With Ban Ki-Moon’s term as the United Nations Secretary-General ending this year, many candidates have been put forward to replace him.
With Ban Ki-Moon’s term as the United Nations Secretary-General ending this year, many candidates have been put forward to replace him.
Where governments are unable or unwilling to venture, at least publicly, for fear of losing credibility with their electorates or their allies, parallel diplomacy can offer a way forward.
With current Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon term ending this year, the search for his replacement has begun. Here are the four current nominees with the best credentials and most support.
As the deadly Ebola virus rips across West Africa causing death and civil unrest (i.e., due to the fear mongering that accompanies an epidemic) the fate of region remains at an impasse.
On Wednesday, Mar. 26, United States Secretary of State John Kerry cut his trip to Italy short to fly to Amman in hopes of keeping the Palestinian-Israeli peace process on track. Kerry met with Jordan’s King Abdullah before a long dinner with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. On the three-hour flight to Amman Kerry spoke […]
It is a volcano jumping between dormant and active stages and last month, it erupted again, spitting a litany of condemning editorials across global opinion pages that set ablaze United Nations’ inexcusable, uncompromising policy in Haiti, where the cholera epidemic, now entering its fourth year, killed more than 8,300 people and sickened another 650,000. […]
Mouvement du 23-Mars (M23) rebels fled their stronghold in Bunaguna, a small town in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on the border with Uganda, the rebel movement’s political leader, Bertrand Bisimwa, called for a ceasefire to end all hostilities. While fighting is ongoing, as Congolese government troops (FARDC) continue to […]
A graduate student recently interviewed me for his dissertation on Russia, the Arctic, oil and gas. During the interview, he asked me what I believed was the single most important Arctic resource. The answer could have been oil, gas, minerals, fisheries, or any other number of commodities. I responded that oil and gas are probably […]
The people of the Central African Republic (CAR) may be left to fend for themselves. Despite the increasingly dire humanitarian crisis emerging in the country, conflict in other countries may overshadow the situation so much that the country will be left to its fate. Scores of people were killed on September 9 amidst new clashes […]
President Woodrow Wilson has long fascinated me. He is one of those presidents that is a giant in history, but few people know much about him. Steven Spielberg has never made a movie about him, you don’t hear his name referenced on the Sunday talk shows, and he seems entirely missing from pop-culture. And yet […]
Sex trafficking. It happens all over the world but is largely invisible to most. What The Whistleblower (a drama, not a documentary) does is expose it as it occurred in Bosnia in 1999, four years after the Dayton Accord was reached. Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who joins the United […]
The language of war could swell volumes with what would at once be the most depressing and coldly technical glossaries of chaos ever scribed. The intersection of political calculation and unrelenting violence is formed by an endless stream of words. Open-air condemnations and closed-door strategizing. Shouts and whispers, threats and rumors. Uncapped fury and profound […]
Sometimes you look at it, and it seems a fairly straight-forward, if somewhat bizarre, story. Then again, it bears a hint of mystery. A North Korean dry-cargo merchant vessel, MV Chong Chon Gang, traveling from Cuba to the Panama Canal, was boarded by Panamanian military personnel on suspicion that it was carrying contraband narcotics. […]
Photo: POOL/Reuters As a founding member of the United Nations in 1945 and as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China has sometimes drawn criticism for the use of its veto to forestall other nation’s interference in the affairs of its allies. Recently, Beijing was roundly condemned, along with Russia, […]
Nigeria increased its offensive last week against the insurgence group Boko Haram in an attempt to reclaim the northwest region where the rebel group has attempted to carve out an Islamic state for the last four years. The conflict has left more than 3,000 people dead and thousands living in a state of fear as […]