What the End of Civil War Means for Sri Lanka, and Why it Should Matter to the Rest of the World
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
The ICJ and Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence: Anything Resolved?
I always tell my students, when sitting an exam, that they have to answer the question that has been set rather than one that they feel comfortable with. No analogy is ever perfect, but this one sums up pretty neatly the outcome of the deliberations by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Global Governance and Geoengineering
The potential “experiments” imagined in the geoengineering literature will be overtly designed to alter the climate. By contrast, the carbon buildup experienced this past century was the unintended byproduct of energy production. Obviously, very difficult (but interesting) global politics problems are associated with both pathways.
John Gray and the idea of progress
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 advocacy politics of NGOs: shaping society to respond to climate change
In his seminal article The Tragedy of the Commons, Garret Hardin described a dilemma whereby individuals, acting independently and in rational pursuit of their own self-interest, will ultimately destroy shared, limited resources, even when it is accepted that this is not in anyone’s long-term interests. Today, climate campaigners see this unfolding before their eyes. But what does it mean for the study of advocacy politics?
Framing climate change
At my home institution, I’m involved in a project to reduce carbon emissions via individual behavioral changes. A relatively small group of scholars and administrators have been looking at some interesting theoretical and empirical social science research to bolster our efforts.
Outer Space Development: Including Everyone in the Process
The first phase of outer space development has already taken place, involving satellite telecommunications industries, television, cell phones, the Internet and a multitude of goods and services linked to these space technologies. The vast majority of people around the world still think of outer space as an elite field for government astronauts and scientists. So, why not expose more people to outer space development?
Raising the Bar on Chocolate: Cocoa Farmers in Ghana Shape the Future
In 1993 Ghana initiated the partial liberalisation of its most significant economic export, cocoa beans. Having resisted World Bank pressure to liberalise fully, the Cocoa Marketing Board retained its monopoly on exports through the Cocoa Marketing Company. It thus sustained its farm-to-port quality control system of every sack and its authority to determine the terms of trade
Why Gender Matters in/to the Global Economy
During the apparent peak of the so-called Global Financial Crisis in 2009, a flurry of descriptions of the crisis as a ‘mancession’ emerged. To ignore or trivialise gender in the global economy is to fail to appreciate the power of a basic and fundamental system of identification through which we understand the world; a system that organises how we respond to our environments, our abilities to survive, our goals in life, and how we approach our relationships.
Whose “World Cup” is this?
As the drift of this (admittedly) curmudgeonly blog suggests, I’m keen to invest in a T-shirt which is carrying a somewhat different slogan, “FICK FUFA”!
