When the USA overthrew the Taliban in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in 2003, many hoped that America could repeat its great foreign policy successes of neutralizing Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan following World War II. Overthrowing the former permanently moved extraordinarily grave threats to international stability.
Despised by Bismarck as ’not worth the life of a single German solider’’ and described by Churchill as ‘having too much history to consume’’, the region of the Western Balkans is returning to the agenda. The EU and the USA must step in and show that they are up to this ultimate test of bringing the last remaining non-EU island into the orbit of the Union and NATO.
With the cascading events in Tunisia, there has been much debate about whether or not this represents a real revolution. The question is clearly important. Much of the debate seems to focus on whether or not Tunisia will move out of an autocratic system of government and into a liberal democracy. But whatever the eventual political outcome, Tunisians have already experienced a real revolution.
Professor Peter Vale’s provocative piece on “The Responsibility of IR Scholars” deserves comment which I suspect many e-IR readers will provide. Let me offer mine in this blog. I must say that I would hardly claim to be an IR Scholar as I was trained in political economy and government […]
In January 2011 the South Sudanese voted overwhelmingly for independence from Sudan. Over 98% of registered voters chose separation over unity. Much of the Western media has portrayed this vote as an indicator of a successful end to decades of conflict in the South. When South Sudan celebrates its independence, expected to take place in July 2011, the mood will indeed be jovial. But South Sudan is setting up to be a failed state.
When security forces, meant to protect people, are instead let loose in a killing spree, the state itself becomes the prime perpetrator of atrocities. With precisely such an unfolding scenario, Libya today is the place and time to redeem or renege on R2P’s solemn pledge.
The ‘Arab Spring’ is a pivotal moment in the political and social development of the wider Middle East. Some have likened it to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, others to the impact of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Nowhere encapsulates the tensions and contradictory forces now shaping the Arab Spring than Yemen, a state that has become synonymous with the epithets ‘failed’ or ‘failing’.
History has placed two peoples, both with legitimate claims, in competition for the same land. The brutality of the Murders at Itamar is a reminder that the conflict on the West Bank, indeed the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians in all of its aspects, should be understood as a secular, rather than a religious, event.
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 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.
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