Mitrovica, Kosovo — Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy of Flickr user Jekkyl.
Yesterday was the first anniversary of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. Kosovo was not a Yugoslav republic like Croatia or Slovenia, so it did not immediately emerge as independent from the break up of Yugoslavia, but remained a province of Serbia, despite [...]

Filed under: eu, europe, foreignpolicy on February 18th, 2009 | No Comments »

Samuel P. Huntington died on the December 24th 2008, aged 81; one of the most controversial figures in the history of international relations, whose legacy is a chilling reminder about the complexity of political science.
In the plurality of thought marking the end of the Cold War in 1989, Huntington’s book on the “Clash of Civilisations” [...]

Filed under: 9/11, foreignpolicy on January 8th, 2009 | 12 Comments »

Photograph courtesy of Nick Smith.
“For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins” (WG Sebald, Austerlitz)
In celebration of the new-year my homepage (now Clare Politics of course – apple + d [...]

Filed under: environment, foreignpolicy, middle east, morganlewis on January 7th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Photograph courtesy of Jonathan Alpeyrie by Creative Commons
What exactly is going on in Georgia? A good place to start would be Michael Totten’s comprehensive overview. We owe today’s mess to a nifty trick by Stalin: gerrymandering provinces so as to maximise ethnic tension and inhibit rebellion (it’s in here somewhere). At the break-up of the [...]

Filed under: foreignpolicy, humanrights on August 29th, 2008 | No Comments »

Photograph courtesy of Flickr user *Hiro
Does the West cause Islamic extremism? Is it the war in Iraq what done it, or decades of support for Israel, or centuries of imperialism? In a trivial sense, yes. If we’d done things differently, the consequences would have played out differently. It’s easy to construct stories of how this [...]

Filed under: foreignpolicy, iraq, jonathanbirch, middleeast, ukpolitics on January 24th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Thank you to everyone who filled the Latimer room beyond capacity to hear David Loyn this evening.
David shared with us his free and frank assessment of the history, present and future of the conflicts in Afghanistan in a talk he preferred that we did not record. He gave detailed analyses of the military, [...]

Filed under: 9/11, afghanistan, bbc, clarepoliticsnews, davidloyn, foreignpolicy, history, speaker discussion, taliban on January 22nd, 2008 | No Comments »

I don’t recall why I’m on the Cambridge University “Hands Off Venezuela” Society mailing list. Perhaps, if any of them read this post, I’ll get taken off it. But in the meantime I’m enjoying their collective apoplexy over an astonishing memorandum between a US embassy official and the CIA. The absence of any actual scans [...]

Filed under: democracy, foreignpolicy, jonathanbirch on November 30th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Having spent a great deal of time (probably not enough) subsidised by the British taxpayer looking back over the history of 20th century Britain and trying to get some of it to stick in my mind, I feel that it might be worth speculating about the views of historians on the Blair governments. I’m sure [...]

Filed under: constitution, foreignpolicy, gambling, gordonbrown, history, tonyblair, ukpolitics on May 5th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

So, here’s the question of the day – should the Ministry of Defence allow Prince Harry to be deployed to Iraq? The key word here is ‘allow’ - he wants to go, and that’s admirable. But surely Harry isn’t naive enough to think that just because he wants to go to Iraq like an ordinary [...]

Filed under: defence, foreignpolicy, iraq on April 27th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Picture the following. During a time of heightened tension in the Gulf, a U.S warship, USS Vincennes, falls into a skirmish with Iranian patrol boats over its incursion into Iranian waters. Shortly after the skirmish it sees an incoming jet on its radar and fires two missiles. It’s too late when it transpires that [...]

Filed under: foreignpolicy, history, iraq on April 8th, 2007 | No Comments »