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I’m in Ukraine, land of black soil. Ukraine is already an important player in the global food crisis - it’s a big exporter of wheat, and one of the reasons wheat prices have spiked this year is because Ukraine had a particularly bad harvest last year. This year, it’s been a rainy March and April, [...]

I’m over in Geneva, where I’ve just been presenting to the IASC, which is composed of the heads of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies (including UN agencies like WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and the WHO; NGOs like Oxfam; and the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement).  Here’s my presentation, which uses food prices as a springboard from which [...]

I am at the Diplomatic Academy of London for a conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (programme- pdf).
As the title suggests, the launch pad for the conference is US one - the agenda Condoleezza Rice first set out in a speech at Georgetown University in 2006:
I would define the objective of transformational diplomacy this way: to [...]

Prince William, the second in line to the British throne, just finished a trip to Afghanistan, which probably happened at the same time as Taliban gunmen failed to kill Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a slew of international officials.
Despite Prince William’s safe return and President Karzai’s lucky escape, it should be clear to anyone that [...]

Asks William Saletan over on Slate. Actually he raises a number of questions about whether suicide bombings are increasing around the world, why they might be and if so what can we do about it. The stats are revealing. According to
an article by Robin Wright of the Washington Post last week:
Suicide bombers conducted 658 attacks [...]

Last night I was at Gresham College where their Professor of Commerce, Michael Mainelli, was lecturing on global risks (read his lecture here).Mainelli concluded his lecture with this neat throwaway line:
I sometimes think global risks keep us from attacking each other by providing a common enemy. So, if we get started attacking global risks collaboratively, [...]

Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely [...]

I admit I have never heard this but will now shameless use it…  in answer to a question about what impact an individual can really have on climate change:
If you think you’re too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito

What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically [...]

Despite having practically invented modern counter-insurgency, today Britain is woefully ill-equipped for this kind of complex, mosaic-style warfare. The Times, echoing David’s post from a few days ago, has picked up on the problems Britain has in spending money in places like Afghanistan.
As readers will know, even though the Labour government sought to overcome the [...]

Sam Coates at The Times reports from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in DC last week (”where the President and Washington press corps show Hollywood what self-congratulation is all about”).  Along with “Ben Affleck, Colin Powell, Pamela Anderson, Henry Kissinger, Marcia Cross, Jenny McCarthy and other A-listers”, the guest list also included British Government Chief Whip Geoff Hoon and [...]

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 to EU officials. Mr Ruecker told the BBC that the extent of co-operation with the EU mission “had yet to be decided”.
“One thing is for sure,” [...]

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 are devising innovative ways to lose an election that they should own.  But Jackie Ashley at the Guardian still sees cause for hope: Gordon might be the [...]

Nothing is more viral than a political gaffe – just ask Hilary Clinton. But what about EU accession policy? Well, in the Balkans anything goes.
Twenty days ago I wrote a piece about the EU’s policy in the region on ECFR’s website. I recommended “reverse conditionality” – in other words that the
EU should give three countries [...]

England football manager Fabio Capello went on an unusual overseas tour earlier this month. His destination? Maseru in Lesotho, where he visited an HIV testing centre. What was really unusual, however, was the ingenious method the centre used to grab the saturnine coach’s attention. They sat him in a room with a 14-year-old boy who [...]

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 also happens to be your landlord. With the Security Council deadlocked, Kosovo is still subject to its Resolution 1244 of 1999 - and according to [...]

For three weeks, Europe’s “big men” have been polishing off their CVs in the hope of getting one of the new top EU jobs to be created if the Lisbon Treaty comes into force. They all want to be at the other end of the phone when the U.S wants speak to Europe, as Henry [...]

David Miliband writes:
My visit this week to Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq was punctuated with people describing their links to Britain. One conversation particularly sticks in the memory.
I was told by someone that they had great affection for British education. “I studied at Eton, Oxford, Nottingham and London universities”. I congratulated him and said [...]

For English policy wonks walking along Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC, the experience is invariably bittersweet.  On one hand, they are (they must admit) slightly awed by the concentration of great engines of think tankery within a stone’s throw of where they stand: Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, SAIS, CFR and plenty more besides.
But then their [...]

It’s not just Australia that’s been getting it in the neck this week, New Zealand’s PM, Helen Clark, has been compared to a cockroach by Hilary Clinton, in another deft display of foreign policy experience.
This from an interview with Newsweek:
You have any good jokes?
Here’s a good one. Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand: [...]

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