The Study of Modern Intrastate War
As many as 30 million people have perished in intrastate wars since 1945, with nearly 50 million displaced. Human rights violations during intrastate war – including rape, systematic torture, displacement, sexual mutilation, genocide, and the exploitation of child soldiers – have caused great misery. As a consequence, there is a need for more effective ways of controlling and transforming the devastating effects of intrastate war to be unearthed.
How do Public and Private Authority Differ from Public and Private Power as Mechanisms of Global Governance?
This essay begins with an articulation of authority, and the role of legitimacy in acquiring authority. It then defines power, moving away from realist conceptions to other social relations through which power manifests. It analyses how these different conceptions of power translate to authority once legitimacy is established before finally concluding with an examination of market authority as an illustration of interconnectedness of authority and power.
Towards a New Paradigm for Transitional Justice?
This dissertation will focus on a critical comparison of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This study will look at several key aspects of these commissions in order to attempt to establish whether the adoption of certain elements over others enabled these truth commissions to have a greater impact with regards to their titular mandate.
The Unique Character of the European Union
The EU is a modern political phenomenon that has risen out of the social, historical and economic context of the 20th century. It is a political system which is unique in comparison to all others. Although it has traits that bear resemblance to the political systems of federal states as well as intergovernmental organisations, it remains one of a kind.
A case against universal human rights
This essay seeks to explore whether it is indeed useful to endow the individual with universal human rights. Although it is essential that the individual should have human rights, these cannot be attained through the deliberate resort to universalism that we can find in the cosmopolitan position. Instead, the only possible way of protecting the individual is through emphasising her particularity.
How did the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki start a ‘nuclear revolution’?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not mark the beginnings of a ‘nuclear revolution’ as it is understood. The strategic environment and technological capabilities for a revolution did not exist in 1945 and not until much later.
Can Armed Intervention to Save Strangers be Morally Justified?
Humanitarian intervention is an issue which receives a great deal of attention from academics, politicians and the media. Throughout the 1990s, human rights abuses in Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo all raised the question of whether humanitarian intervention could be morally justified. This left Tony Blair to conclude in 1999 that ‘the most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get involved in other people’s conflicts’. In the twenty-first century the controversies have continued, and the international community has been deeply divided over whether to intervene both in Iraq and Darfur.
Does the European Union have a strategic culture?
The European Union does not currently have a strategic culture, but it is in a process of creating one and putting it into practice. But the real question is whether the European Union has the capacity to transition from a civilian to a strategic actor, by developing a concrete strategic culture and a higher level of autonomy for the EU regarding security and defence issues
Al-Qaeda and the success of US intelligence
The year 1989 will remain in a global history as direct beginning of Soviet Union’s collapse which was finalized in the 1991. This year will also stay in world remembrance as a founding date of probably best known terrorist organization – Al-Qaeda. How well has US intelligence performed against this threat?
Why did Communism survive in China but not in the USSR?
While there were many factors that contributed to the downfall of Communism in the Soviet Union, the main one was that during the 1980s nobody believed in it any more; which was the key difference between the survival of Communism in China. China had a truly mass movement with Communism, while the Soviet Union was largely created with the ideas of one man, Lenin.
