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Charlie and I are both off to Wilton Park this afternoon for a conference on European security in 2020.  I’m presenting on scarcity and resilience, and why they’ll matter in 2020. 
Here’s my speech - which is also, in part, the beginnings of an attempt to sketch out a reply to Martin Wolf’s questions about civilisation in a [...]

I’ve got an article in this month’s World Today, Chatham House’s monthly magazine. It’s about the UK’s approach to national security. Here’s a taster:
British Governments have rarely taken a strategic approach to national security, preferring instead to focus separately on issues of defence, foreign affairs,development and intelligence. Invariably, this has led to narrow strategies, which [...]

You’ve probably heard that John Edwards is out of the Democrat race - but this new entrant is really going to shake things up…

Kurt Andersen of New York nicely sums up the growing sense that the last nine months of American politics may actually have been a farrago of nonsense:
Giuliani can never win; he’s the huge favorite; he’s nearly a goner. McCain’s the front-runner; he’s imploded; he’s the presumptive nominee. Obama is exciting; he has no traction; he’s [...]

Michael Totten’s still pottering around Iraq and the Middle East, blogging as he goes.  This week he’s in Fallujah, looking at police reform:
I sat down with Captain Stewart Glenn and his executive officer Lieutenant Chuck Miller at India Company’s train station FOB.
“The Marines were the catalyst for providing security,” Captain Glenn said. “But without [...]

Blake Hounshell at ForeignPolicy.com has a succinct answer to people who don’t think binding targets are necessary in climate policy: this graph, which shows patent applications on sulphur control technologies in the US.  Guess what happened in 1970 and 1971?

Dan Drezner wins the prize for catty swipe of the week as he takes no prisoners on Parag Khanna’s new book The Second World:
Over at Duck of Minerva, Daniel Nexon heaps praise (and gentle criticism) on Parag Khanna’s The Second World, which was excerpted as the cover story for the New York Times Magazine: (”[T]he [...]

News is breaking of the resignation yesterday of a senior Slovenian diplomat who, press reports in Slovenia claim, had taken orders from the US about Slovenia’s EU Presidency - including a suggestion that Slovenia should lead the charge on recognition of Kosovo as an independent state.  Details from EU Business (one of only a couple [...]

Someone mentioned this list to me at the conference. It includes political, economic, ecological, educational targets, tourist and military targets - and a ‘Top 10 Terrorist Wishlist’. Bit weird.
Sometime ago The Times did a front page spread of all the likely terrorist targets in the UK. It highlighted them on a map of Britain. Unsurprisingly a [...]

Margaret Beckett has become the new chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, succeeding Paul Murphy who got moved in last week’s reshuffle. Murphy’s legacy to Beckett and the ISC is the Committee’s annual report, published today and which no doubt will capture some headlines in the media and set eyes rolling around Whitehall. According [...]

The morning sessions were quite good, but the problem the old school (sitting behind and to the left of me) had was that most of the presentations were just scene setters. Paul Cornish, on the other hand, said they were more like undergraduate lectures on international security.
We aren’t able, it seems, to move beyond talking about [...]

Mysterious goings on in Turkey, as a shadowy group of arch-nationalists with alarmingly close links to the army and government is arrested for conspiring to murder those less patriotic than themselves. Among their key targets was novelist and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk recently escaped a prison sentence himself, having been accused of insulting the [...]

Strange Maps is fast becoming my favourite website: it’s the only blog I’ve ever come across where I’ve scrolled all the way back to the beginning to read every post.  Here’s a small sample: a fascinating religious map of the US, shaded according to which denominations command majorities in each county. 

I’m not allowed to blog about the session I am currently in for reasons of commercial confidentiality (which raises a point about how we share information on risks on a practical day-to-day basis – which is what the presentation is about).
However - we had an awesome discussion in the break. According to people present we [...]

By now, we’ve all read enough horror stories to know that we have to exercise restraint in what we post on Facebook or Friends Reunited. But are we sufficiently attuned to the risks of You Tube and camcorders in cellphones?
Before you answer that question, you may wish to view this engaging film of David [...]

I’m at a conference in The Hague on National Safety and Security. The conference has just been opened by Guusje ter Horst, the Minister of the Interior & Kingdom Relations, in the Netherlands. It’s a good speech and I’m chuffed when she begins to talk about how important it is that we move away from [...]

Last year’s big issue at Davos was climate change - unsurprisingly, given that it was the first time the WEF crowd had convened since the Stern Review was published and An Inconvenient Truth was released.  This year, for all the worry about meltdown in financial markets, the big issue was by all accounts scarcity.
Gideon Rachman, [...]

Matt Yglesias says:
Every once in a while, I come across a person who still hasn’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s definitive article on ketchup. Well, you should read the article. You probably don’t think ketchup is a very interesting subject, but you’re wrong.
And I began to read, and lo, I saw that he was right. 

Last December, one book in particular seemed to crop up on every newspaper or magazine’s list of books of the year: Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.  The Economist, for instance, calls it “this thorough and persuasive study”, noting that “as a New York Times journalist who has covered espionage for [...]

And so to a new report on soft (i.e. agricultural) commodities from Bidwells, the agribusiness property consultancy,  noteworthy for its observations about water scarcity and the need for productivity on existing agricultural land to rise by as much as 50 per cent (!) by 2050 if we’re to feed 9 billion.
In particular, though, note this [...]

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