Diplomacy & Politics Archive

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the legal status and socio-economic conditions of indigenous peoples in a range of countries. In July, footage was made public of guards at a juvenile detention center in Australia’s Northern Territory using hoods, restraints and tear gas on aboriginal children, in what could be a violation of the U.N. treaty barring torture. In an email interview, Libby Porter, a principal research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, discusses indigenous rights in Australia. WPR: What is the legal status of Australia’s indigenous peoples, and what are the key issues […]

Most observers, myself included, expected Gabon’s incumbent president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, to win his country’s election late last month. Few, however—again including me—anticipated the degree of violence and apparent fraud that would accompany the process. Bongo is now reconsolidating power in the aftermath of an intensely contested election. If his victory stands, it will demonstrate that Gabon’s opposition has few tools with which to challenge the results, and that the international community has little will to sanction Bongo and his inner circle. When elections were held on Aug. 27, Bongo barely won. Gabon’s electoral framework stipulated that the winner needed […]

This week, America commemorated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the world worried once again about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. All that is missing to illustrate all three of the biggest threats that will be priorities for the foreseeable future is a catastrophic natural disaster linked to climate change. The next president will have to update the strategies to cope with all three, with varying international mechanisms in place to do so. National security experts often say that if everything is a priority, then nothing is. They wish that political leaders and bureaucratic processes would do a better job at […]

Once taboo, the targeting of hospitals and health care providers in wartime has become such a frequent occurrence in today’s conflict zones that Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian aid organization that goes by its French acronym MSF, now calls it the new normal. Attacks that previously seemed to occur unintentionally or sporadically now appear to be a deliberate strategy of war. This is particularly the case in Syria and Yemen, where hospitals and doctors are targeted so often that medical care now has to be provided in places such as caves and chicken coops in order to avoid detection by […]

In late August, the European Union ordered Ireland to collect more than $14 billion in unpaid taxes from Apple. The move followed an investigation by the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, which found that Apple’s effective corporate tax rate on its European profits had fallen from 1 percent in 2003 to just 0.005 percent by 2014. At a press conference announcing the move, the EU commissioner responsible for competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, said that “member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies—this is illegal under EU state aid rules.” EU member states are allowed to set […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the status of women’s rights and gender equality in various countries around the globe. Last week, Sweden’s minority center-left government announced that it plans to propose legislation that will require 40 percent of all corporate board members to be women by 2019, with fines for companies that fail to comply, despite the fact the center-right opposition has said it will vote against the measure. In an email interview, Ann Numhauser-Henning, a professor at Lund University, discusses gender equality in Sweden. WPR: To what degree is Sweden’s reputation as […]

United Nations headquarters in New York is abuzz with rumors about the organization’s future leadership. The race to replace Ban Ki-moon as secretary-general next year is entering its final straightaway, but it looks like there will be some serious twists before it is complete. Meanwhile, big powers including China and Russia are allegedly looking to secure top jobs in the next secretary-general’s team. That could make the U.N. a rather less Western institution than it has been since the end of the Cold War. What is going on? Right now, it is hard to disentangle passing rumors from hard facts. […]

On Aug. 24, Ukraine celebrated 25 years of independence from the Soviet Union with a military parade in the capital, Kiev. President Petro Poroshenko, elected in the wake of the 2014 Maidan uprising, proudly recounted the country’s progress to the crowd: “Independence already gave us democracy and liberty, sense of human dignity and national unity; taught us to defend ourselves and opened the European perspective. The middle class has been formed as well as the civil society. The first post-Soviet generation with a new European world outlook has grown up.” Less than two weeks later, a mob of far-right protesters […]

Islam Karimov, who ruled Uzbekistan for 27 years, is dead. Rumors began circulating on Aug. 26 that the 78-year-old dictator had been hospitalized with a stroke. Official recognition came two days later. On Sept. 2, following endless speculation, Uzbek officials announced the death of the country’s long-serving strongman, which leaves a great deal of uncertainty. Almost half of Uzbekistan’s 32 million people have not known life without Karimov as president. Karimov, who grew up in an orphanage in Samarkand, became first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan in 1989 and declared the republic’s independence on Sept. 1, 1991. He […]

