Five years before Hezbollah, ten years before Al Qaeda and Hamas, and 15 years before the Taliban, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was founded in northern Sri Lanka in 1976, beginning life as one of many militias fighting for Tamil independence from the predominantly Sinhalese Sri Lanka

Using women’s status as an indicator for the level of modernity achieved in non Western Muslim societies can set up a vicious circle that reinforces an orientalist bias. Such an evaluation is often affected by a belief that secular-liberal regimes hold a more favourable stance towards women. In addition, some Western feminist scholars have developed an approach that exasperates this dynamic

The political thought of John Gray offers an unflinching vision of the world, a world divided by refractory ways of life, stressed by the looming conflicts over natural resources and scorched by irreversible patterns of global warming. Gray’s vision of the world is none too cheerful, and prescribed throughout his numerous analyses of today’s most pressing problems is a sobering dose of realism. Gray has repeatedly emphasized that many of our greatest problems are incurable and that the best we can hope to achieve is to minimise their symptoms

The “responsibility to protect” principle (R2P) has radically transformed the international community’s approach to major cases of humanitarian suffering, shifting its focus from “intervention” to “prevention”. Nevertheless, the tragic case of Darfur has clearly demonstrated its limitations.

If the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes has been called a “father of Realism”, then the Greek historian Thucydides must surely be its forefather. This essay is going to compare Hobbes’ and Thucydides’ opinions on the sources of state-behaviour with respect to Realist standpoints, questioning whether they can justifiably be classified as belonging to this school of thought.