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President Putin built up his authority by promoting mates of his from KGB to senior posts in the government and economy. Now president Medvedev is doing the same, but instead of promoting spooks, he’s promoting people from a legal and business background, like him.
In his first cabinet reshuffle, announced today, Medvedev began to promote [...]

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 [...]

A diplomat who shall remain nameless offers three rules of thumb:

Don’t mistake activity for action
Don’t mistake access for influence
Don’t mistake experience for expertise

In our Progressive Governance paper, Alex and I argued that ad hoc ‘shared platforms’ are a vital part of the management of a globalised world, particularly at times of rapid change. In Newsweek, David Rothkopf provides a glimpse of how these platforms have swung into action during the current financial meltdown:
To get a sense of [...]

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 [...]

Istanbul

London

Paris

I recently interviewed Sergei Markov, who is a key spin-doctor to the Kremlin. He told me that the West had completely underestimated the extent to which things will change under Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev.
He said: “Most western observers expect no change because Medvedev is the new president. On the contrary, Putin chose Medvedev precisely [...]

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.  [...]

Avaaz’s current petition, calling on China to begin “meaningful dialogue” with the Dalai Lama, looks set to pass has now passed the one million signature mark some time later today, which will make making it comfortably the largest petition ever organised on the internet.  Sign it here.
[Update: and they've also just won political video of the [...]

While China is blocking websites in the hope of preventing news of security force brutality from seeping out, Xinhua is busy denouncing the Dalai Lama as a “master terror maker”. In fact,
The Dalai Lama and his clique have never for a day refrained from violence and terror. His childhood teacher, an Austrian, was a Nazi…
You have to be [...]

I am sure Alex and/or David will post something about Miliband’s speech to the FCO leadership conference which happened yesterday. My advice - don’t get too carried away with the speech - it’s good and runs through a familiar set of themes, instead watch the video embedded into the speech.
Two things stand out. Miliband’s plea [...]

Am back in Moscow for a week, working on a story. The impression I get from my meetings so far is that the West has underestimated the extent to which a new era has begun in Russian politics, and the extent to which Russia genuinely has a new leader, with his own agenda, in Dmitry [...]

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A propos of David’s recent posts on lax security surrounding Barack Obama, American voters can at least take heart from new research from Harvard University, which finds that the effect of assassination attempts in democracies - either successful or not - is negligible.  In autocracies, on [...]

Two days, two very similar broadsheet leaders. Yesterday The Times called for a national security strategy that narrowly defined ‘security’ (read defence), today the FT calls for strategic thinking on national security (read defence). Without some background knowledge both these pieces seem sensible enough but you wouldn’t expect us at Global Dashboard to give you [...]

Over the past few years, the New Yorker’s George Packer has provided some outstanding reporting from Iraq. (He was also the author of one of the best articles on counter-insurgency we’ve come across, which introduced the State Department’s counter-insurgency boffin David Kilcullen to a bigger stage.) Now, in the current edition of World Affairs, he’s [...]

I’ve spent some of my President’s Day holiday hammering out a review of Surrender is Not an Option, John Bolton’s scaborous memoir of his tenure at the UN. This will eventually come out in the International Journal, based in Canada, but as (i) the wheels of academic publishing move slowly and (ii) the IJ doesn’t [...]

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Here’s an excellent video with which to while away the next nine minutes and thirteen seconds.  The speaker is Clay Shirky, an American writer on the social effects of internet technologies.  He says:
What is happening in our generation is that we have a set [...]

As Charlie noted here yesterday, lots of people are having a grand old time fulminating about the Gwyn Prins / Robert Salisbury article in the new RUSI Journal on risk, threat and security in the UK.  It’s not hard to see why their piece has aroused such passions:

The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, [...]

The tiny Pacific small island state of Palau has just announced that it’ll be formally requesting protection from the Security Council on climate change and rising sea levels- and co-sponsoring a binding Security Council Resolution calling for mandatory emissions caps. 
It’s not the first time that climate change has appeared on the Security Council’s agenda (the [...]

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