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Begin New Search Topic United Nations Political Geography America Content Type Journal Article

1. Clash of Elites: What Lies Behind the Defamation Debates

Author:
Mark P. Lagon and Ryan Kaminski
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Abstract:
Since Samuel Huntington's 1993 article warning of inter-civilizational conflict, pundits and policymakers alike have been quick to forecast a so-called “clash of civilizations.” This has become especially common following 9/11, with warnings of a unitary Islam pitted against a unified West. Yet a clear-eyed assessment reveals that the West includes Muslim-majority regions and the often fractious United Nations; this divisive vision is as incorrect as it is unhelpful. In his address to the UN General Assembly in September 2012, President Barack Obama argued that freedom of speech and tolerance transcends civilizational, cultural, and religious fault lines. “Together, we must work towards a world where we are strengthened by our differences and not defined by them. That is what America embodies, that's the vision we will support,” declared Obama. In direct opposition to those favoring limitations on the freedom of expression or the imposition of blasphemy charges, the president noted, “The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech – the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.” Setting the stage for Obama's remarks was what can roughly be termed as a global panic attack with peaceful, semi-violent, and violent protests about a video spreading from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In the face of the unmistakable energy and vigor associated with protests, however, many were left confused how a shabbily crafted video, Innocence of Muslims, with a skeletal budget, and miniscule opening audience to match, could instigate such a worldwide conflagration.
Topic:
United Nations
Political Geography:
Africa, America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia

2. Joseph Nye, the inventor of the term 'soft power'

Author:
Alan Philps
Publication Date:
06-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Chatham House
Abstract:
He shares his thoughts on on America's role in an increasingly affluent world, Russia's decline and China's own goals
Topic:
Economics and United Nations
Political Geography:
Russia, China, America, Middle East, and Syria

3. Towards a Jurisprudential Articulation of Indigenous Land Rights

Author:
Gaetano Pentassuglia
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
As expert analysis concentrates on indigenous rights instruments, particularly the long fought for 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a body of jurisprudence over indigenous land and resources parallels specialized standard-setting under general human rights treaties. The aim of the present article is to provide a practical and comparative perspective on indigenous land rights based on the process of jurisprudential articulation under such treaties, principally in the Inter-American and African contexts. While specialized standards inevitably generate a view of such rights (and, indeed, indigenous rights more generally) as a set of entitlements separate from general human rights, judicial and quasi-judicial practice as it exists or is being developed within regional and global human rights systems is effectively shaping up their content and meaning. I argue that indigenous land rights jurisprudence reflects a distinctive type of human rights discourse, which is an indispensable point of reference to vest indigenous land issues with greater legal significance. From a practical standpoint, focussing on human rights judicial and quasi-judicial action to expand existing treaty-based regimes and promote constructive partnerships with national courts, though not a panacea to all the intricacies of indigenous rights, does appear to offer a more realistic alternative to advocacy strategies primarily based on universally binding principles (at least at this stage) or the disengagement of domestic systems from international (human rights) law.
Topic:
Human Rights and United Nations
Political Geography:
Africa and America

4. Haiti's New President: Welcome to the Toughest Job in the Americas

Author:
Robert Maguire
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Americas Quarterly
Institution:
Council of the Americas
Abstract:
Haiti's next president must put the country on a path to real development.
Topic:
Development, Government, and United Nations
Political Geography:
America and Haiti

5. Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad by John Bolton

Author:
Gideon Reich
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
What is it like to be an American diplomat trying to advance U.S. interests? In Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, John Bolton recounts his harrowing experiences in the foreign policy establishment of the United States government. The book is an enlightening introduction to the bureaucratic machinations that guide our foreign policy. At the book's start, Bolton describes himself as a “libertarian conservative” (p. 7) and tells why he agreed to join the Agency for International Development (AID) when Reagan offered him the appointment in 1980. I was attracted to AID because it involved both U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy in the recipient countries. Our goal was to make AID's programs more market-driven, to induce recipient countries to foster private enterprise, and to turn AID away from a welfare-oriented approach known as “basic human needs.” This rubric disguised a belief that poverty in developing countries was caused by a lack of resources and that poverty could be overcome by developed countries' transferring the missing resources. I regarded this as essentially backward: The creation of wealth by developing countries was the long term cure to their poverty, which they could accomplish by market-oriented policies that rewarded rather than penalized domestic and foreign trade and investment. (p. 20) While there, Bolton helped return $28 million to the Treasury, by “canceling AID projects around the world that were failing” (p. 20). He also had his first professional contact with the UN, where he says he learned much about the behavior of countries at international bodies—for instance, that “countries with which the United States has close bilateral relations are not always helpful in such bodies” and that “this was just business as usual at the UN” (p. 21). . . .
Topic:
United Nations and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
America

