WPR on France 24: The World Last Week

I had the pleasure of participating in France 24’s panel discussion program, The World This Week, last Friday. The other panelists were Paris Match’s Régis Le Sommelier, France 24’s Annette Young and Global Post’s Mildrade Cherfils. Topics included the News of the World scandal, the U.S. and European debt crises, and the Libya war. Part one can be seen here. Part two can be seen here.

Global Insider: The U.N. Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

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 […]

Libya Precedent Makes U.N. Unlikely to Back U.S. Shift on Syria

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 […]

On June 26, at a gathering in Kabul marking World Counter Narcotics Day, the mood was somber. Gone was the positive spin of last year’s event, when Afghanistan’s minister of counternarcotics, Zarar Ahmad Moqbil, proudly announced that poppy cultivation had been reduced by up to 50 percent and that 23 out of 34 provinces were then free from poppy cultivation. Sadly, the significant decrease in opium production last year has since been attributed to a convergence of environmental and climatic variables that devastated the crops late in the season, not to effective counternarcotics measures. According to the United Nations, Afghanistan […]

Rioting in Belfast Ahead of Orange Day Parade

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.

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 […]

Debate Over U.S. Diplomatic Expansion in Iraq

The American embassy in Baghdad — already the world’s largest — has been expanding as the U.S. transitions from a military to a civilian-led mission in Iraq. On Sunday, the United States opened on a consulate in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil.

Since the 1980s, the Kurdish separatist group Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK), labeled as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States, has been one of the main threats to Turkey’s domestic security. The PKK lost momentum after the group’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured in 1999. But since 2003, the turmoil resulting from military operations in Iraq has facilitated the creation of a new safe haven for PKK bases in the Qandil mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan. In the past few years, clashes between Turkish security forces and PKK militants have been interrupted only by sporadic and […]

Drone War Expands to Somalia

The announcement this week of a Somali terror suspect’s transfer to U.S. federal court came just after reports of the U.S. drone war’s expansion into Somalia. Both developments highlight the growing U.S. counterterrorism interest in Somalia and raise questions about how it might be expected to impact the country’s 20-year-old civil war. “American strategy in Somalia has not always matched up with the reality on the ground, and at the moment the reality is shifting very quickly there,” says David Axe, an independent correspondent and World Politics Review contributor who has reported from Somalia. A leading concern for the U.S. […]

Global Insider: Rebel Disarmament

An ongoing effort by the Central African Republic to disarm rebel groups highlights the prominent role that disarming former combatants plays in peace agreements. In an email interview, Robert Muggah, research director of the Small Arms Survey and a research fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, discussed the process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. WPR: How significant are disarmament initiatives in post-conflict scenarios, and are there any scenarios in which they are counterproductive? Robert Muggah: Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) is currently a fixture of the stabilization and peacebuilding landscape. The vast majority of the roughly […]

MAE SOT, Thailand — On June 9, deadly clashes broke out in northern Myanmar between the country’s army and the ethnic minority Kachin Independence Army (KIA). The fighting reportedly erupted after Myanmar’s military moved to secure the Tarpein Hydropower Project, a Chinese-built dam that came online in January. The plant, which sits on a tributary of the Irrawaddy River close to rebel-held areas, has since suspended its operations, and the clashes have spread to surrounding regions, pushing Myanmar’s strategic borderlands to the brink of civil war. Rights activists say the Myanmar army’s offensive has brought a range of rights abuses, […]

When the generals in Myanmar orchestrated their pseudo-democratic pageant last November, the exercise was labeled a “sham” by most of the world. Some in the West, however, speculated that despite the deeply flawed elections, the long-ruling junta might still redeem itself and allow real democratic progress in the wake of the polls. So far, however, the optimists are being proven spectacularly wrong. In the months since the vote, the country has marched in the direction of civil war and intensified oppression rather than toward democratic reconciliation and real reform. The election may, in fact, have made matters worse. Myanmar’s new […]

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