Conn Hallinan remembers Carl Bloice—an FPIF columnist, longtime journalist, and lifetime advocate for the dispossessed.
Goodbye, Carl Bloice
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Foreign Policy In Focus
Our Top 13 from 2013
Our top pieces from 2013 touch on nearly corner of the world.
2012 in 16 Stories
From drugs to drones, budgets to bases, and Syria to Sandy, FPIF continues to cover the human impacts of policy at home and abroad, always affording a special place to scholars and activists committed to changing it for the better. In that spirit, we’ve collected 16 of our biggest stories from 2012—those global vignettes that readers like you read, shared, and talked about the most.
Naval Base Tears Apart Korean Village
“The land and sea isn’t something you bought,” explained Kang Ae-Shim. “Why are you selling something that was there long before you were born?” Kang Ae Shim is a haenyo, one of the legendary Korean women sea divers from Jeju Island who can hold their breath for up to two minutes while foraging the ocean floor for seafood. But today Kang and others are fighting to save their island from the pending construction of a South Korean naval base in Gangjeong village, which threatens to tear apart the age-old sisterhood of the haenyoand destroy the pristine ecology of Jeju’s shores. The government and construction contractors are attempting to stamp out the outcry by arresting, beating, fining, and threatening villagers and activists.
China and the U.S. Debt
As the largest U.S. foreign creditor, China has a huge stake in ensuring the safety of its investments in U.S. treasury bills. Having closely observed the U.S. debt turmoil, China has likely concluded that the U.S. economy is in deep trouble and that full economic recovery might take quite some time. The Chinese, on the contrary, are convinced that their economy is on the rise. Consequently, they are more vocal than before when it comes to pointing fingers at U.S. economic behavior.
Washington Needs a Progressive Drug Policy
Mexico’s drug war is spiraling into bedlam. Within the past month, local Ciudad Juarez authorities deemed 15-year-old girls attending prison parties “impossible to control,” a 14-year old was accused of beheading and kidnapping for cartels, and masked guerilla groups continued to avenge their countrymen’s deaths. The war has no end in sight. Atrocities plague northern Mexico and other Central American countries, including Guatemala and El Salvador.
The Crisis of Humanitarian Intervention
Events in Libya and Syria have again brought to the forefront the question of armed humanitarian intervention or the “responsibility to protect.” Is it ever legitimate to supersede the principle of national sovereignty with a military intervention aimed at protecting citizens from their government? And if the answer is yes, what circumstances would justify this course of action and how should it be carried out?
Interview With WikiLeaks Go-to Guy, the Nation’s Greg Mitchell
No one covering WikiLeaks has been able to keep up with the Nation’s Greg Mitchell.
A Memo to the Next President: Think Globally
With a global economic slowdown and a deepening food crisis, the biggest foreign policy priority for the next President must be building a global economy that benefits poor and working families in the United States and around the world.
The Quagmire in Iraq
Editor’s note: Since 2004, IPS has been tracking the costs of the Iraq War in human and financial costs to the United States, Iraq, and the rest of the world. This latest fact sheet is designed to help bring a full understanding of the devastation of the war. The PDF version of this article http://www.fpif.org/pdf/reports/0803iraqcow.pdf provides the following information in an easy to read format designed for duplication and popular education.