Cultural dynamics reside at the heart of global environmental governance. The politics of the environment is – alongside questions of distribution/justice and physical sustainability – always a matter of meaning and purpose. And this should not come as a surprise.
We know that torture is a constant presence in warfare, most especially in counter-insurgency operations. Terrible things happen in wars. But warfare is also a learning process where participants try to avoid repeating the mistakes of their own experience and that of others.
The 2008 election was not a fluke. The days of Republican advantage on foreign and security affairs are over. The Democrats have learned to talk tougher on defense matters and to appoint Republicans and moderate Democrats to the senior posts. The Democrats now treat military preparedness, including Ronald Reagan’s missile defense, like the Republicans treat Social Security —with the self-preserving respect accorded electrified third rails.
A relationship between international actors based on sponsorship differs from classical notions of clientelism and soft power, and is critical of exclusively statist conceptions of international politics. Sponsorship, I argue, becomes a mutual determinant and accelerator of globalisation.
The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall offers has understandably generated a number of opportunities to look backwards to what happened, and to ask why it was that IR specialists seemed unable to see what was coming.
Neoconservatism’s approach of democratising the Middle East via military intervention, tempering terrorism in the area, and dealing with Iran decisively has already formed the core of Obama’s policy package, all continuations from the Bush administration.
The story of how Yushchenko came to power with high domestic and international expectations that he largely failed to fulfill will be a fascinating area for future research.
In October 2009, Iran was due to host athletes from the Muslim nations in order to celebrate “harmony” in the Islamic World. But Tehran has had to cancel the ‘Islamic Solidarity Games’ because Arab states demanded that the Persian tag should be removed from the competition’s medals and promotional posters – 27 countries led by Saudi Arabia refused to compete unless the famous waterway was called the “Arabian Gulf” instead of the “Persian Gulf”. What does this tell us about soft power and diplomacy in the region?
One year ago Cyclone Nargis struck southern Burma. This ‘natural’ disaster brought about the death of at least 140,000 people, made homeless 800,000 more, and caused severe hardship for the inhabitants of much of the Irrawaddy Delta. The land of the Delta is Burma’s (and once the world’s) ‘rice bowl’, and so the destruction wrought here a year ago has been greatly damaging to food security amongst the poor throughout the country.
What do the Miss Universe competition, Sesame Street’s Elmo, and Fox’s television show 24 have in common? Aside from being phenomenally successful American cultural products, they can also offer us insight into the workings of world politics, in this case through their connections to the US military detention facilities at Joint Task Force Guantánamo.
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