6. At the Intersection of Domestic Acts and Globalization: The Case of Irregular Migrants15

Author:
Federico Daniel Burlon
Publication Date:
03-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Sixty-five percent of the Netherlands is below sea level: ten thousand miles of dykes, gates, and dams hold back the sea. As the water besieges the land, some politicians and scholars claim that immigrants are doing the same to the country. On the other side of the Atlantic, immigration to the United States also has been compared to a tide that must be contained. The fears surrounding immigration have been one of the focal points raised by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and by his successor, Ban Ki-moon. As a result of the dramatic increase of migration flows and the large number of irregular migrants worldwide, immigration has moved from low to high politics. Fuelled by a mentality that sees domestic security as threatened, the salience of irregular immigration is grounded in parallels drawn between the control of illegal immigration and the control of crime. According to Adam Crawford, the conflation of illegal immigration with crime has led Western governments to rule through the politics of fear of crime and insecurity. The impact of these policies on irregular immigrants illustrates what John Tomlinson calls the reflexive nature of globalization. An insightful avenue to take in order to explore globalization is the study of human mobility. Globalization has placed immigrants at the nexus of the increase in migration due to lower transportation costs, the development of the international human rights regime, and the enactment of increasingly restrictive immigration policies by developed countries. The interplay between these processes crystallizes in detention centers, and renders immigrants vulnerable to human rights violations. Studying globalization from a comparative perspective, this essay analyzes the impact of the International Human Rights Regime (IHRR) on American and Dutch immigration detention policies. In the last decades, detention has become the established way of dealing with irregular migrants. It lamentably obscures various essential examples of alternative legislation.
Topic:
Globalization, Human Rights, and United Nations
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Netherlands

7. The U.N. Security Council's Approach towards Iraq: 1980-2003

Author:
Majid Takht Ravanchi
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Center for Strategic Research (CSR)
Abstract:
Between 1980 and 2003 Iraq was involved in three armed conflicts; namely, the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980's, the occupation of Kuwait in 1990- 1991, and the American-led war against Iraq in 2003. These are three different conflicts with their own distinct characteristics. A comparative study on the behavior of the United Nations Security Council with regard to each of these conflicts reveals that the Security Council has had three different and notably imbalanced reactions towards these conflicts. While At the beginning of the Iran-Iraq conflict, the Council was silent for a few days and later adopted a very ineffective resolution, the approach and conduct in the second conflict was quite different. A few hours after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Council adopted a very strong resolution, under Chapter VII of the Charter. In the case of the third Persian Gulf conflict – 2003 - the Security Council was in the middle of discussions as to how to deal with the Iraqi crisis when the American and British forces started the military attacks against Baghdad. Furthermore, international humanitarian law has been violated during these conflicts on numerous occasions, most notably the use of chemical weapons by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq conflict. The Security Council's lack of resolve to adopt necessary punitive measures against Iraq to prevent further use of chemical weapons was considered by Iraq as a green light to continue its resort and practice with a sense of impunity. As discussed in the paper, blatant lack of resolve on the part of the Security Council towards Iraq's repeated use of chemical weapons was, as a matter of fact, the most manifest expression of the strong pro-Iraq tilt in the Council's approach and conduct; the outward expression of alternating implicit-explicit consensus among the permanent members on how to punish the revolutionary Iran and reward a friendly Iraq. The present paper concludes that a different approach and conduct by the Council vis-à-vis Iraq 's aggression against Iran would have most probably created a different situation and dynamism in the Persian Gulf area with all its significant repercussions and implications.
Topic:
United Nations
Political Geography:
Iraq, America, Iran, Kuwait, Baghdad, and Persia

