by Richard Gowan | Feb 16, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Who is he? Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez, of course.
In 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his intention to found a new history museum in Paris. In recent weeks, he may have been cursing the memories of two of France’s lesser-known historical figures, Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez and Jules Ferry. Both men died over a century ago, but they are still causing Sarkozy trouble.
Bouët-Willaumez was a French naval hero who began the colonisation of what is now Côte d’Ivoire in the 1840s. Ferry was the prime minister who authorised an invasion of Tunisia in 1881. Although France renounced control over Tunisia in 1957 and Côte d’Ivoire in 1960, officials in Paris have always viewed them as important elements of the French sphere of influence in Africa. Now that sphere of influence seems to be falling apart – a strategic challenge for France that has been overshadowed by events in Egypt.
Read more about this challenge here.
by Alex Evans | Feb 16, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, North America
Sure, everyone talks about policy coherence, joined-up thinking, connecting the dots, overcoming silos and all the rest of it. But if you want to see the real deal, form an orderly queue at the door of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. They organised a Valentine’s Day party for junior diplomats, with ‘policy speed dating’ and a chocolate fondue to lubricate the evening’s proceedings. And diplomats were only allowed to attend if they brought with them two friends from other government departments.
by Casper ter Kuile | Feb 15, 2011 | Africa, Global system, Influence and networks
As campaigners start to chase down the billions that Mubarak took with him, many outsiders are trying to figure out how the Egyptian revolution came to be. During the heady three-week protests, cameras naturally focused on large crowds full of anger and hope. But were they missing something?
Creative, humorous protest.
Activists in Tahrir Square released fake press releases to major news outlets, to give them a voice in the rolling coverage. (They didn’t have highly placed Washington lobbyists of course, unlike the regime.) Before the protests started, viral jokes about Mubarak were spreading through social networks and eliminating the problem that Steven Pinker calls ‘individual knowledge vs mutual knowledge‘.
This subversive protest can’t have been too much of a secret though – even CNN had a comment.
h/t Eric Stoner
And for the 80’s fans amongst you – this classic by Chicago get’s a thematic overhaul.
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/c82d846e46/president-mubarak-apologizes-through-song?rel=player
by Alex Evans | Feb 15, 2011 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPvAGd_kDQ[/youtube]
by Andy Sumner | Feb 15, 2011 | Africa, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Global system, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
The UN this week announced a June MDG review meeting in Tokyo. This is the conference that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at the MDGs Summit proposed that Japan convene in 2011 (see page 4, paragraph 1 of his speech).
One thing it may or may not discuss (depending on who you speak to) is what might replace the MDGs in 2015 which is likely to be one of the big global development policy debate of the next few years.
At the MDG summit last September the outcome document requested the President of the UN general assembly to organise a ‘special event’ in 2013 ‘to follow up on efforts made’. However, it is not yet clear exactly what this will mean. The outcome document also mandated the UN Secretary General to initiate a consultation process of what would come after 2015, and to recommend in his annual reports ‘further steps to advance the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015’.
It is possible though that there will be neither an agreement on any post-2015 framework nor an extension of the current MDGs.
Not surprisingly, the subject of what a new global framework might look like in detail is really starting to bubble up in debates.
The NGOs via GCAP are already discussing MDGs 2.0 and there was a workshop at the World Social Forum recently and blog convened by the UK NGOs. UNDP’s Helen Clark has it on her radar in a recent interview as does UNDP assistant SG, Olav Kjorven at UNDP in comments on a Guardian blog.
There’s also a global group convened by the International Red Cross and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a recent Lancet Commission report and one by International Alert and papers by MDG architects such as the former chair of the OECD DAC, Richard Manning and former UN official, Jan Vandemoortele (and a set of papers from a Brussels Forum on the ‘MDGs and Beyond’) as well as work at the Center for Global Development (for example, here in Global Policy, and here), a symposium at Harvard and – launching soon – CAFOD’s work on Voices of the South on the MDGs and post-MDGs.
(more…)
