Even the most zealous ideologues have been challenged approaching Damascus. Thrown from their horse, they have been left dazed and partially sighted, forced to re-examine their norms. Damascus has presented such a challenge once again in recent months. This time, it is the new norm in international relations known as R2P—the responsibility to protect—that has been temporarily unseated. It is a simple formula. This important new norm contends that it is the international community’s responsibility to protect civilians when a state fails in its responsibility to do so. R2P has made swift progress in the international community since its adoption (in a watered-down form) at the United Nations Summit in 2005, gaining acceptance at the same time as the rise …

Having toppled a dictator of thirty years in the uprisings of January and February 2011, millions of Egyptians looked ahead to a future of comprehensive change. In May 2012, they faced the disturbing prospect of choosing a new president from a list that included Mubarak’s last prime minister, and foreign minister. When the former, Ahmad Shafik, was allowed to pass through to the second electoral round, waves of nationwide protest decried his candidacy. Yesterday, to the alarm of pro-revolution political forces, the High Constitutional Court dissolved parliament, and legislative powers passed to the ruling military council. Several prominent activists have slammed the entire transitional process, and have been protesting with fellow Egyptians to boycott a poll they dismiss as illegitimate …

With the military campaign in Afghanistan in the middle of its eleventh year, NATO has firmly moved from what is idealistically desirable to what is realistically achievable in the war-torn country. Over a decade ago, NATO intervened in Afghanistan with post-Cold War ambition. But the experience in Afghanistan, where the battle with Taliban-led insurgents is far from over, has put many off protracted peacekeeping missions. The US, who went into Afghanistan with a neoconservative mission of turning a tribal system upside down, is finally settling for an imperfect yet “responsible end” to a prolonged, unpopular, costly and deadly war. At the recently-held summit in Chicago, NATO leaders announced an “irreversible” three-stage security transition plan. Under the plan, Afghan National Security Forces …

I was recently traveling in Dakar, Senegal. I was there visiting an American friend, I will call her A, who has been teaching English language at a local high school for three years. One evening we were hailing a taxi across town, accompanied by a friend of A who is also an American and a high school teacher in the city; I will call her B. My friend negotiated the price of the taxi prior to our taking a seat, as is the custom in Senegal. The taxi man insisted that the price was 2,500 CFA (500 CFA: $1US: £0.62BPS) and A insisted that we pay 2,000 CFA, the price that the Senegalese routinely pay to get across town. The …

In light of last month’s VI Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, it seems obvious and commendable that the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, would call on the leaders of the region Friday to help coordinate the fight against transnational organised crime. The threat is, he claimed, the “main challenge to security in our hemisphere.” Insulza’s call comes on the heels of the adoption in Cartagena of Mexico’s proposal to create an Inter-American Centre for Coordination against Transnational Organised Crime. It is clear that dealers in drugs, arms and human trafficking (these items increasingly the wares of the same criminal merchants) do not limit their activities to the confines of national borders.  And …

For nearly three decades, India and Pakistan have engaged in a maddening conflict over Siachen Glacier in the Himalyan peaks of the disputed Kashmir region. The “world’s highest battlefield” has claimed thousands of lives due to hostile weather conditions—frostbite, avalanches and blizzards—along with over a hundred soldiers killed in sporadic combat until 2003, when the two countries agreed to a ceasefire across the Line of Control in Kashmir. The weather’s latest victims are 139 Pakistani soldiers who were buried deep in snow after an avalanche hit their Gyari battalion headquarters on April 7. Since then, the worsening weather has prevented the rescuers to gain access even to their dead bodies. Sustaining a conflict for so long at an altitude of …

After a long and expensive trial, the Special Court for Sierra Leone will finally give its verdict on whether former Liberian president Charles Taylor is guilty or innocent of war crimes and crimes against humanity. While there is little doubt Taylor commanded militias that were responsible for some horrific acts of violence in his home country, Liberia, today’s judgment will consider the extent to which he should be held responsible for ordering and condoning various war crimes (including murder, sexual violence, and enslavement) committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Amongst Western governments and their publics, there is widespread agreement that prosecuting Taylor has been the right and proper thing to do. The West considers the Special Court of Sierra Leone as …

In today’s Libya, local is king.  Yet, if Libya is to become a functioning state governed by an elected leadership capable of empowering its citizens and providing an equitable distribution of its resource wealth, then, the interim government of the National Transitional Council (NTC) must become king. In the run-up to the June elections many militias and civil society organizations are lambasting the interim government’s mission to centralize authority rather than its lacklustre results at achieving that task. On March 5th, notables in Benghazi — Libya’s second city and capital of the Eastern region of Cyrenaica — proposed to compensate for the ineffectiveness of the central NTC authorities by asking them to relinquish certain powers to sub-state bodies such as …