“Terrorism” has become a formulaic term in political discourse, often deployed as a device sustaining a US informal empire. Time to unpack it—and develop a more secure multilateral order.
Humanitarian agencies have renewed support after a rare moment of unity in the UN Security Council regarding cross-border aid delivery into Syria, but face only growing challenges and ethical dilemmas navigating the country's complex conflict lines.
The latest effort by the Israel-aligned US to renegotiate the asymmetric power relationships of the Middle East has inevitably failed, with brutal violence following; it is time, as an alternative, for the EU to generalise the rule-based constraint on Israeli action it has tentatively essayed.
The UK home secretary has pushed legislation through Parliament which allows her to strip individuals of their citizenship, even if they are rendered stateless—but the case on which she drew turns out to have a Kafkaesque quality.
Drones may offer an appealing alternative to the US after Iraq and Afghanistan but they don’t provide genuine security.
Little is clear about the US renewal of drone strikes in Pakistan—except that they won’t be the last.
Too often across Europe, the rule of law is not being observed, as thousands of European Court of Human Rights judgments remain unimplemented and some governments second-guess the judiciary. Europe’s human-rights champion says democratic legitimacy depends on it.
With the larger substantive issues of ceasefires and political transition at an impasse, the ground broken over humanitarian access has suddenly become a metric for whether the first phase of Geneva II will be considered a success.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons should be a technical agency of the UN. But it has arguably become a piece in a geo-political chess game dominated by the US, invited into Syria to act in contravention of its remit.
The Iron Wall of Jabotinsky has to be torn down, and it can only be torn down through long term civil and ideological struggles against this heritage of Zionism, with the Palestinians living inside the green line playing a crucial part.
As David Miranda's recent detention illustrates, where states once introduced exceptional legislative measures in times of crisis, the law has now been rendered an instrument for a permanent state of war.
The expert responsible for chemical weapons destruction operations in Iraq from 1991-94 takes a look at the challenge in Syria. A key decision will be whether to move all of the chemical weapons to a single location for destruction or undertake their destruction at the individual sites.
