British foreign policy under the stewardship of David Miliband has maintained its universalist outlook but shifted its agenda from a distinctly top-down approach to a grassroots drive for what Miliband has called a ‘Civilian Surge’. This subtle shift is in part brought about by Miliband’s progressive liberal ideology but also by his interest in and support for new technology. But for all his enthusiastic rhetoric, is Miliband’s drive for a bottom-up approach to foreign policy the right one?

As in the other five slums in the city, people in Eastleigh are poor. They survive on far less than the average daily wage in Kenya, which is equal to about one and a half U.S. dollars. Lack of food is only one of their troubles. The political turmoil has exposed and exacerbated decades-worth of tribal tensions. While apparent to many Kenyans, for most of the international community, those tensions were hidden under the thin veneer of an emerging democracy with steady economic development and relative state stability.

Pakistan came into being out of a nationalist cause; the ethnic Muslim minority felt that its rights would be better preserved and served under a separate democratic setup, rather than among an overwhelming majority of Hindus. Great Britain also wanted a buffer state between the Muslim belt and India to save the Sub-Continent (which contained a quarter of the world’s population) from the effects of ‘Islamization’ and to ensure that it never emerged as a challenging power to British ambitions in the East (the Middle East, Hong Kong, Burma and Japan to name a few).