WPR Blog Archive

Bosnia’s constitution violates the rights of minorities by preventing them from aspiring to hold the country’s highest political offices, the European Court of Human Rights ruled this week. “This decision affirms that ethnic domination should have no role in a democracy,” Sheri P. Rosenberg, co-counsel on the case and director of the Human Rights Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law told AP. A Jew and a Roma – would-be political candidates Jakob Finci and Dervo Sejdic -filed suit at the court in June, charging that the constitution was discriminatory because it precludes anyone not of Bosnian, Serb […]

Mexico City has emerged as the first Latin American city to endorse legal gay marriage and a host of other rights for gay couples. In a landmark decision, the Mexico City legislature voted 39-20 to approve legislation that will change the definition of marriage in the city’s civil code to read “the free uniting of two people.” Gay couples may be able to marry as early as February 2010. The bill also provides gay couples with the right to adopt children, to be included on one another’s insurance, obtain joint housing loans and the right to inheritance. The move has […]

To take a page out of the playbook of Sam Roggeveen and the smart bunch at the Interpreter, this year I’ve changed my mind about Europe. Not that I’ve gone from optimism to pessimism, or vice versa. I’ve long been a Europhile, primarily because of the very real foundation of peaceful semi-post-sovereignty that the EU incarnates. But also driving my affection for the EU was the idea of what it might become. And that’s what I’ve changed my mind about. I no longer believe that the EU will become something other than what it is: a collection of states with […]

Julia Mahlejd makes some thought-provoking observations about the difference between Afghan and American perceptions and understanding of just what constitutes corruption. This adds some substance to my abstract reflections on the relationship between corruption and legitimacy, as did Kari’s smart post on the Asia Society event featuring Ashraf Ghani she attended two weeks ago. My point wasn’t that corruption isn’t a problem in Afghanistan, nor that there is no connection between perceptions of corruption and perception of legitimacy. I just suspected that the Stateside policy discussion about corruption was lumping together a wide range of behaviors that in fact have […]

In its first ruling since being established by the African Union in 2006, the Tanzania-based African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights last week declared itself incompetent to ruleon a petition regarding the planned trial of former Chadian President Hissene Habré for crimes against humanity. Chadian national Micholet Yogogombaye brought the suit in an effort to halt a planned trial in Senegal, where Habré has lived since losing power in 1990. Yogogombaye instead endorsed the idea of a South African-style truth commission to deal with charges related to the tens of thousands tortured and killed during Habré’s reign. The court […]

Here are a few of this week’s highlights from WPR’s video section: – U.S. Military drones have been hacked by militants. WSJ’s Siobhan Gorman talks about the implications and possible threats this breach may cause. – This Al-Jazeera videoreports on the Kurdish struggle for representation in Turkey after acourt decision banned the pro-Kurdish party from parliament, linkingthem to the PKK. – The delicate relationship between Afghan and U.S. security forces isoften strained as they work together to secure Afghanistan. This VOA video discusses some of the obstacles. Our video sectionis updated daily. I’ll highlight videos we post there from time […]

Spain has agreed to send 500 additional troops to Afghanistan, including combat troops, but otherwise mainly in a training capacity to the Afghan army. This is more welcome news, politically speaking. But I think it lends weight to the charge made by French Defense Minister Hervé Morin, in defending the Afghanistan war before the French Parliament, that Europe has undermined its political weight by announcing its various troop increases one by one, as opposed to adopting a common position in a coordinated manner. In essence, the immediate declaration by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, following President Barack Obama’s speech […]

From Art Goldhammer, taken out of context from a post worth reading in its entirety on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s grandstanding at the Copenhagen summit: China, meanwhile, insists on remaining inscrutable — and jealous of itssovereignty. In post-sovereign Europe this smacks of archaism, whereasin imperial America it is perceived as a threat. The EU countries, who have experience hammering out impossible compromises at “post-sovereign” summits, probably find the Chinese position a bit distasteful, too. A hard deal? Sure. A meaningless deal? Why not. But no deal? That’s simply uncivilized. I’d probably replace “imperial” with “unilateral.” And I’d note that there’s […]

