Thanks to the WSJ, we can search the ever-growing database of Hillary Clinton emails. Here is the one from Feb 2011 where news of Tony Blair’s discussion with Gaddafi is described, as the doomed dictator (Gaddafi, not Blair or Hillary) wriggled to survive. If you have a safe place to […]
Remember my piece at DIPLOMAT late last year? Once a state effectively loses control of some parts of its territory to local violent extremists, how long does it take for the mass of citizens to start to challenge state authority, if only because they fear for the results if the state […]
Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn wants to discuss gender apartheid – but only with women, of course: Corbyn said: “Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment on public transport could be to introduce women only carriages. “My intention would be to […]
Football transfer negotiations are fascinating as examples of Technique. Alas we mortals never knows the detail of how the negotiations go or the specific clauses in the final contracts, but the tensions between different ways of doing the business are often obvious enough in the final outcomes. Take, for example, […]
UPDATE: More! * * * * * How to explain the fact that Hillary Clinton is still afloat politically? Or not in jail? This is a handy round-up (my emphasis added) of her accelerating woes over her private email server that she used for much of her work (most of […]
Russia has decided once again to line itself up with absurd and offensive positions by vetoing the Srebrenica resolution in the UN Security Council. Here is what looks to be the final text. Most of it is the usual rather convoluted language of UN-speak recalling and noting earlier positions. I […]
The 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres during the Bosnia conflict is prompting renewed interest in what happened and why. To mark the occasion the UK government has tabled a draft UN Security Council resolution on the issue. The current UK Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Edward Ferguson, explains the […]
So here I am, whirring away to devise a new one-day module on Diplomatic Crisis Management. Imagine my surprise to see that Buckingham University got there first, with a full module on this very subject: Module outline The nature of Conflicts and Crises Non-Diplomatic Tools of Conflict Resolution: Arbitration; Humanitarian […]
I am briefly back from my travels around Europe including to the CTBTO in Vienna and then the UN System Staff College in Turin. Next stop? Back to Warsaw and the Polish Institute of Diplomacy. Anyway, in the past few weeks the students of UK Universities have been grappling with their […]
Here is my piece over at PunditWire and Commentator describing a draft leaked keynote speech by Vladimir Putin in which he makes a decisive break with Soviet-era iconography and paranoia in favour of basic decency: Traditionally we have taken the Great Patriotic War as starting in June 1941 when Hitler […]
