Gabrielle Rifkind is the director of the Middle East programme of the Oxford Research Group and co-author of The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of Peacemaking (IB Tauris, 2014).
" I have lived with my partner for over forty years and as a psychotherapist I am embarrassed to say that my empathy muscle could do with a little revitalizing."
National dialogues operate outside the permanent institutions of government; moving beyond the Westminster bubble to listen to the communities who feel disconnected from government.
The question now is not only how to respond to recent conflict on the border, but to address the underlying causes that produced these disturbing events.
Britain needs a different kind of security that looks at the root causes of violence. The need for jobs mustn't be used to perpetuate the powerful lobby that is the defence industry.
Tony Blair told Chilcot Saddam Hussein was, “a man to whom a last chance to do right is just a further opportunity to do wrong. He is blind to reason.”
Decisions to go to war don’t just analyze whether we can win. That is the easy part: the superiority of the western military machine makes this an absolute.
A genuine, if brief, debate took place amongst the political classes in the UK on the dangers of intervening or not in Syria. But it seems that we live in a world of amnesiac thinking driven by fine words and high ambition rather than clear strategy.
The Ammerdown Invitation has initiated here a debate on an alternative security policy for the UK. Mediation is a key alternative to the “militarism” the signatories bemoan.
A number of parties seem to have been complicit in the failure of the politics to prevent this latest round of deadly fighting in Gaza. In such a climate, one can be motivated to damage one’s enemy rather than to protect one’s own best interest.
