Hannah Arendt’s name has emerged at the forefront of contemporary writing on the possibility of cosmopolitan political forms. The central political issue, for Arendt, was one of appropriate foundation, that is, ‘the setting of a new beginning’ and of ‘lawgiving’. One could read Arendt’s entire theory of politics as an effort to work out the possibility of non-violent, non-imperial, non-ideological political founding.
Diplomacy can help make the world a better place, but it has failed to adapt to the imperatives of world order management in the 21st century. It has been sidelined, under-resourced and marginalized by governments almost everywhere. If this is to change, grand strategy will have to be reconsidered.
In order to avoid losing ground in a geopolitically pivotal region of the world, the US must be bold. Today, Iran and the increasingly confident Shia of the Middle East are playing a central role in shaping what the region will look like a generation from now. The US must be able to adapt to the shifting sands and not cling rigidly to yesteryear’s policy prescriptions.
Science should ideally provide the basis of non-ideological environments for the participation and free exchange of ideas. However, science has been, and will continue to be, used for political gain with the express aim of furthering a particular ideology and proving its superiority. Despite the negatives, science diplomacy has been effective for many years and led to coalition building and conflict resolution.
Religious dynamics (e.g. actors, worldviews, and cultures) infused numerous conflagrations in the 1990s including Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Sudan. Without giving credence to the notion that religion is the “problem” causing all today’s conflicts, how best can we understand the role that religious dynamics play in contemporary war and peace?
One of the few things to catch the imagination out of last December’s UN climate conference in Copenhagen certainly was Tuvalu, standing up to make a desperate plea for its continuing existence. But despite Clive Hamilton’s claim that this marks the ‘tectonics plates’ shifting and a rift emerging within the Third World, it is more likely that Tuvalu’s actions will come to be little more than a wistful memory.
Households are an enduring feature of human history. They are the building blocks of social formations in every era and at all scales: from small communities to the global economy. Feminists have produced an extensive body of research on households. But like domestic labor within households, this work rarely appears in mainstream accounts of economics, politics, or international relations (IR).
For half a century, the Third World remained united in the face of a common threat, the influence of the United States and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. But for least developed countries a greater enemy has now emerged, the threat to their survival posed by global warming, and they are no longer willing to subsume their demand that all the world’s polluters curb their activities beneath the imperative of maintaining the appearance of G77 unity.
The kind of conventional military brinkmanship going on at the common NATO-Russia border is not good news. A phenomenon not seen since the frostiest Cold War periods. If the last East-West confrontation offers a cautionary tale, it is that the situation urgently needs to be de-escalated, before worst-case scenarios become self-fulfilling prophecies.
As a power such as China come to rise, it can at its discretion take the role of a rival, a partner, or disguise itself and ultimately be both. Therefore, an emphasis on human rights through public diplomacy and positive interaction with both China and the international community may be the key that opens the door to building positive relations between the United States and China in the future.
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