Diplomacy & Politics Archive

One sign of how good relations between Russia and the United States have become is that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spent three days in high-level meetings in Washington without attracting much attention from the American news media. Bilateral ties may finally be evolving, at least for now, into a more mature, almost normal relationship between two great powers sharing common interests as well as limited areas of disagreement. Lavrov discussed a range of important issues with his American interlocutors, including Libya, Syria, Iran, Korea, Afghanistan, South Sudan, terrorism, the Israel-Palestine peace process, the United Nations and even Alaska and […]

In late-June, the U.N. Security Council renewed the mandate of the peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), despite calls by DRC leaders for its withdrawal and fierce criticism of the mission’s failure to halt the country’s rape crisis. In an email interview, Theodore Trefon, senior researcher at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium and author of the forthcoming book “Congo Masquerade,” discussed the U.N.’s peacekeeping mission in the DRC. WPR: What are the main challenges facing the U.N. in the DRC? Theodore Trefon: Powerlessness is the word that best captures the challenges facing the […]

Americans today are enjoying the most peaceful period, on a per capita basis, in human history, with virtually all of the remaining mass violence in the system occurring not between organized militaries, but rather sub- and transnationally — that is, within nation-states and across their borders. The frequency, length and lethality of conflicts are all down from Cold War highs, despite the growth in both numbers of countries and world population. Nonetheless, most Americans continue to have extremely misdirected fears and impressions regarding the global security landscape. We see a world of wars and believe them all to be of […]

Brazil’s Finance Minister Guido Mantega recently told the Financial Times that the global currency war “was absolutely not over,” and cited two countries that, according to him, have not ceased the hostilities: China and the United States. More and more, Brazil seems to be caught between — and battling against — the greenback and the yuan in its efforts to slow the rise in value of its own currency, the real. Part of the problem is due to the disparity in how the United States and China have bounced back from the 2008 global financial crisis. Economic recovery in the […]

Remarks this week by U.S. President Barack Obama may have indicated a hardening of his administration’s posture against Syrian President Bashar Assad and Syria’s ongoing violent crackdown on anti-government protesters. But questions remain over what the United States can do to rein in Assad while supporting the Syrian protesters. “The Americans’ options are extremely limited,” says Richard Gowan, a World Politics Review contributor and associate director of NYU’s Center on International Cooperation. The logical step would be to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s crackdown. But as Gowan told Trend Lines yesterday, “The Security Council is deadlocked over […]

The Obama administration’s decision to begin a process of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan was predicated on the assumption that the U.S. and NATO mission in that country had successfully set it on a “glide path” toward an acceptable level of stability. While always acknowledging the fragility and reversibility of progress achieved to date, there was increasing confidence that, especially after the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. had turned a corner in Afghanistan. The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, or AWK, throws all of this into doubt. Whether his killer in fact acted on orders of the Taliban, or […]

An open-ended sit-in in Cairo’s Tahrir Square will enter its seventh day today and may grow larger if calls for another major Friday protest are met. Five months after an 18-day uprising brought down President Hosni Mubarak, a substantial number of Egyptians feel that the pace of change has been too slow to satisfy their revolutionary demands. They are holding major demonstrations in Tahrir Square and around the country, explicitly condemning the ruling military council that took over after Mubarak’s resignation and pushing for faster and deeper reforms. In the week since the latest round of protests began, the interim […]

A century ago, Argentina was one of the world’s richest countries. Since then, Buenos Aires has given the world a primer on how to derail, disrupt and mismanage economic growth, with successive governments finding new and creative ways to stop prosperity in its tracks. Now President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is adding a page to the nation’s playbook, and this time, the main theme is deliberate denial of reality. With the specter of inflation threatening to overheat and burn Argentina’s economic recovery, Fernandez enacted a most peculiar strategy to combat the problem: denying there is one. In recent years, the […]

The announcement this week that Israel’s cabinet approved a new maritime demarcation agreement with Cyprus may pave the way for Israel to start tapping prized offshore oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. But it also exacerbates an already tense geopolitical standoff between Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and Cyprus surrounding the energy reserves, which, though relatively small compared to those in the Persian Gulf, are estimated to be worth billions. “You’ve got all the ingredients for a problem,” says James M. Dorsey, a World Politics Review contributor and senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. […]

