Voting in the Total Politics Blog Poll ends at midnight today. So, you know what to do.
Voting in the Total Politics Blog Poll ends at midnight today. So, you know what to do.
I have been struggling with my paper on military/civilian cooperation in ‘fragile states’. It is easy to think that the whole business is hopeless. It is just not possible in the short time-scales we all can cope with these days to work out how best to achieve Stability while maintaining Legitimacy. Not […]
Over in the USA a lot of noise is being generated by people speculating that President Obama is not for various technical reasons an American citizen and so should not have been allowed to run for President. Yawn. But there may be other reasons for wanting to see all the […]
My next commission for DIPLOMAT magazine is a piece on Diplomatic Ghastly Moments. All you diplomatic readers out there will have had them. You know what I mean. That moment when your heart disappears in the general direction of your toes at high speed. When your mouth goes dry as all […]
Have you voted in the Total Politics Blog 2009 exercise yet? If you care to do so you can include a vote for this one, now with an added Wikio ‘badge’ (see on the right hand column) which I have earned by soaring unexpectedly for me at least into the […]
The Americans have a way with words: a good loser is a Loser. In other words, by contemplating the possibility of defeat yet remaining cheerful about it you psych yourself down – and help bring defeat about. Which brings us to President Obama’s recent remarkable off-hand thought: I’m always worried about […]
Remember that far-reaching German Constitutional Court ruling qualifying the interpretation of the Lisbon Treaty? Spiegel Online International has a lot more: In essence, the court ruled that by passing the so-called "accompanying law" to the Lisbon Treaty, which determines the rights of German parliament to participate in European legislation, the […]
I was over at the UK’s international development department (DFID) today, talking about the current British attempts to ‘join up’ military and civilian efforts in world trouble-spots. As I was looking at these questions with both the benefit of years of insider experience and now the irresponsibility of non-office, it […]
One of the best things about the Internet is the way it lets ideas be hammered out, if only for the benefit of the people who follow the hammering. (Note: the fact that insane Internet conspiracy theories seem to do rather better than hard facts is of course a problem.) […]
Brian Barder tries to explain why he is of The Left: There is a broad left-to-right spectrum of values and priorities and most people can quickly see where on the spectrum they belong. The two ends of the spectrum may be summarised (in simplified form) like this: Liberty, human rights […]
