The Chinese government has developed the world’s most extensive technical, organizational, and cultural systems for monitoring and filtering the Internet and other forms of communications such as SMS and voice calls. Many Middle Eastern and African countries have bought telecommunications equipment from China, and have tried to emulate its monitoring and filtering regime.
It can’t be that everyone once considered political theory relevant and now finds it irrelevant, based on mysterious facts about today’s world. Practical men and women have always favoured action over thought. Long ago, Aristotle said that political activists find philosophers contemptible. So these questions are hardly innocent: they put political theory on the defensive. How should political theorists respond?
Terrorism has existed for centuries as a way of creating disruption and fear. Yet, to declare a war against it has created numerous questions as to how to fight this multifaceted idea. Individual groups do indeed hold ideological stances, just as legitimate political parties do, but to brand all terrorism and terrorists as the same would be incorrect.
I started writing this blog in an angry retort to the bombastic voice of Peter King but what I have ended up with is more confusion than insight. The Chair of the Homeland Security Committee, Peter King has previously made a number of comments towards Islam and Muslims that have […]
Nuclear strategy developed as a means to create a rational framework of deterrence for the seemingly irrational nature of nuclear war. Rational individuals may only be so when they exist in a rational context. Once placed in an irrational situation, it is questionable as to whether a person, or on organisation could continue to act in a rational manner.
The Treaty of Lisbon is not a major step in advancing the institutional interests of the EU, but some of the new institutional arrangements and the ambiguities central to its main provisions have the potential to shift the process of European integration from formal treaties towards informal evolution of competences.
Women’s roles in working towards peace have become increasingly celebrated. The core issue with the association of women with peace activism is that it raises, and reinforces, gendered norms, through the assumptions of what it means to be a woman. In academic literature, these assumptions of Maternalism and Essentialism deny women agency.
The American-Russian relationship is best described as going from Cold War to Cold Peace, as articulated by the then Russian President Yeltsin. The 1990s essentially brought about a period in which the US sought to manage the uncertainties that the new world order was presenting.
It was widely regarded as a rare bright spot in New Labour’s pretentions to an ‘ethical foreign policy’. While domestic reform got bogged down in complexity, and foreign policy in recrimination, British policy in Africa stood for something pure – the ‘one noble cause’ as Blair himself put it. But what is the real legacy of New Labour’s pursuit of the ‘good state’ in Africa?
From the social uprising that toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia on January 11, 2011, to the recent social unrest in Libya to oust the 40 year old reign of Muammar Gadhafi, many political scientists have been left puzzled as to reasons behind the North African revolutionary movement and where it could spread in the coming weeks.
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