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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 may be too soon to determine what has trigged the current violence in Beirut. Some analysts have suggested Hezbollah took advantage of a labour strike on Wednesday by using it as a political opportunity and the strike quickly escalated into a flashpoint over Lebanon’s 17-month-old political crisis.
What is more clear is that the Lebanese [...]

Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to [...]

Today American Defence Secretary Robert Gates recommended that General David Petraeus be appointed head of US Central Command. Until Admiral William Fallon was sacked earlier in the year, the idea had been for  General Petraeus to replace General John Craddock as Supreme Allied Commander and help fix the failing mission in Afghanistan, especially after Paddy [...]

Barney Rubin has an excellent post updating on latest developments in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas.  Start, he says, from a clear recognition of one thing at least: the US has no plan.  Here’s a graph from the US Government’s General Accountability Office which proves the point:

Note especially the amount being allocated to political reform, [...]

Interesting times for the peak oil debate.  Last week came the news that Russian oil had peaked: its Q1 oil production in 2008 fell, for the first time in a decade.  Later in the week, oil touched a new all-time high of $117 after Nigerian insurgents attacked a Shell pipeline there.
And today, the news emerges [...]

I’ve started writing about Islamic finance as of a few months ago. It’s a fascinating, bizarre market, fusing as it does the world of ancient religious law with the world of international finance. And it’s an increasingly important market, because the Middle East is suddenly where all the capital is, so companies, banks, funds and [...]

Below the jump, Alex and my talk at last weekend’s Progressive Governance summit - it’s a four minute summary of our paper on multilateralism and global risks.

Back in the middle of February I posted on the plight of the Iraqi people in Basra suggesting that while the the city was not in the media spotlight things were turning from bad to worse. I ended saying I think we are going to see a lot more about Basra in the headlines in [...]

Barney Rubin does know how to start a blog post:
Last week I was at a meeting in Madrid to discuss a “Political Solution” to the conflict in Afghanistan. Among the topics discussed was prospects for talking to the Taliban. I was surprised, however, at how literally some of the participants seemed to take it. One [...]

The latest move in the long game between Turkey’s hardline secularists and its moderate Islamist government is perhaps the most worrying yet. The chief prosecutor in the country’s constitutional court has filed a petition to close the governing AK Party and ban its leaders from politics for five years, including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and [...]

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.  [...]

…you may have noticed that all is not well.  The British troops in Basra (both of them) are needless to say staying out of the way.  But as the Yorskhire Ranter reports,
…inevitably, the US authorities seem to have swallowed the “southern surge” thing, and are now pressing for more British troops to be sent - not [...]

Record commodities prices have given countries like China, Singapore, Russia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and UAE control over trillions of dollars, which they have stowed away in sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), that are now hovering over the global financial system like mighty hoovers, sucking up whatever assets cross their path.
The SWFs have, in the last 12 [...]

The Israeli secret service has launched a blog written by four of its agents. According to the BBC the agents discuss how they were recruited, and what sort of work they perform; they also answer questions sent in by members of the public. The blog is part of a recruitment drive with one agent claiming [...]

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 [...]

Now that Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM, has resigned, the blogosphere is, naturally, shifting into overdrive.  Best one-stop summary of comment so far is on Wired’s Danger Room blog; here’s Thomas Barnett’s Esquire article on Fallon which appears to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. 
Spencer Ackerman:
Gates said in a press conference [...]

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 [...]

Last week, I noted that the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee had come out with a new report calling for the EU to get serious about Iraq’s reconstruction.  I’ve now read the text in full.  It’s a detailed set of proposals, built on a strong case that most current European funding to Iraq might as well go down [...]

News that Turkey is to publish a modernised revision of the Hadith - the traditions that govern the practice of Islam - will come as a shock to those Turks who think the government wants to turn their country into a hardline Islamic theocracy. Rather than returning to the past, the AK Party is attempting [...]

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