Daniel may well be right that "The German and French governments need to reflect on how their veto of Georgia’s NATO membership at the Bucharest Summit in...
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, and the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren't Enough? (Penguin, 2017), a book about the power of deep stories to unlock transformational change. He lives in North Yorkshire and is currently working on political polarisation and learning dry stone walling. Full biog here.
The US blogosphere on Georgia
Taking a quick tally of where some of my favourite US blogs stack up on the Russian / Georgian conflict, there are some interesting perspectives. Steve...
South Ossetia: who’s at fault?
In an age when media coverage is such a significant dimension of armed conflict, the question of who's cast as the goodie and who's the baddie is not a small...
Trouble on the BTC pipeline
As Jules's post on the sudden descent into a shooting war in Georgia implies, one of the West's principal reasons for being interested in Georgia is that the...
Is it nerdy for politicians to like Amartya Sen?
Jim Pickard at the FT's excellent Westminster blog has been wondering whether David Miliband really has the common touch. "Will the public warm," he wonders,...
The global fertiliser crisis
Although all the attention lately has been on food prices and the effect of their sharp rise for inflation, development and security, the rises seen on food...
China and humiliation
Over the past few months, China's given a few lessons in how not to do public diplomacy, whether it's nationalist students abroad or Party officials at home. ...
From Gazprom to Foodprom
Oh dear. First the collapse of Doha, and now this: Russia plans to form a state grain trading company to control up to half of the country’s cereal exports,...
Prohibition, insurgency and state failure
Daniel's a hundred per cent right to call for an end to some of the more stupid measures taken in Afghanistan in the name of counter-narcotics work. Take...
Miliband’s intentions
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpNcQLn_oHI] Even before his refusal to rule himself out of any leadership bid on the way to and during his press...
The collapse of Doha
No-one quite wants to pronounce the patient dead just yet (US Trade Representative Susan Schwab: "This is not the time to talk about collapse ... the US...
Burn Up
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY__KBYJjMM] Freed from the nice-guy constraints of being Josh on the West Wing, Bradley Whitford was clearly having a...
Not your usual political fact-finding visit to Africa
Flying politicians out to developing countries to see poverty at first hand - and what aid programmes are doing to tackle it - is pretty standard fare for...
Obama: global emissions reduction of 80 per cent by 2050
It's been his campaign's policy since October last year, but in case you needed reassurance, here's what Obama's July 15 speech on foreign policy had to say...
Subsidies and fuel prices
A key fact here from BP, via the New York Times: From Mexico to India to China, governments fearful of inflation and street protests are heavily subsidizing...
The oil price: what’s happening, what next?
Herewith an attempt to marshal my thoughts about what's happening on the oil price (which has fallen sharply over the last few weeks), what's likely to happen...
The US, Europe and the ‘coming crisis of high expectations’
Last year, while she was still working as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair of international security at West Point - and shortly...
ElBaradei: we need a World Energy Agency
As a general rule of thumb, my starting assumption is that we need new multilateral agencies like we need a hole in the head. But if there's an exception to...
How safe is FDIC?
Lots of discussion in the US about whether FDIC - the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which makes sure depositors get their cash back if banks go bust...
Development – now with added politics
I'm currently immersed in writing the main pamphlet for my project on food prices with Chatham House (hence not much posting for the last few days) - but I...
More from Global Dashboard
Reasons to be cheerful in the fight against inequality
My job is to challenge the causes of poverty. That means that I spend a lot of time highlighting the gross injustices that I have witnessed people face. This can hamper my ability to be fun at parties. "What have you been up to?" a fellow party guest will ask, and...
Lessons from global HIV / AIDS campaigning
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl7gxiqJYAU[/youtube] Guest post from Jack Wilson, campaigner at Save the Children, reflecting on a talk by Simon Wright, head of child survival policy, in the latest in Save the Children’s #changehistory series. You...
9 take aways from COP21
Having attended COP21 as a member of the Ethiopian delegation, I've been meaning to write up a post with some take-aways and reflections on the outcome, and will still do so if/when I have a second - but in the meantime, here's an excellent piece by Christian Hunt,...