Global Archive

The United Nations may be on the verge of launching a new wave of peace operations, beginning with a blue helmet force in Mali in July. Further deployments to Somalia and Syria are also on the horizon. Yet the U.N. still has a huge amount of unfinished business to complete in countries where peacekeepers are already deployed, ranging from Haiti to Liberia and Lebanon. As Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his advisers look for the resources for a new generation of missions, they will face pressure to cut costs and downsize existing missions — even if that means leaving some fragile […]

The International Energy Agency, an organization comprising 28 industrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) aimed among other things at preserving global energy security, is reportedly seeking to expand energy cooperation with emerging powers. In an email interview, Thijs Van de Graaf, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ghent Institute for International Studies specializing in global energy politics and international institutions, explained the IEA’s expansion drive and its likely effects. WPR: What is motivating the IEA’s push to form an “association” with emerging economies for the first time in its 40-year history? Van de Graaf: When […]

Today both states and their challengers face a conundrum. Images of dissent and grievance circulate at lightning speed through the global media landscape, fueling demands for change and even revolution. Furthermore they encourage populations to expect governments to fall in response to people power in ever-contracting timeframes. States are perplexed at how rapidly calls for change can spread through social networks. Their challengers too are concerned: They face a loss of control and message coherence. Political change has always been about the long game, as Egypt and Syria demonstrate today. Nevertheless, there remains the challenge of organizing collective action in […]

A lot has changed in the world of technology since the indigenous Zapatista movement emerged in the mid-1990s in southern Mexico to become a symbol of the fight for global justice. To modern would-be revolutionaries, the communication technologies that allowed the Zapatistas to gain global visibility — highlighted by the then-futuristic-looking pictures of Subcomandante Marcos, the movement’s leader, posing in the Chiapas jungle wrapped in electronic gear — now look obsolete and cumbersome. Communication technologies have since morphed into devices that, despite being smaller, are incomparably more powerful for broadcasting, not only because exponential growth in Internet penetration over the […]

Five Indian soldiers serving with the United Nations peacekeeping operation in South Sudan were killed in an ambush last week that also left seven civilian U.N. staff dead and four more troops wounded. Such casualties are grimly familiar for the Indian army, which has lost more personnel on blue helmet missions than any other country’s military. But the attack capped off a difficult few weeks for India at the U.N., marked by diplomatic disputes over the rules of peacekeeping and the new Arms Trade Treaty. Cumulatively, these episodes may reinforce doubts about New Delhi’s commitment to the U.N. system. Although […]

In a speech in early April, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim declared that “extreme poverty,” defined as living on less than $1.25 a day, could be eradicated worldwide by the end of the next decade. In an email interview, Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center on Global Development who has written on the Millennium Development Goals, discussed what ending extreme poverty means, and what it would take. WPR: What is the technical meaning behind World Bank President Jim Kim’s recent call to “end extreme poverty” by 2030? Charles Kenny: Kim is suggesting that we can reduce the […]

The U.S. has recently made two high-profile moves to cooperate with the International Criminal Court, which the U.S. has not joined and is barred by domestic law from supporting financially. In an email interview, Harry Rhea, assistant professor of criminal justice at Florida International University and author of the book “The United States and International Criminal Tribunals: An Introduction,” discussed U.S.-ICC cooperation and how the U.S. can bolster the court without joining it. WPR: Do recent U.S. moves to cooperate with the court — transferring Bosco Ntaganda to The Hague and including ICC suspects in the Rewards for Justice program, […]

During the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Defense concluded that it was in a “strategic pause.” With the Soviet Union gone and no equal threat on the horizon, the Pentagon had the luxury of doing things like building a “futures” industry to think big thoughts about long-range changes underway in the security environment and the nature of armed conflict. But today strategic futurists face hard times. As the defense budget shrinks, money and time for forecasting and analysis are hard to come by. There is no doubt that cuts in defense spending are needed, but if thinking about the future […]

Last week, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced plans to move to New York to head the International Rescue Committee, a leading humanitarian organization. In his new position, Miliband is likely to be a powerful voice in debates over crises such as that in Syria. His decision may have inspired some envy at the United Nations, which would benefit from the services of such a seasoned political operator. U.N. officials are already starting to size up early candidates to replace Ban Ki-moon as secretary-general in 2017. The next leader of the U.N. is likely to be a European. But […]

Last week, Iran, Syria and North Korea blocked the adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty, the first international pact to regulate conventional arms sales across borders, citing its failure to ban weapons sales to rebel groups. In the absence of consensus, the United Nations General Assembly is expected to put the treaty to a vote on Tuesday morning. It is considered likely to pass overwhelmingly. “As we like to say, it’s ludicrous that the global trade in bananas is better regulated than the global trade in arms,” Allison Pytlak, campaign manager for the Control Arms Coalition, an international civil society […]