The recent debate over military action in Syria – and the upcoming Commons Defence Committee’s Inquiry on UK intervention strategy - shows how data and information in conflict is changing the imperatives of decision-making.
Senior government officials including President Obama have already become infected with this euphoria, as have top Wall Street investors - which means it will have a powerful and longlasting, though largely pernicious effect on US energy policy, industrial development, and foreign relations.
Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the start of the 1973 oil shock. Its consequences are still echoing across the world today.
The difficult choice faced by the United States and its allies in Syria is rooted in the strategic errors of the early post-9/11 years.
The Violence Law can be seen as a site-specific implementation of intensifying methods to oversee the entire population: wholesale detentions and ex post facto indictments have emerged as the preferred method of intimidating, marginalising and criminalising dissenting groups en masse.
Should Britain, the United States and others who claim to be concerned, stand by and allow reactionary forces to stage-manage a phony election, this sends yet another inconsistent and disheartening message to those struggling for peaceful democratic change in the Islamic world and beyond.
Turkey is on a journey beyond AKP patriarchy, “Aleviphobia”, and those social classes opposed to the AKP who have their own totalitarian tendencies, who call for a restoration of the first republic. We have to show that a “third way” centered on libertarian and democratic politics, is possible.
Albania has been leading the Balkan region in its management of women prisoners – a complex group to detain and rehabilitate. Now, as a new government is sworn in and politically motivated staff changes look likely, this progress – and the wellbeing of its female inmates – is at risk.
The recent elections in Zimbabwe were a flagrant fraud. But analysis must not stop short at ballot rigging. Zimbabwe’s problems are far greater. Why did many Zimbabweans vote for Mugabe?
Faced with rising violence in the run-up to the withdrawal of foreign troops, Afghan women’s rights activists fear for the future, Lynne O’Donnell reports from Kabul.