Guatemala is confronting numerous problems as it prepares for presidential elections scheduled for Sept. 11. Organized criminal groups have made parts of the country all but lawless. Corruption and poverty remain widespread. Frequent natural disasters have strained state capacity. Even the preparations for the elections themselves have been plagued by political violence, with two dozen political workers killed in 2011 alone. But one problem has yet to become a major feature of the presidential campaign, despite its gravity: food insecurity, which threatens millions in Guatemala. With food prices rising globally, social upheaval over increasingly expensive basic staples has become more […]

On Saturday, South Sudan achieved formal independence from the central Sudanese government in Khartoum. The event was cause for considerable celebration as well as several rounds of expressions of concern from observers in Africa and the West. While the status quo was untenable, the prospects for South Sudan look far from bright. It lacks both a well-defined border with its hostile mother-state and control over much of its own territory, and appears to have minimal administrative, military or normative capacity. In other words, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. The bleak scenario facing Juba raises the question: What have we […]

More than 1,400 people were arrested in Kuala Lumpur over the weekend during clashes between opposition protesters and government security forces, who reportedly used chemically laced water cannons to deter the crowd. The demonstrations were Malaysia’s most significant since 2007, and the swiftness with which Prime Minister Najib Razak cracked down suggests his government may be edgy ahead of elections to be held by 2013. “I think you’re seeing a lot of defensiveness on the part of the government,” says Bridget Welsh, a Malaysia specialist at Singapore Management University. “To lock down the capital city reflects a certain degree of […]

Belfast police have been attacked by rioters throwing flaming petrol bombs and rocks ahead of the July 12 Orange Day parade. The parade commemorating the Battle of the Boyne traditionally sees Protestants participating in hundreds of Marches across Northern Ireland.

In 1999, Amartya Sen, an Indian economist who a year earlier had won the Nobel Prize for Economics, published “Development as Freedom.” Sen mapped out two arguments for a general audience. First, he defined economic development as the expansion of individual freedom, challenging “narrower” views that reduced development to GNP growth or a rise in personal incomes. Sen’s ideas spurred the creation of the U.N. Human Development Index, which created a composite measure of development that included income, health and education. Second, Sen maintained that democratic political arrangements, defined as the existence of civil and political freedoms, were necessary to […]

KIGALI, Rwanda — Young, radiant and eloquent, Clare Akamanzi is anything but modest as she outlines her government’s plans for Rwanda’s future. As chief operating officer of the Rwanda Development Board, an institution mandated with fast-tracking private sector growth, Akamanzi is a rising star among Rwanda’s best and brightest and the day-to-day brains behind one of the boldest development visions on the planet. Here, in this former conflict-ridden backwater best known to the world for its grisly 1994 genocide, officials are determined to forge Africa’s first knowledge-based society — turning away from small-scale agriculture and embracing services like information and […]

With a territory as large as France, the Republic of South Sudan became the world’s 193rd independent country on July 9. But while the South Sudanese now have an independent state with vast natural resources, they have yet to build a nation out of some 50 different tribes with diverse languages, beliefs and other key characteristics. Many obstacles will impede progress toward this end, and the outcome depends primarily on the South Sudanese themselves. But the international community can make important contributions to help realize this goal. We in the United States know these challenges well. When Americans declared independence […]

Ever since the 2003 Rose Revolution, Georgia has painstakingly cultivated its image as an emerging-market investor’s dream and a lonely bastion of Western-style modernity in the South Caucasus. But that image faces a credibility problem in light of Tbilisi’s continuing lack of political progress toward a truly liberal democracy. By allowing Georgia’s democratic development to remain at a standstill, President Mikheil Saakashvili risks damaging the country’s legitimacy, both domestically and with its partners in the West. When Georgian opposition leader and former Saakashvili ally Nino Burjanadze and her supporters took to Tbilisi’s streets in May, the protestors’ rhetoric was rife […]