The Politics of Justice: The International Criminal Court Prosecutor seeks a Warrant
There is some irony in the criticism of ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo for issuing his request for a warrant of arrest for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) was previously criticised for moving too slowly and for not targeting high levels of the government. How sensitive to a politics of consequence, then, should the Prosecutor be?
The Cold War and Chinese Foreign Policy
In October 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) replaced the Republic of China (ROC) after the Chinese Communists won a nationwide victory in the civil war and drove the Nationalist government to Taiwan. A Communist China, comprising a quarter of the world’s population, had inevitably extended the Cold War to East Asia. The PRC’s foreign policy during the Cold War went through several distinctive stages.
Can the World Position Itself for the Next President Before the Actual Election?
For the first time since 1952, neither an incumbent president nor a vice president of the incumbent’s party is running for the White House in the US presidential election of 2008. The 2008 election and its outcome thus represent something of an unknown quantity not only to the American electorate, but to the rest of the world as well.
President Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy: Change We Can Believe In?
The election of America’s first African-American president would excite enormous expectation in Europe, and, at least temporarily, reverse much of the hostility to US foreign policy which has been generated over the last six or so years. But how much change should we expect from Obama’s foreign policy?
Global food price rises: Threat or opportunity for poor farmers?
After thirty years of stability, staple food prices have increased on average by 43% in world markets this year and 80% since 2005. The fastest rising commodity, wheat, was $105 a tonne in 2000 and now costs $481. This is of enormous concern in less developed countries (LDCs), but are there also opportunities present for poor farmers?
The Paradox of Globalisation: Countering Terrorism in a Deterritorialised Global Sphere
This comment considers some implications of territoriality (and deterritoralisation) as they affect global politics and as they impact states’ policies towards global politics. A special emphasis will be put upon a security perspective, namely on transnational terrorism and subsequently on imperatives for counter-terrorism policies.
Is Iran Next? The Importance of Geopolitics
In many ways geopolitics is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be thought about; it’s the taken for granted arrangement of things that provides the context for policy making. Except that what it most obvious in how we understand the world isn’t necessarily the only way things can be understood. Given dominant geopolitical specifications in the White House then, what are the prospects for an attack on Iran?
A Sorry State of Affairs
Last year, the U.S. House International Relations Committee voted to approve a resolution describing Turkey’s mass killing of Armenians as a genocide. The move sparked a furor from people concerned that pressuring Turkey was politically unwise, raising the question of whether or not it makes sense for national governments to be in the business of pressuring other countries to acknowledge human rights abuses.
Bolivia’s New International Stage
The December 2005 election of Evo Morales as the president of Bolivia captivated international attention. Not surprisingly, it was greeted (by supporters and critics alike) as part of the region-wide shift to the left. Morales has worked to realign Bolivia away from its earlier Washington orbit and closer to anti-American bona fides like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. But he’s playing a dangerous game.
The Politics of Displacement in Kenya
In this brief piece we will look at Kenya’s politics of displacement. Recent violence in this important East African country left over a thousand dead from police bullets, fires and machetes and around 600, 000 displaced. Whilst such violence reaches back into the colonial period, the combination of bad government and the revival of multi-party elections is also central.
