by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
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by Alex Evans | Apr 13, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
ForeignPolicy.com is running a list of predictions that didn’t come true, including free atomic energy for all, global cooling, Japan ruling the world, another 9/11, and too many people on earth. What actually happened on the last of these, they ask?
Birthrates leveled off, food production drastically expanded, and technology improved. The 6.5 billion people alive today are far more than most imagined could possibly be supported a few decades ago. Limited resources and widespread poverty remain challenges for billions, but in nothing like the apocalyptic form that the alarmists predicted. The United Nations now predicts that the world’s population will level off at 9 billion by 2300.
Well, birthrates may have levelled off relatively, but global population certainly ain’t level just yet. (Might be an idea to check those figures, too – the UN’s prediction is actually 9 billion people by 2045, not 2300.) But more generally, here are a few reasons why reports of Malthus’s demise – well, his reputation’s demise, at any rate – may be premature:
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by David Steven | Mar 27, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
In 2003, I wrote ‘A Long Peace’, a pamphlet on Northern Ireland with Unionist politician Trevor Ringland and nationalist writer Mick Fealty (founder of Slugger O’Toole). At the time we wrote that:
British and Irish governments are braced for a scenario where the DUP and Sinn Fein eventually emerge as Northern Ireland’s two largest political parties. Should this happen, a titanic ‘battle of the bottom lines’ will ensue.
That battle ended yesterday, it seems, as the DUP’s Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams sat next to each other for the first time, and then agreed to serve together in government. Four years ago, we were optimistic that this might happen (other commentators were sure that the marginalisation of moderate politicians was a sign of impending disaster). We used to the Prisoner’s Dilemma to model what we thought might be going on: (more…)
