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…or so suggest the exit polls after today’s national elections - see why here.

From a piece on the credit crunch in the current London Review of Books, the sort of opening that you find yourself reading more than once…
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St [...]

Exactly how bad has the first half of this month been for the UN? Where does one start? You could choose Burma, where the international organization’s ability to deliver aid in a hostile climate has been hurled into doubt. Or Sudan, where Darfuri rebels sallied forth to attack Khartoum, demonstrating exactly what [...]

It’s utter hypocrisy time in the Balkans.  With Serbia’s elections less than a fortnight away, everyone feels obliged to be nice to Belgrade in the hope that this persuades the voters to back the pro-EU liberals rather than the anti-EU nationalists.  But sensing that victory is in their grasp, even the hardliners are having to make [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I had meant to write something wildly insightful about Gordon Brown’s visit to the U.S. and his rather good speech at the Kennedy Library on world order - a distinct improvement in terms of both intellectual clarity and phrasing on his previous outings on the subject in London and Delhi. But then Daniel Korski [...]

I normally leave  scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand.  UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment.  John Holmes, [...]

There isn’t a think-tank, policy institute or academic department anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a cupboard or entire room given over to hoarding vast quantities of unread pamphlets from years gone by.  When I was at the Foreign Policy Centre in London, we actually had a whole cellar (although the FPC has moved [...]

Utilitarian philosopher (and celebrity corpse) Jeremy Bentham famously proposed a “Panopticon” design for a prison: a circular building, with the warder sat at its center able to see all the inmates in their cells around him at all times. The warder would have to be hidden behind Venetian blinds to conceal who he was looking at, [...]

Last month, Sixpoint Craft Ales - with which I share a Brooklyn zip code - launched “Hop Obama”, an electoral ale.  It’ll be around until the Pennsylvania primaries and sounds nice:
In keeping with the Illinois senator’s unifying theme, the “Hop Obama” is an indefinable ale that doesn’t adhere to traditional style guidelines. The 5.2% ABV [...]

Just when things had gone quiet in Kosovo, the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague has found a way to spice matters up.  It has acquitted former Kosovo Albanian premier Ramush Haradinaj of war crimes, which puts him back in the political game down in Pristina.  Not that he ever really left that game after [...]

While the EU is still recovering from its series of set-backs in Chad over the last two months, it’s been hit by bad news from an earlier mission.  In 2003, the French led the EU’s first African venture, Operation Artemis, into the DR Congo to bail out beleaguered UN troops.  This has usually been hailed [...]

The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks.  It has a great piece on how marines  in Iraq turned to a blogger in New Jersey to track the patterns of insurgent attacks - as well as a thoughtful dismissal of  indie documentaries on the war.  [...]

I’d dropped my plan to do weekly scorecards on events in Kosovo, not least because bigger and better-informed Balkan-watchers like ICG are on the case. But the recent violence in Mitrovica brings me back to an argument I made in the first days after sort-of-independence was declared: that the best plan for the Kosovo [...]

For over a year, one of the biggest questions among officials in UN-land has been: will the Security Council make us go to Somalia?  Back in November, I debuted on this blog by noting that Ban Ki-moon had announced that a mission was not “a realistic and viable option.”  Well, the Council didn’t like that one bit, [...]

David Steven has recently reminded us of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, but an earnest story from DoD reveals that the U.S. is now running hearts and minds operations inside its “detention facilities” in Iraq.
New ways of dealing with detainees in coalition-run facilities in Iraq are paying off through less violence, more actionable intelligence for [...]

The McClatchy Company is the third biggest newspaper owner in the U.S., but most of the papers it owns tend to be of the smaller, less internationally-known variety.  But it takes foreign reporting very seriously, especially from Iraq.  Its “Inside Iraq” blog is a platform for the Iraqi journalists it employs to, well, blog.  The posts [...]

Now that it looks likely that Kosovo is heading for some sort of de facto partition, there’s a sense of weary inevitability abroad.  Of course this was coming, the argument goes, and it won’t be long before some other Balkan backwater is trying redraw its border - Tim Judah has a typically excellent summary of the possible hot-spots here.   I suspect [...]

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