Suchergebnisse

In this column, Ko Colijn, special professor of global security issues at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, discusses the role of the Netherlands as 'the fourth-largest provider of assistance to Africa world-wide' in relation to the current Dutch government that is putting development assistance under immense pressure and questions its purpose.

In this column, Ko Colijn, special professor of global security issues at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, discusses security issues related to nuclear energy. The author argues that it is crucial in the future to prevent one security problem from being solved at another's expense. The trade-off in the NPT between the spread of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy could very well be repeated in a new trade-off between energy-dependency and nuclear crime (or even nuclear terrorism).

In a recent paper, The Intervention Paradox, Isabelle Duyvesteyn of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, says that intervening puts target countries in an 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' situation. According to Duyvesteyn, interventions in unstable countries only make situations worse. This article discusses the paper.

Collecting data on conflict resolution trends began in the 1960s with the early empirical research by the Correlates of War Project. However, little international follow up on the study was done until the surprisingly optimistic findings of the Human Security Report appeared in 2005. The study reported a decline in armed conflict and war fatalities, and its findings increased interest in conflict resolution research. The Peace Process Yearbook 2007 (PPY) is one result of this renewed interest in conflict resolution research. The promising news is that negotiation has been attempted in more conflicts worldwide in recent years, and has been more successful. There is some reason for caution. Evidence indicates that wars ended through negotiation flare up again more often than those concluded by military victory. Mediation is on the rise globally. Unfortunately, so is the rate of recurring war. There is a real need for sufficient post-war stabilization capacity.

As a bestselling author and influential speaker, Thomas P.M. Barnett explains how to understand the world, the US mission to manage that job, and its implications for all policies we used to call 'external'. Barnett is also senior managing director of a company called Enterra Solutions, a platform for pushing 'new rules sets in the military and market worlds'. Two-thirds of the world is connected and the rest is not. The connected countries form the Core and the rest the Gap. The Gap countries define the danger. Rather than threatening the Core with its destructive power, the Gap causes fear by its disruptive outside acts. It challenges its rules and may harm Core countries by causing pinpoint crises and 'system perturbations'. The mission of the Core (read the US) is to meet the threat by making the Gap connected. How? By an external policy mix of flows: by exporting security, letting investment money flow into the Gap, and somehow sustaining the global flows of people and energy that cross the line between the Core and the Gap. You call that policy mix 'system administration', which essentially deals with the disconnected in order to protect the connected, and thereby the world itself. It is the moral mission of the US to conduct and manage that kind of system administration.

Coalitions of the willing have been accused of undermining multilateralism. But if they work from the bottom up, they can actually strengthen global governance. Witness the efforts to ban landmines and, most recently, cluster munitions.