For Jacques Derrida, hospitality is ethics entire. This may well be the case. Yet the rights and wrongs of intervening in Libya (or anywhere else for that matter) from the standpoint of the ethics of hospitality are complicated, not simple.
The ongoing people’s uprisings in the Arab countries against autocratic rulers have provided Iran with both challenges and opportunities in the Middle East and beyond. Will these momentous events enhance Iran’s foreign policy opportunities, or will they ultimately lead to further isolation and strategic loneliness for Iran?
Although all wars may represent a failure of diplomacy, war is often the last resort of diplomacy. This paradox results from two competing ideas of what the supreme objective of diplomacy should be: peace at any cost, or peace by any means. This is the paradox of Libya. The international military intervention resulted from a mixture of an arguably successful strategy of coercive diplomacy at the UN, and a failure of third-party mediations.
The relations within and between the British and Irish islands are now routinely described as never having been better; a description regarded as a cliché. A cliché? Good. It was not so long ago that such a belief would have been dismissed as an attempt at humour.
The Libyan Crisis is in some respects a turning point in the ‘history’ of the responsibility to protect doctrine (RtoP). The case suggests that the international community is beginning to mobilize against rulers who conquer or purchase statehood to gain impunity.
One of the hotly debated topics in leftist circles is religion itself. While most leftists, especially since the birth of Marxism, have criticized religion with the desire of its downfall, there have been attempts by some to unite them, as in liberation theology, Christian communists and Islamic socialists.
Many international relations commentators are heralding the Western bombing of Libya as marking a return to the 1990s era of humanitarian intervention. The debate is largely over whether this return is to be welcomed or regretted. But a return of the moral or ethical understandings of the humanitarian interventionist 1990s is not a possibility.
The East Moves West confirms Geoffrey Kemp’s reputation as a scholar who combines a broad geopolitical vision with an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the many bilateral relationships between so many Middle Eastern countries, on the one hand, and so many Asian powers, on the other. It will be of great value to policy makers, journalists, scholars and students.
Revolutionary change is hard to understand, but it is even harder to predict. Whatever transpires in Libya, political tectonic waves are shifting. In the coming years, Cairo will rediscover its stature and voice; the Arab world’s sectarian cold war will move into a dangerous period; and aspirant democrats will search for models of their own, first Turkey, but perhaps eventually, Egypt.
This is a hectic season for IR junkies – another American-led war, several new African catastrophes, another crisis over the Euro, and (perhaps, best of all) the return of the nuclear issue. As these have arisen I’ve been wondering what kind of a creature IR is in the aftermath of […]
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