The current swine flu outbreak takes place amidst ongoing international efforts to establish a system of global health security. While considerable progress towards this goal has been made, serious unresolved problems mean that the concept and practice of global health security is likely to face severe challenges.
Proponents of “responsibility to protect” or “R2P” have been linking their concept in recent weeks to the waning civil war in Sri Lanka. Are they right to do so? Talk of R2P may well distract from what should be a clear and unified demand to both sides: Cease fire.
South Africa’s general election which was held on April 22 has yielded the proverbial ‘win-win’ situation for all the participants except the tiny parties, who failed to impress voters and whose futures now hang in the balance. Although this outcome-and the peaceful and well-organised poll-augur well for democracy in the former apartheid state, many still believe that the country’s fifteen year-old democracy may be in peril.
Sceptics of soft power proclaim that as long as the United States is strong enough, it can do what it wishes and thus “the world’s only superpower does not need permanent allies.” Nevertheless in light of the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the decline in the American economy following the fall of the loan market and “fewer genuine friends surrounding it”, one has to ask the question of whether or not US power is in decline.
When Asian leaders attending a summit meeeting – including the prime ministers of China and Japan – had to be whisked out of a besieged luxury Pattaya hotel by helicopter on 11 April, it was official: Thailand is in deep political trouble.
The Sri Lankan government is losing the ideological battle while it is winning the military battle. This has tremendous implications for policymaking. Even if the government completely vanquishes the LTTE, the government could be pressured into an unfair and unsustainable political settlement due to the deeply entrenched ethnic analysis.
It is likely in the coming days that the Tamil Tigers lose their last piece of territory. However, without a political agreement to address the grievances of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, Sri Lanka will continue to be beset by a different, and perhaps more intractable, type of conflict.
Of all the visible symbols of China’s rise to global prominence, perhaps the most compelling was the Opening of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. But what did the Games reveal about the nature and character of the “new” China, and-equally importantly-what did they seek to conceal from view?
The international system, comprised as it is of a society of sovereign states, necessarily stands as a barrier to universal morality. The ideal of cosmopolitanism, envisioning humanity as a singular and unified moral community, is impossible in a world where the primary political unit is the state.
American aversion to counterinsurgency is deeply ingrained in the American way of warfare. Since the 1940s the US Army has trained, equipped, and organised for large-scale conventional operations against like adversaries. They have traditionally employed conventional military operations even against irregular enemies. I hope to show that America’s conventional supremacy and in particular their approach to war may prove to be counterproductive in this new century of small wars.
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