Before the uprising, Erdoğan and Davutoğlu tried to turn Damascus and Aleppo into safe market havens. Perhaps Turkey still expects eventually to have the lion's share in a future reconstructed Syria, but the ruling AKP party may pay a high price for its regional policies.

The only Arab country where protests started from rural areas might find itself facing an internationally funded reconstruction which will award money to urban centres, thus abandoning the very roots of the current crisis. The only solution is to build economic awareness. Starting from now.

Europeans both love and hate globalisation. They benefit from mobility across cosmopolitan Europe and there can be no return to the sovereign nation-state. But they want to limit their liabilities both to other EU countries and the global economy.

While North Korea's nuclear threats towards the US remain in the realm of the absurd, the government's latest denunciation of the armistice agreement dangerously raises tensions between an inexperienced leader in Pyongyang and an untested president in Seoul.

The Syrian social movement has to be conscious of the necessity of establishing a just economy. Strong checks need to be built against the post-war government so that all Syrians understand the conditions of aid and consequences of reconstruction plans on their lives and the lives of their children.

EU accession in 2004 did little if anything to make runaway bankers accountable; on the contrary, the so-called institutional ‘independence’ of the Central Bank making the Governor accountable to the ECB rather than having any democratic accountability to the people who would be immediately affected, made the bankers more unaccountable.

Choosing a new path for development based upon self-reflection only happens rarely in history. This would be impossible without a fundamental shift in the self-perception of the vast majority of Europeans, including the political and business elite, national political classes, intellectuals and academics, churches and religious communities.

Many of the problems that afflict Iraqis today are rooted in the rushed and undemocratic constitution of 2005, says Zaid Al-Ali.