The High Level week of the 70th Session of the UN General Assembly opened this week. Important issues will be debated and decisions made, which in turn will establish guidelines for the UN’s image and operations in the coming years. Next year’s election of a new Secretary-General is lurking in the background. After eight male… Read more »
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War is Development in Reverse
The UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals are ready for adoption. For the first time, the UN will measure the incidence of one of the most controversial, but important, development indicators: the amount of armed conflict in the world. On 25 September this year, a UN summit will adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals. These will… Read more »
We are being Put to the Test
We must both take in refugees and preserve our culture and way of living. A flood of migrants is coming to Europe. They are fleeing chaos and war. They are from all levels of society. The vast majority would have remained in their homelands if they had been able. But as a result of violence,… Read more »
Why the ISIS Threat is Totally Overblown
One of the most remarkable phenomena of the last year is the way ISIS, the vicious insurgent group in Iraq and Syria, has captured the imagination of the public in Western countries. And as usual, officials and the media have fallen over themselves to respond with urgency. Americans had remained substantially unmoved by even worse… Read more »
World War II Becomes a Chinese War
70 years ago, Japan signed an agreement of formal surrender on an American warship in Tokyo Bay. The anniversary of this event will be marked in Beijing today, September 3rd by a massive military parade in which Chinese and Russian soldiers march together. President Xi Jinping’s most important guest during the parade will be Russian… Read more »
The Dangers of Alarmism
Threat identification and threat inflation are clearly important elements in international affairs. However, determining which threats and fears people and policymakers will embrace as notable and important is difficult. Thus, the American public and its leaders have remained remarkably calm about the dangers of genetically modified food while becoming very wary of nuclear power. The… Read more »
Cracking the Glass Ceiling: Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.S. presidential politics
In a now legendary 2008 Saturday Night Live skit, comedians Amy Poehler and Tina Fey opened the show by imitating Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and unsuccessful Democratic contender for the nomination Hillary Clinton, respectively. The skit could have been a harmless imitation game, with Fey and Poehler simply doing their brilliant impressions of… Read more »
The “Sunnification” of Turkey´s Foreign Policy
Two months is a long time in politics – even more so in Turkish politics. At the beginning of June, the Turkish election brought a wave of hope across the country with results that broke the majoritarian (and authoritarian) rule of the reigning Justice and Development Party (AKP). The pro-Kurdish People´s Democratic Party (HDP), winning… Read more »
Oh my, not another ‘Festschrift’!
Eight years ago, I wrote a short piece for a Norwegian science policy journal lampooning the Festschrift as an outmoded form of academic communication. The Festschrift, I can hear some of my non-Scandinavian readers ask: Are such volumes still being published? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Of course, it is largely a self-financing enterprise. In… Read more »
Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Killing the ‘Robots-don’t-Rape’ Argument
Earlier this spring, we debated a law professor who insisted that lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) could clean up war. The professor posited that a war fought with autonomous weapons would be a war without rape. Taking humans out of the loop would, the argument goes, lead to more humane war. We find this narrative, where… Read more »