by Alex Evans | Apr 24, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Last week’s UK-sponsored debate on climate change in the Security Council this week was always going to be contentious, as the Guardian and the Times of India reported (see also a letter to the FT yesterday from UK special representative on climate change John Ashton). As China put it: “The developing countries believe that Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change — nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals.”
The G77 group of developing countries, together with China, have long been acutely sensitive to any perceived encroachment of the Security Council into non-security areas. ‘Soft’ issues like climate change, they argue, belong in the UN’s Economic and Social Council, or indeed in the full General Assembly; but emphatically not in the Security Council, which is seen as an exclusive great powers’ club.
From the perspective of the Foreign Office in London, by contrast, the Security Council debate was an example of ‘disruptive political action’ that could highlight the extent to which climate change is becoming a security issue. As Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett put it, “an unstable climate will exacerbate some of the core drivers of conflict — such as migratory pressures and competition for resources”.
Both China and the UK have a point. For last week’s squabble illustrates a crucial point: that just because climate change doesn’t belong in the Security Council, isn’t to say that it sits any more comfortably anywhere else.
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by Elizabeth Sellwood | Apr 24, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
Yesterday, in Jerusalem, the acting President of Israel Dalia Itzik offered some advice to Israel’s enemies on the 59th anniversary of Israel’s independence: “Our advice to you is replace your Katyushas and Qassams with computers and loving education, the smile of a boy that has a future, and neighbourliness”.
On the same day, in Gaza, Hamas’s militant wing fired a volley of shells and mortars against Israeli targets in the Negev. No Israeli was hurt. The attack was significant, however, because this is the first time that a Hamas-affiliated group has fired rockets since an informal ceasefire was agreed between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert in November. The ceasefire must hold if political negotiations are to resume; it is now, at the very least, under heavy strain. Later in the evening, a twelve year old boy was killed in crossfire between rival clans in Gaza.
Most Palestinians would love to be able to provide their child with a computer and a “loving education”, not to mention “the smile of a boy who has a future”. Most Israelis, too, would like to see Gaza develop in a more sustainable and peaceful direction – either because they are disturbed by the constant violence that affects Palestinians like the twelve year old who died yesterday, or because they realise that the chaos inside Gaza represents an increasing threat to Israel.
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by Alex Evans | Apr 22, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
There’s an excellent account of the flotilla of boats that converged on Lower Manhattan on September 11 2001 to assist with the evacuation of nearly half a million people here (see also earlier post here). The authors note:
Although some thought had been given to circumstances that might require evacuation via bridges and tunnels around Manhattan, there had been no planning for this scale and kind of organizational activity. No group was responsible for making such an activity a central part of its disaster planning. No organization or official was in complete charge of the overall emergent evacuation activities. Who went where, where evacuees were disembarked in New Jersey or Staten Island, and how long any vessel operated, were decisions often made independently by the multiple operators of different vessels who had little direct communication with one another or agencies elsewhere.
But, they continue, this didn’t present a problem; the opposite was the case.
The kind of emergent behavior shown in the evacuation was in an important sense familiar to veteran disaster researchers. Studies of evacuation at times of crises, which have now been undertaken for 50 years, have consistently shown that at times of great crises, much of the organized behavior is emergent rather than traditional. In addition, emergent evacuation is often decentralized, with the dominance of pluralistic decision making and the appearance of imaginative and innovative new attempts to cope with the contingencies that typically appear in major disasters. Fortunately, on September 11 no attempts were made to impose a command and control model on the evacuation by water transport from lower Manhattan.
by Jules Evans | Apr 20, 2007 | Europe and Central Asia
The latest news here in Moscow is that Putin has decreed the country’s elite should not go to this weekend’s Russian Economic Forum in London. The Forum happens every April, and is a merry jamboree where 2000 Russian politicians, CEOs and journalists mingle with British investors, politicians and journalists. It’s perhaps the major social event in Russian business networking.
This year, however, the word has come down from the Kremlin that top politicians and businessmen should not support what a Kremlin source calls “a gathering of emigrants”. Instead, they should go to home-grown conferences such as the St Petersburg Economic Forum, which takes place in June. The Kremlin has long railed against what it calls the “offshore aristocracy” of its business elite, and now it looks like its put its foot down.
The Kremlin has directly forbidden top politicians from going to the Forum and apparently many businessmen also fear the wrath of Putin more than alienating their foreign investors, and have also cancelled their trip west.
It’s a fascinating moment in post-Soviet politics. Many have used the new freedom of travel and of capital movement to shift towards Europe, and especially towards London. And yet the Kremlin is still able to rattle its sabre and stop the elite travelling there for a Forum! Tsarist times…