For some reason, coverage of the intelligence failures involving U.S. drones in Iraq as well as the U.S.-South Korea defense plans is insisting on framing the lapses as “hacking” and “cyberintelligence,” when both were the result of human error. In the case of the drones, as the Danger Room piece above points out, a known security loophole was left unchecked, and in the latter, the plans were apparently made vulnerable because they were downloaded to an unsecured USB key. Here’s a simple rule of thumb: If I could do it, it ain’t hacking. And I’m pretty sure I could have […]

After signing a deal in Moscow, reportedly for the purchase of six submarines to shore up its South China Sea claims, Vietnam’s defense minister made back-to-back visits to Washington and Paris to discuss further military hardware purchases. In France, the subject of discussion was helicopters and air transport. For all the talk in Asia of regional integration, military budgets don’t seem to be suffering much. If Reagan’s famous formula for U.S.-Soviet arms talks was “Trust, but verify,” the contemporary Asian version would seem to be, “Trust, but cover your . . . back.”

America’s decline and China’s rise are perhaps the two most-cited trends in global power dynamics these days. Speaking at the Carnegie Council in New York on Monday, council Vice Chairman Dr. Charles Kegley used the historical context of previous hegemons and the trajectories they followed to argue that the two trends will indeed continue, representing a transfer of power from one hegemon to its successor. How that transfer of power is handled by both will determine global security in the near future. The Fading Power. Based on America’s historically pendulum-like swings between internationalism and isolationism, Kegley says we are now […]

The conventional way to look at the Afghanistan war is as a multilateral coalition forming a security scaffolding around and upon which a stable Afghan nation can form. But if you consider the strategic network that is emerging from the war, it might be more accurate to say that Afghanistan is the strategic scaffolding around and upon which a stable regional arrangement is forming. The thought was triggered by Saurav Jha’s WPR briefing on India-Iran relations (which, if you missed it, is really worth taking the time to read). It took shape around Nikolas Gvosdev’s recent WPR columns, in which […]

International and local human rights organizations have applauded Libya in recent days for some tentative steps towards greater recognition of human rights, but are calling on authorities to increase the pace of reform. Human Rights Watch released a report, “Libya: Truth and Justice Can’t Wait,” on Dec. 12, which noted that availability of the Internet and two new newspapers have increased journalists’ ability to report on some previously sensitive subjects. Nevertheless, criminal penalties brought against members of the press continue to stifle most press freedoms. HRW applauded Justice Ministry efforts to secure the release of unjustly detained Libyans and to […]

I just saw the latest Jim Jarmusch movie, “The Limits of Control,” last night. And though I can understand why it seems to have been poorly received, I found it to be a visually beautiful film with a masterful use of tension, even if it suffered from a failure of nerve in the climactic scene. There are a lot of subthemes in the movie, including art (the reflection) vs. reality (the thing being reflected), the screen as canvas (both the museum subplot, but also the way in which crucial scenes played out in front of train windows looking out over […]

There’s a lot to unpack regarding the Turkish Supreme Court closing the “Kurdish” DTP party. The move comes as the AKP party is rolling out its long-awaited Kurdish initiative. And although the DTP had begun to increasingly oppose the measure, by inflaming public opinion, the party’s closure is certain to be a blow to the effort toward national reconciliation. There’s a lot riding on Turkey resolving its Kurdish population’s grievances — domestically, in terms of national cohesion and bloodshed; and regionally, in terms of its relations with its neighbors. More broadly, an inclusive reconciliation would help Turkey’s EU aspirations, and […]

Writing at East Asia Forum, Yusuke Ishihara argues that if the Bush-era U.S.-Japanese posture toward China consisted of “hedging without reassurance” due to Sino-Japanese tensions, the current posture is closer to “reassurance without hedging” due to emerging tensions in the U.S.-Japanese alliance. All that in the context of the military cooperation agreements signed last month between China and Japan, including maritime rescue exercises and other mil-to-mil communication and cooperation exercises. Clearly, we’re in a moment of uncertainty in terms of both the U.S. regional posture in Asia, and its future as a superpower. Given the new party in power in […]

The Asia Society hosted a panel of Afghanistan experts on Tuesday in light of President Barack Obama’s recently announced new Afghanistan strategy. The panel — comprised of Peter Galbraith, former deputy special representative of the secretary-general of the United Nations to Afghanistan; Amin Tarzi, director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University; and 2009 Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani — was quick to identify the difficult position Obama finds himself in, not just on the ground, but over the airwaves. As Ghani pointed out, in a globalized world, there is no such thing as giving two different speeches […]