By Prof. Inderjeet Parmar | 13 August 2010 British Prime Minister David Cameron recently declared his wish to build – or rather renew – Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with India. The likelihood of that, I suspect, is strong mainly because of the character of India’s elite, and the evolution of that society since 1947 when India won

By Dr. Guy Burton | 11 August 2010 During the current Venezuela-Colombia spat, one particular comment by the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, was particularly striking – although not necessarily for the reason he gave. During a speech commemorating Venezuela’s founder and his political hero, Simon Bolivar, Chavez highlighted the passage of 46 US warships, 200 helicopters

By Prof. Inderjeet Parmar | 01 August 2010 Even as British leaders, and the media, proclaim the imminent death of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, they cannot seem to help backing America’s line in world affairs. Last week, when Prime Minister David Cameron was in Turkey, he rather ‘boldly’ (for a British leader), criticised

By Eliot Cohen | 10 August 2010 AI: Let’s start with the Stanley McChrystal episode. What’s your take on this? Why did the general act with such inexplicable tactlessness? Did President Obama, in your view, respond appropriately? Eliot Cohen: Obama handled it well. I’m not one of his greatest admirers, in general, but I thought he reacted quickly

By Prof. Barry Rubin | 08 August 2010 This is one of those stories about the Middle East that is totally amazing but not the least bit surprising. What, you ask, do I mean? From the standpoint of the way the region is portrayed in the West this information is incredible but if you understand the

Prof. Inderjeet Parmar | 30 July 2010 All men may well be born equal but their deaths certainly betray huge inequalities. A month or so ago (24 June, to be precise), Michael Tomasky, GuardianAmerica’s editor at large, wrote that the chances were that Obama’s military strategy in Afghanistan was likely to work but that a lot of

By James Petras | 28 July 2010 “We are confronting a monster; a force that ridicules, deceives and wants to destroy us”.   – Miguel Angel Ibara, member of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, (SME) on the 80th day of a hunger strike. (La Jornada July 18, 2010).   There is a direct relation between the rise of

By Dr. Guy Burton | 26 July 2010 Relations between Colombia and Venezuela appear to have hit a new low. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were severed by Venezuela’s government following the Colombia ambassador’s presentation before the OAS last Thursday (22 July) that Venezuela ‘tolerates’ up to 1500 FARC guerrillas on its side of the border.

 By Prof. Stefan Wolff | 23 July 2010   Does the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence Resolve Anything? I always tell my students that, when sitting an exam, they have to answer the question that has been set rather than one that they feel comfortable with. No analogy is

By Prof. Stefan Wolff | 18 June 2010   Ever since the Pentagon announced that it estimated Afghanistan to sit on around $1 trillion of minerals, including iron ore, copper, cobalt, gold, silver and aluminium, and additional reserves of lithium not included in this value estimate, commentators have analysed the situation—and been far from optimistic about what

By Peter Berger | 22 July 2010 Israel was established as both a democratic and a Jewish state. Both qualities continue to be real enough. But there have been increasing tensions between these two definitions of the state, and some (in Israel and outside it) have questioned whether there is not an inherent contradiction that cannot be

By Walter Russell Mead | 23 July 2010 During the next two weeks I’ll be visiting Pakistan at the invitation of the US Embassy there. I won’t be there to toe the government line; from time to time US diplomats abroad call on people from many different points of view and walks of life to give overseas

By Zaur Shiriyev | 15 July 2010 Current public policy debates in Armenia and Azerbaijan over a possible Nagorno-Karabakh war are more acceptable to those who want to return to their homes rather than live in a “no-war-no-peace” situation. The danger of another open war in the Caucasus – one much worse than the August conflict between

By Peter Berger | 17 July 2010 A Chinese sage defined a wise person as one who sees things together which others see as apart. Writing a blog implies the presumption of at least a measure of wisdom. So here we go:   In an earlier effusion of wisdom, in reference to conflicts between secularist elites and religious voters,

By Alexander Christie-Miller | 17 July 2010 On the picturesque island of Buyukada in the Marmara Sea about an hour’s ferry ride from Istanbul, tourists climb a steep track through pine trees to peer through locked gates at the decaying remains of an old Greek orphanage.   Sealed behind crumbling walls, reinforced with ornate rusting bedsteads, the