8. Under a Cloud of Uncertainty: AIPAC's 2010 Policy Conference, 21--23 March

Author:
Cléa Thouin
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
ON THE SECOND DAY of the 2010 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy conference, Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip for the 111th U.S. Congress, declared, “We gather today under a dark cloud of uncertainty.” Cantor may have been referring to most participants' favorite subject, the Iranian “nuclear threat,” but his statement proved an apt description of the overall atmosphere at this year's conference. The conference came in the midst of unusually fraught public tensions between the United States and Israel over the announcement two weeks earlier of new settlement construction in East Jerusalem. The dispute over an issue as important to the United States as the peace process, against the background of recently revealed statements by the U.S. military high command that the nonresolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was negatively impacting U.S. security and military operations elsewhere in the world, directly challenged AIPAC's fundamental founding premise: the identity of U.S. and Israeli interests. As a result, the conference was colored by a palpable level of uncertainty about the way forward for the pro-Israel community in the United States. TELLING THE STORY AIPAC's fifty-first annual conference, which took place from 21 to 23 March in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., was billed as the largest ever, with 7,500 delegates. The size itself posed challenges. To accommodate such numbers, the plenary sessions were held in a 780-foot-long conference hall—more than twice the size of a U.S. football field. This meant that despite the extravagant 500-foot split screen, the crowd on one side of the hall could not see what was happening at ground level on the other side, sometimes resulting in serious confusion. On more than one occasion, for example, half the audience, spontaneously joining with commotion on the other side of the hall without being able to see the source, unwittingly applauded pro-Palestinian activists protesting speeches, particularly by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Middle East Quartet envoy (and former British prime minister) Tony Blair. These were two of the main speakers, the other most highly anticipated speaker at this year's conference being U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Besides four plenary sessions (and a gala dinner) that featured the main speakers, the program consisted of approximately one hundred “breakout sessions”—focused panels, university-type seminars, and advocacy training sessions led by scholars, professionals, or lobbyists. These took place concurrently before or after the plenary sessions, and most were repeated more than once in the course of the conference (sometimes with different speakers). There were also luncheons and dinners with distinguished guests, most of which (as well as some panels) were “by invitation only,” restricted to select AIPAC members. Only one plenary session was held on the last day of the conference, as most of the morning was dedicated to training workshops in preparation for AIPAC's traditional day of lobbying on Capitol Hill. These workshops were organized by region, with participants attending lobbying sessions for their specific region so as to receive targeted training on their congressional representatives. The overall conference theme, “Israel: Tell the Story,” represented AIPAC's effort to redirect the increasingly negative public narrative on Israel that has emerged since Israel's winter 2008–2009 assault on Gaza. This was part of a broader attempt to shift from a defensive campaign aimed at refuting criticism of Israel to an offensive campaign focused on advancing a positive picture of Israel, that of “an innovator, a Jewish homeland, an open society, a light unto the nations.” AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr outlined in broad strokes the new strategy, expressly calling on his audience to shed their “defensive mentality,” which he argued focused “all too often on the slights Israel faces,” and instead “tell the story of Israel's hand extended in peace . . . Israel's example of freedom and democracy.” The results of the conference fell short of this goal. The only successful “storytelling” took place at the opening plenary session titled “Innovation Nation,” which framed Israel's modern technological entrepreneurship as a continuation of early Zionist settlers' alleged ability to “make the desert bloom,” and in a video (one of many screened on the conference hall's mega screen) that depicted the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a humanitarian vanguard without ever hinting at the possibility of improper conduct during Operation Cast Lead (OCL). Only four “breakout” panels addressed the Israel-as-innovation-nation theme—two on Israel's economic and technological achievements, the other two on its military innovation. Moreover, most panels on Israel throughout the conference could be seen as “defensive,” for example, “Singled Out: Delegitimizing Israel at the United Nations,” “Mainstream to Fringe: Reality of Anti-Israel Effort in America,” or “Tough Questions: Answering Israel's Detractors.” Similarly, although a number of secondary speakers, from a Paraguayan entrepreneur to a Nigerian doctor, were tasked with “telling Israel's story” during the conference's plenary sessions, they were never the focus of the sessions at which they spoke and instead seemed to be no more than fillers before anticipated speakers like Clinton and Netanyahu. Even main speakers like Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz inevitably found themselves defending Israel's policies—whether on settlements or on the IDF's conduct during OCL—rather than actually telling the story of what Kohr called the “small miracle we know as Israel.”
Topic:
United Nations
Political Geography:
America and Israel

9. How Barack Obama is Endangering our National Sovereignty

Author:
Daniel Wahl
Publication Date:
12-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
Small books can pack a big punch—as proven by John Bolton's latest, How Barack Obama is Endangering our National Sovereignty. In fewer than fifty pages, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations shows that American sovereignty is under siege and indicates what concerned Americans must do to save it.
Topic:
Sovereignty and United Nations
Political Geography:
America

10. Non-Military Organizations Should Lead on "Nation Building"

Author:
Courtney N. Meyers
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
European Affairs
Institution:
The European Institute
Abstract:
Timed for the Obama administration's Pentagon, this RAND study says government leaders should take more account of the lessons learned from people "on the ground" in recent successful (and unsuccessful) ventures in state-rebuilding. Best practice means strong local command (involving the military under civilian leadership) which is heeded in national capitals.
Topic:
International Law and United Nations
Political Geography:
United States and America