WPR Blog Archive

The plight of migrant workers around the world got significant attention from rights advocates this week ahead of International Labor Day on May 1. Across the globe, according to advocates, migrant workers face a broad range of serious human rights abuses that range from unpaid wages and long working hours, to sexual abuse and murder. Hundreds of thousands of migrant domestic workers continue to face abuse in Asia and the Middle East despite moves by several governments to reform legislation and provide better training for law enforcement, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report. Most of the domestic workers, […]

At the risk of taking an overly contrarian position on the EU’s handling of the Greek debt crisis, I think that there’s an argument to be made that the best deal was reached for everyone involved at the soonest possible moment. That it didn’t come sooner is a reflection of the institutional and political weaknesses both of the EU and Greece. But I don’t think that earlier versions of the bailout plan, which amounted to symbolic signals, would have effectively held off markets. It’s not certain that this one will either, with regard to the risk of contagion in Spain, […]

Preliminary investigations suggest that a North Korean torpedo caused the sinking of South Korea’s naval ship, the Cheonan, late last month, killing 46 sailors. In an e-mail interview, Scott Snyder, director of the Center for U.S.-Korea Policy at the Asia Foundation and an adjunct fellow for Korean Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, assesses the potential significance. WPR: What are the possible responses we can expect from South Korea? Snyder: In its response to the sinking of the Cheonan thus far, the Lee administration has consistently attempted to internationalize its response by including American, Australian, and Swedish technical experts […]

In the span of the last 10 days, Iran dropped its bid for a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council, only to turn its sights instead on a position on a U.N. commission devoted to the protection of women’s rights. In the meantime, a senior Iranian cleric claimed that scantily clad women are an indirect cause of earthquakes, leading to a protest on social media sites around the world. No country in the world has a spotless human rights record, but Iran is a perennial target for human rights advocates for everything from its attacks on free speech […]

The Interpreter has published a very powerful and moving letter from a reader and Afghanistan war veteran that’s really worth reading. Along with this post by Robert Farley, it serves as a junction between what had been two parallel threads I’ve been following on the myth of “antiseptic war.” One, to which the reader was responding, has to do with the relation between video games and networked war, which Sam Roggeveen discussed here. The other has to do with COIN and population-centric warfare, and specifically the misconception of it as a “kinder and gentler” form of war, which Michael Cohen […]

Announcements by New Zealand and the United States this week on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples moved the world community tantalizingly close to achieving consensus on a human rights issue with ongoing relevance in many parts of the world. The declaration protects indigenous rights related to land, resources, cultural identity, education and others issues. Only four countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States — opposed it when the U.N. General Assembly originally voted on it in 2007. Australia dropped its opposition to the instrument last year. On Monday, New Zealand said it […]

No matter where you stand on nuclear abolition, if it’s an issue you care about, you ought to read through Bruno Tertrais’ article (.pdf) in The Washington Quarterly, “The Illogic of Zero.” As the title indicates, it’s a critique of total nuclear disarmament, and some of it is ground that Thomas P.M. Barnett covered in his last couple WPR columns (especially here, but also here). But in addition to offering a number of solid arguments against implementing “zero” as policy, Tertrais also offers a section full of substantive arguments against adopting it even as a vision. What also makes the […]

I just started browsing through this new publication from the Strategic Studies Institute, “Short of General War,” and found the chapter on al-Qaida and RMA by Lt. Col. Thomas Graves thought-provoking. Graves runs through the goals of the 1990s RMA and subsequent Donald Rumsfeld-era “transformation” and suggests that al-Qaida represented a pretty close approximation of the ultimate RMA-inspired military organization, which Stephen Biddle described as “a leaner, faster, higher-technology force that exploits the connectivity of networked information to outmaneuver, outrange, and demoralize enemy forces without requiring their piecemeal destruction in close combat.” That got me thinking about the tactical-strategic rap […]

In a talk at the Carnegie Council earlier this month, Georgetown University professor of international relations Charles Kupchan walked attendees through the findings of his latest book, “How Enemies Become Friends.” The cross-cultural study spans centuries and examines the normalization process by which bitter enemies can develop friendly relations. The hope is that by analyzing past successes and failures, we might be able to identify the key elements necessary to orchestrate the right conditions for peacemaking. Although the unification of the Swiss Cantons, the normalization of U.S.-British relations, the formation of the Iroquois Confederation in upstate New York and the […]

