The recent multinational agreement with Iran, along with the calamitous consequences of US military intervention in the Middle East, challenge the frozen notions that have dominated US foreign policy.
The United States blocked the latest UN resolution to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine for the most disingenuous of reasons.
America is suffering from a failure to commit.
Institutions of global governance such as the United Nations are often limited to inter-governmental dialogue with little input from the civil society actors they directly affect. However, in her book The United Nations and Civil Society: Legitimating Global Governance – Whose Voice?, Nora McKeon documents the interaction between civil society organizations (CSO) and the United Nations over the last two decades. Developments between the two actors, she argues, point to meaningful civil society inclusion within the global political system.
U Win Tin is a close associate and advisor of Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and is also known as the chief strategist of the opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). Over his lifetime, he spent 19 years in Rangoon’s Insein Prison, most of it in solitary confinement.
Over one million people would die before the partition of India and Pakistan was over in 1947, when one country suddenly became two. The governments in Delhi and Islamabad quickly set about recasting national identities that would strengthen each individual regime. Central to these newly formed identities was a strong loathing for the other side, developed through closed borders, years of warfare, and a systematic approach by both governments to create fear. The people, once united, became enemies.
Michael Edwards spent years working for such organizations as Oxfam International, Save the Children, and the World Bank. Before writing Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, he directed the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society program. With this knowledge and expertise, Edwards challenges the notion that “philanthrocapitalism,” or market-driven philanthropy, can have deep and transformative value to society.
In early February, President Obama submitted his defense budget, asking for an additional $33 billion for the expansion of the war in Afghanistan on top of a record-breaking $744 billion for the Department of Defense. His request follows the decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, in the belief that greater military might is needed to defeat the Taliban and win the war. However, understanding the strength of the Taliban and its supporters could provide needed insight on how to overcome the Taliban using other tools than just the military.
There are no saints and even fewer geniuses in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over Ossetia. However, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, clearly the real power in Moscow, has certain proven himself even less saintly than other parties – and in the long term, less clever. Albeit with serious input from American miscalculations and atavistic politics and with the help of the hapless Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili, Putin has made both Russia, and the world, a more dangerous place.
Someone should erect a monument in Pristina to Slobodan Miloševic as the godfather of the new country. If he had not abolished Kosovar autonomy, practiced a form of apartheid for a decade, and rounded it off with a brutal episode of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, Kosovo would not likely have declared independence on February 17. Nor would its European neighbors and indeed so many of the most important countries of the world have recognized its independence so promptly.