As the Syrian people suffer the unspeakable horror and deprivation of war, it must seem to them that the violence will never end. Every week brings new brutality, whether the use of barrel bombs and chlorine gas by an evil regime or the up-close barbarity of the so-called Islamic State. It is hard to overstate how shocking this has been: In 2011, almost no one foresaw that protests demanding democratic reforms and the release of political prisoners by President Bashar al-Assad would devolve into a protracted humanitarian disaster that would devastate Syria, destabilize its region, and fuel the rise of […]

Uganda is pulling out of the hunt for Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), taking with it the best hopes of eliminating the militia once regarded as one of the world’s most brutal. The withdrawal of the roughly 2,500 Ugandan troops from an African Union military mission, which is set to be completed by the end of the year, comes with a recognition of the LRA’s diminished stature after years of being on the run in Central Africa. But the move has also raised fears that the group could rebuild some of its strength and take advantage of […]

Separatist rebels from the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) said they killed 12 Angolan soldiers in an ambush near the border with the Republic of Congo on Sunday. More than 50 Angolan soldiers have been killed since fighting escalated in August. In an email interview, Alex Vines, the head of the Africa program at Chatham House, discusses the state of the separatist insurgency in Angola. WPR: What is the current state of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, and how has its insurgency evolved since the 2006 cease-fire was signed with […]

On Tuesday, Francois Hollande became the first French president in 12 years to visit Vietnam, a former French colony. Despite their troubled past marked by a nearly decade-long war that ended with France’s military defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954, relations between Paris and Hanoi have warmed during Hollande’s presidency, part of France’s deepening interest in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific more broadly. By a number of measures, the visit was a productive one. Vietnam Airlines purchased 40 jets from France’s Airbus, totaling $6.5 billion in sales; low-cost private airline VietJet purchased 20 planes, totaling $2.39 billion; a regional […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and host Peter Dörrie discuss the prospects for Uzbekistan after President Islam Karimov’s death, the challenges of implementing Colombia’s peace deal with FARC rebels, and Iran’s posture toward the West and Saudi Arabia in the year since signing its landmark nuclear deal with world powers. For the Report, Kimberly Ann Elliott joins us to talk about the global backlash against liberalized trade. Listen:Download: MP3 Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant Articles on WPR: Uzbekistan Faces Continuity With Karimov’s Successor—and the Same Challenges Why Colombia’s Historic Peace Breakthrough Was the ‘Easy Part’ […]

President Barack Obama has often been more upfront than past American presidents on what he thinks about the nature of ties with Saudi Arabia. Years before he came into office, he referred to Riyadh as one of America’s “so-called allies” in the Middle East. Last year, when asked by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull if the Saudis were America’s friends, Obama reportedly replied, “It’s complicated.” And he does little to hide his frustrations with the kingdom, whether over its export of Wahhabism around the world or its treatment of women at home, in interviews, as was the case with The […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on countries’ risk exposure, contribution and response to climate change. South Australia closed the state’s last coal-fired power plant in May, resulting in a massive increase in energy prices and prompting a backlash against the wind and solar energy sources that replaced it. The episode has raised questions about the viability of Australia’s renewable energy policy. In an email interview, Mark Howden, the director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, discusses Australia’s climate change policy. WPR: What is Australia’s risk exposure to climate change, what […]

The international headlines generated recently by the Philippines combative new president, Rodrigo Duterte—over extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers in the country and a slur directed at U.S. President Barack Obama this week—have overshadowed his efforts to seek peace with communist rebels to end one of Asia’s longest-running insurgencies. Just over two months after being inaugurated, Duterte opened a first round of official talks in Norway in late August. Although early overtures suggest a level of promise not seen for decades, it remains to be seen whether the government and rebels can succeed where past talks have failed and translate […]