Canada, the upcoming chair of the Arctic Council, has named Patrick Borbey as the new chair of the group of Senior Arctic Officials. His role will be to work with the SAOs from the other seven permanent member states along with representatives from indigenous organizations. Borbey will still retain his title as head of the Canadian […]
Shahbagh: The Set Up (Part 1 in a 3 Part Series about the Shahbagh Movement, its Politics and its Moral Content) Since this past February 5, now for the past month and more, the “youth” of Bangladesh have ebbed and flowed in the hundreds of thousands from the neighborhood of Shahbagh, in Dhaka. An occupying […]
Now that one of Latin America’s most controversial figures has died, it is interesting to look back at his actions, actions that will reverberate in the western hemisphere for some time to come. This is a short piece (about 52 minutes) that is clearly a love letter from the maker, Cinema Libre Studio. The whole […]
Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose announced today that the Canadian government has signed a $288 million definition contract with Irving Shipbuilding for Arctic/Offshore Patrol Ships (A/OPS). The definition contract will allow Irving Shipbuilding to design the ships and their electronics and mechanics up to a production level. A separate contract will […]
Iran’s presidential election will be held on June 14. Under Iran’s election law, observation of the voting process is a crime unless this monitoring is pre-approved. Generally, presidential candidates are only allowed to have one representative at each polling station to monitor the process. In 2009, it was claimed by Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the presidential […]
Strict censorship of arts and culture in Iran emerged shortly after the victory of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Through various tactics, rules and regulations the Islamic Republic managed to successfully instill fear and control mainstream arts and culture in an attempt to “purify” the society of westernization and bring back Islamic and revolutionary values […]
Today is 60 years since the death of Joseph Stalin. How do we know this? Well, it’s on the front page of the BBC, there’s an article in the Telegraph, Reuters, the Atlantic and pretty much everywhere else. Except Russia itself, that is, where the event hardly attracted any attention whatsoever. It was not on […]
My last post focused on the domestic implications in Pakistan of the latest revelations about the 1999 Kargil mini-war. Since the crisis is a key point of contention – a sort of Rorschach test, really – in the debate over whether the proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Asia has stabilized or aggravated the India-Pakistan […]
A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dr. Laurence Smith and Scott Stephenson of UCLA’s Geography Department reports that new trans-Arctic shipping routes will be navigable during the summer by midcentury. The authors found that first, common open-water ships will be able to transit the Northern Sea Route […]
Give the people sports and they will forget all about politics. Such a maxim could be attributed to all manner of political figures from Commodus to Machiavelli. We can now add Kim Jong Un to that list after the North Korean leader welcomed former NBA weirdo Dennis Rodman to Pyongyang for a basketball game between […]
The questions on the functioning and success of EU Foreign Policy are back at the forefront of the debate. Three years after the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon leading to the establishment the European External Action Service (EEAS), the excellent ECFR and CEPS, two leading think tanks on European politics, have both published insightful […]
Northern diplomats and policymakers like to reinforce the notion of cooperation in the circumpolar north, and Denmark’s Arctic Ambassador Klavs Holm is no different. On Thursday, speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, he complimented the council’s camaraderie, noting, “There’s a very good atmosphere. I never experienced anything quite like it in […]
In the U.S., sequestration threatens a shaky recovery. In the eurozone, unemployment rose to record levels this week. In response, both sides of the Transatlantic partnership are recasting what was traditionally a strategic partnership as an economic one, aimed at enhancing global security by facilitating economic growth. For the past several years, economic anxiety […]
On Sunday, February 24, 2013, a regional peace accord was agreed upon in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by 11 African nations from both the Great Lakes region and Southern Africa in an attempt to finally end two decades of conflict that have plagued most sections of the war-riddled country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), particularly its mineral-rich eastern provinces. Appropriately labeled […]
Foreign Policy Association’s 2013 “Great Decisions in Foreign Policy” on PBS, a series of half hour documentaries providing background information for and evaluation of leading contemporary issues, airs this March. The forthcoming series includes a segment on Iran’s controversial nuclear ambitions. “Red Line: Iran, Israel, and the Bomb” begins with the same powerful introduction as […]