A few days after posting this about the impact of COIN on armor, I ran across this Gian Gentile piece over at Small Wars Journal, basically arguing that the U.S. Armor Corps is dying a slow death by negligence. That spawned an Internet-wide debate that SWJ collected here. I’d add Paul McLeary’s Ares post on the subject as well. In the meantime, it looks like China and Turkey are two other places where the job prospects for tank commanders are bright. The fact that China still place such a heavy doctrinal emphasis on armor is certain to embolden the COIN-skeptic […]

It seems like a “given” that the freedom from torture is a right guaranteed by all democratic societies in the 21st century. But the reality is that over the past decade, in many democratic countries, including Pakistan and the United States, authorities have turned a blind eye, or in some cases openly endorsed torture, when politically expedient. So the news that the Indian cabinet has signed off on handing over the country’s first anti-torture legislation to the parliament for a vote should spark cheers, right? Not exactly. The Prevention of Torture Bill 2010 was drafted without public discussion, and no […]

Walter Russell Mead has some typically thoughtful things to say on the persistence of American power and influence. But if Mead is right that this week’s Nuclear Security Summit is an illustration of the ways in which America still sets the global agenda, it seems that he might not have paid as close attention to the BRIC and IBSA summits that followed it. In addition to both summits articulating alternatives to the Obama administration’s Iran policy, the BRIC summit also produced a joint declaration setting a 2010 deadline for reforming the IMF and World Bank to better reflect the shifting […]

I could have included this in my previous post on President Barack Obama’s nuclear nonproliferation agenda, but it’s significant enough to warrant its own post. As Obama has pushed for UNSC sanctions against Iran, there’s been a lot of tea-leaf reading going on about Russia and China’s willingness to come on board. Parallel to that, there’s been a lesser amount of attention given to the “bad” UNSC that a sanctions resolution faces, and most notably Brazil and Turkey’s opposition to sanctions. But this week demonstrated how those tracks are far from parallel. So even while Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and […]

A couple scattershot thoughts on President Barack Obama’s nuclear nonproliferation agenda in the aftermath of this week’s Nuclear Security Summit: First of all, in combination, there’s no question that the follow-on START treaty, the Nuclear Posture Review and the nuke summit in Washington represent significant, if incremental, successes. From a political optics perspective, Obama achieved a high-priority agenda item, left his mark on a legacy item and demonstrated well-regarded global leadership, in that order. Anyone who doubts the potency of that sequence needs to check their head with a geiger counter. This was a good couple weeks for the president, […]

A couple of inter-related items on the ongoing shifts in military doctrine and theories of war managed to jolt me out of a self-imposed blogging hiatus (needed to catch up on organizing upcoming feature issues). The first thing that caught my eye was this post over at Information Dissemination on the U.S. Marine Corps’ experiment in company-size autonomous units. I’d noticed this back in December and wondered whether it might not prove an even more lasting impact of our current wars on the U.S. military than the COIN doctrine being applied to fight them. The network of autonomous small units […]

Engaging Burma is not a lost cause, according to an Asia Society task force report released (.pdf) last weekat a roll-out conference at the Asia Society headquarters in New York. The task force — co-chaired by former U.S. presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark and Henrietta Fore, former administrator of USAID — devised a three-phase plan for the United States to engage Burma. The remaining question is, Does the Burmese government want to be engaged? The plan — replete with NGO assistance, the bolstering of ethnic minorities, micro-financing and support for the agricultural sector — hinges on one key element: a […]

As the violent suppression of protests in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, makes international headlines, the rest of the country is bracing itself for further outbursts. An observer on the ground in southern Kyrgyzstan tells World Politics Review that since the escalation of protests that began yesterday, there has been an increased security presence in town centers and people have been advised to stay indoors. The last straw for already disgruntled citizens may have been when the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev increased the price of electricity, the observer tells World Politics Review. But this opposition did not grow overnight. Tensions have […]