We've covered Blackwater a few times in the past here on GD, and when the founder of the firm was implicated in murder in two sworn depositions back in...
Blackwater founder implicated in murder
Okaay: A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in...
re: The bad boys of Blackwater
David Kilcullen on how to run a successful counter-insurgency: In counterinsurgency, the initiative is everything. If the enemy is reacting to you, you...
The bad boys of Blackwater
From Wired.com: former US infantry officer Robert Bateman has an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune today, which has some interesting insights into Blackwater's...
Training programs a la Blackwater
Blackwater doesn't only provide protection for US State Dept staff in Iraq and elsewhere: they also run numerous training programs in VIP protection and other...
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Let’s make climate a culture war!
If the politics of climate change end up polarised, is that so bad? No – it’s disastrous. Or so I’ve long thought. Look at the US – where climate is even more polarised than abortion. Result: decades of flip flopping. Ambition under Clinton; reversal...
Big Elephants and Small Islands: getting beyond the New Aid Orthodoxy
Official development assistance (ODA) – or aid – is a small but conspicuous pillar of the international order, and its frailties are being exposed by COVID as surely as those of the other foundations of this order. The assumptions underpinning aid and its management...
Uncertainty and Humanitarian Action: What Donald Rumsfeld can teach us
Since its onset, one striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been the narrative power of its novelty. This global narrative depicts COVID-19 pushing humanity towards a ‘historical divide’ of BC and AC (before and after COVID-19), where unknown,...