by a non-judgemental conception of individual morality or a smaller, less intrusive government. There is no reason to doubt the compatibility of the two parties.
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