President Donald Trump has provoked strong reactions with his proposition to buy Greenland, not the least because the right to self-determination is a fundamental principle in international law, allowing peoples to freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.
Nanortalik, Greenland. Photo: Jim Griffin via Flickr (CC-BY)
The mobile phone has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. We carry it with us everywhere, and it’s a crisis when it’s lost. Now it has also taken on a new role: alerting us to emergencies.
The traditional sirens for alerting are still there, while alerting on mobile phones is now being tested. Photo: Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection
On Wednesday, January 8, emergency alerts on mobile phones were tested across Norway, eighteen months since the system was first tested nationwide.
But how has the Norwegian population received the new alert system?Read More
As many are by now acutely aware, the International Criminal Court (ICC) relies on state cooperation to investigate and arrest individuals charged with international crimes. This is not new. What is new is the seriousness, complexity, and extent of the political resistance that the ICC is currently facing after issuing an arrest warrant for a Western ally. The court risks collapse.
The arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the first against a sitting head of state in a so-called liberal democracy, writes Kjersti Lohne. Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024. Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
One of the key goals for 2024 that President Vladimir Putin had apparently set at the end of the second year of the Ukraine war was to execute a sustained foreign policy counter-offensive to reduce Russia’s international isolation to irrelevance.
Photo: Ayhan Altun / Getty Images
Every day, children are born in war and armed conflict, in Ukraine, on the Gaza Strip, in South Sudan, in Myanmar and elsewhere.
Photo: Alexey Furman/Getty Images
Some of these children might have parents who are enemies, that is, parents who are on opposite sides of the conflict. Some of these children might have been conceived through conflict related sexual violence. After the Bosnian war, and the genocide in Rwanda, in the 1990s we started talking about rape as a weapon of war and unprecedented political attention followed.
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From late January 2025, the Israeli ban on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) will come into effect. What does this mean for the rights of the Palestinian refugees, and who will then take responsibility for helping them?
A Palestinian sand sculptor commemorating World Refugee Day in Gaza City in June 2020. Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In October 2024, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) passed two laws targeting UNRWA. Both laws are due to take effect after 90 days.Read More
Russian missile strike on the sprawling industrial complex in Dnipro on November 21 produced far more strategic resonance than material damage – and has reopened hard questions about the constant mutation of the long Russia-Ukraine war and the methods of managing its escalation.
Kyiv in April 2024. Photo: STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In October the Security Council met for its annual Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Open Debate under the theme of “Women Building Peace in a Changing Environment.”
A 32 years old female FARC guerrilla fighter inside a demobilization camp in Colombia in 2017. Photo: Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images
Despite the WPS agenda’s goals for including women in all aspects of security and peace-making, their participation in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), a crucial part of peace processes, has often been minimal or merely symbolic.Read More
With the devastating news from Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan among other wars, we witness a crisis of the international regime for protecting civilians in armed conflict. However, this is not a total collapse but a return to the troubling world that the legal protections for civilians in the 1949 Geneva Conventions were made for.
Photo: Majdi Fathi/Nur Photo via Getty Images
Russia’s strategy in executing its aggressive war against Ukraine, passing the 1,000-day mark last week, puts the country’s economy, society, and armed forces under enormous pressure that Moscow’s militaristic propaganda cannot quite cover.
Vladimir Putin (R) and Kim Jong Un before Russian-North Korean talks in June 2024 in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Contributor/Getty Images