The foreign policy world was abuzz this morning with the news that Antonio Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter over the Israel-Hamas conflict. This allows the Secretary General to bring an issue before the Security Council, and call on them to act. Many are...
Forced migration--the movement of people for reasons beyond their control--has become a global crisis. According to both the UNHCR and the Norwegian Refugee Council, over 100 million people were...
Earlier this week, a boat carrying migrants fleeing Afghanistan sank in the English Channel, killing six. Earlier this month, 41 died after a ship sailing from Tunisia sank near Italy. There are...
World Refugee Day was last week (June 20). Ideally I would have written this then, but I haven't been as good on real-time commenting since Twitter fell apart. I still found it important to say...
Guest post by Tiffany S. Chu, Alex Braithwaite, Faten Ghosn, and Justin Curtis Plans to fund a border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border are troubling D.C. politics. During his campaign for the presidency, candidate Trump promised a wall would be built to reduce security issues he associated with existing border policy. In the longest government shutdown in history, Democrats in Congress refused President Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in funding for such a wall. While the government eventually reopened, ongoing negotiations in Congress to reach a border security deal ahead of another shutdown...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Dr Cynthia Banham, a University of Queensland Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Political Science and International Studies. She is also a Visitor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. Her forthcoming book, Liberal Democracies and the Torture of Their Citizens, will be published by Hart Publishing in 2017. She can be reached via e-mail and Twitter. Cynthia would like to thank Professor Susan Sell for her comments on an earlier version of this...
In early September, the circulation of the now iconic picture of Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian Kurdish boy who drowned along with his mother and brother in the attempt to cross the Aegean Sea, prompted me to write a post reflecting on what 'we' as academics might do. I argued that we could, possibly, use "our knowledge of global affairs to connect the dots and lay bare how Alan's story" is emblematic of so many themes we touch upon in our research - and indeed, the moment created by the (ethically difficult) circulation of the picture became an opening to provide depth and nuance for those...
* Please note: I absolutely oppose publishing the image of Aylan Kardi on this website* Since my name is mentioned- and our short twitter exchange highlighted in Annick's previous post as potentially the inspiration point for her piece- I feel I need say something. First, I'll acknowledge that the image we are debating hit me somewhere deep because the boy is the same size and age as my son. Those points of connection made me look at the image differently and that difference in how I saw the image made me feel embarrassed, upset, and unsure what it meant about how I saw the whole 'package'...
Yesterday the picture of little Alan (previously identified as Aylan), lying dead in the sand on the shores of the Mediterranean, circled the world. It provoked strong reactions from those who 'witnessed' his death in this manner and, not unlike the debates following some of the images shared after 9/11 (I wrote about that then), people questioned the ethics of sharing the images particularly without warning (see replies by some who shared here, here & here and note that his father wants the image to be shared if it can provoke action). Indeed, it was this tweet from fellow Duck Megan...
We are witnessing the horror of war. We see it every day, with fresh pictures of refugees risking their lives on the sea, rather than risking death by shrapnel, bombs, assassination or enslavement. For the past four years, over 11 million Syrians have left their homes; 4 million of them have left Syria altogether. Each day thousands attempt to get to a safer place, a better life for themselves and their children. Each day, the politics of resettlement and the fear of terrorism play their part. The last major resettlement campaign in the US came after the Vietnam War. Over a 20-year period 2...
Samer Abdelnour and Akbar Saeed have published a terrific article in International Political Sociology. "Technologizing Humanitarian Space: Darfur Advocacy and the Rape-Stove Panacea" critically traces the emergence of fuel-efficient cook-stoves as a global "solution" to sexual violence in refugee camps. Here's the abstract: We examine how an unassuming domestic technology—the fuel-efficient stove—came to be construed as an effective tool for reducing sexual violence globally. Highlighting the process of problematization, the linking of problems with actionable solutions, we show how...