On April 16, a Chadian helicopter with at least three people aboard crashed in Adre, a town abutting the border with Sudan in the desert region shared by the two countries. One person died in the crash, while two were injured. The incident was an unwelcome reminder of five years of conflict between the two impoverished nations — even as that conflict finally shows signs of winding down. On April 17, the two countries re-opened their official border crossings. “Sudanese taxis are going back and forth and so are the people,” a government official in Adre told AFP. Until a [...]
Now that the Nuclear Security Summit will become a recurring event, with the next one scheduled for 2012 in Seoul, national governments will need to integrate this new mechanism with the existing major multinational efforts designed to counter nuclear terrorism. Despite differences in membership, emphasis, and other dimensions, three prominent initiatives directly support the summit’s objective of enhancing international cooperation to prevent nuclear terrorism: the Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Mass Destruction, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism. Last week’s summit documents endorsed their activities, without specifying how the [...]
Most people look back upon the 20th century as the deadliest in human history, with scholarly estimates suggesting that close to 200 million people died in all the wars, revolutions, genocides and totalitarian purges of those bloody decades. As a result, we regard the entire century as the age of total war, even though we have not experienced great-power war since 1945. Even more telling, state-based war almost completely disappeared as the century drew to a close, leaving us with primarily civil strife, failed states, and the transnational bad actors they both spawn. But instead of celebrating the peaking and [...]
