It's utter hypocrisy time in the Balkans. With Serbia's elections less than a fortnight away, everyone feels obliged to be nice to Belgrade in the hope that...
Richard Gowan
Richard Gowan coordinates the International Security Institutions program at the Center on International Cooperation, New York University. He is also the UN Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and an associate of the Foreign Policy Center (London).
UN staying on in Kosovo: told you so
This just in from the BBC: The head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Joachim Ruecker, has said he expects it to stay, throwing into doubt a planned June handover...
Labour in disarray vs. Democrats in disarray
Would you rather be a member of the liberal left on the western or eastern side of the Atlantic right now? Not easy. Labour's in free-fall. The Democrats...
Kosovo: can’t live with the UN, can’t live without it…
The UN Mission in Kosovo is starting to look like that tedious guest at the end of your dinner party that just won't leave. Except, in this case, the guest...
Brown in the US: the verdict
I had meant to write something wildly insightful about Gordon Brown's visit to the U.S. and his rather good speech at the Kennedy Library on world order - a...
Food riots: the new case for democracy promotion
I normally leave scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week's food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers...
Why people aren’t reading your think-tank’s latest report
There isn't a think-tank, policy institute or academic department anywhere in the world that doesn't have a cupboard or entire room given over to hoarding...
Bentham in Brooklyn: “You may call it a Glass Doughnut, sir, I call it a Panopticon!”
Utilitarian philosopher (and celebrity corpse) Jeremy Bentham famously proposed a "Panopticon" design for a prison: a circular building, with the warder sat...
Obama: “a nice light reddish amber color”
Last month, Sixpoint Craft Ales - with which I share a Brooklyn zip code - launched "Hop Obama", an electoral ale. It'll be around until the Pennsylvania...
Kosovo: a whole new struggle ahead?
Just when things had gone quiet in Kosovo, the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague has found a way to spice matters up. It has acquitted former...
EU troops in Africa: more bad news
While the EU is still recovering from its series of set-backs in Chad over the last two months, it's been hit by bad news from an earlier mission. In 2003,...
Iran’s “Grand Bargain”: how the story disappeared
The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks. It has a great piece on...
Kosovo: how to get it wrong now
I'd dropped my plan to do weekly scorecards on events in Kosovo, not least because bigger and better-informed Balkan-watchers like ICG are on the case. But...
On to Somalia!
For over a year, one of the biggest questions among officials in UN-land has been: will the Security Council make us go to Somalia? Back in November, I...
New U.S. counterinsurgency tactics… inside its own detention centers?
David Steven has recently reminded us of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, but an earnest story from DoD reveals that the U.S. is now running hearts and minds...
Free graves
The McClatchy Company is the third biggest newspaper owner in the U.S., but most of the papers it owns tend to be of the smaller, less internationally-known...
The tolerant, multi-ethnic Kosovo that very nearly was
Now that it looks likely that Kosovo is heading for some sort of de facto partition, there's a sense of weary inevitability abroad. Of course this was...
Chad/Darfur: the predictable crisis
Just after making light of incidents on Kosovo's periphery below, I've been alerted to much nastier events on the Chad/Darfur border. An French EU soldier...
Kosovo: right, that’s it, this probably means World War
Exciting news from Kosovo. As I reported on Monday, Serbia tried to strengthen its claim to to the province by "reclaiming" a railway there - i.e. it...
The MEPs and Iraq: strong on details, weak on strategy?
Last week, I noted that the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee had come out with a new report calling for the EU to get serious about Iraq's...
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