Abstract

The opening of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China was perhaps one of the top three most important moments in Cold War history. Ranking behind perhaps only the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of relations between the two massive countries redefined global politics with a relationship that lasts to this day. This process began with “ping-pong diplomacy,” when in 1971 Chinese ping-pong world champion Zhuang Zedong handed US…

Sharing a link to my storify-ed livetweets from last night's panel discussion on foreign policy and humanitarian aid efforts in Uganda and the Congo in response to the international media attention garnered by Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 campaign. Panelists included Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo, Milton Allimadi of …

Priority Deadline: April 15, 2012 (see below for details)

Atlas Corps is an overseas fellowship for the world's best nonprofit leaders. Our mission is to address critical social issues by developing leaders, strengthening organizations, and promoting innovation through an overseas fellowship of skilled nonprofit professionals.

The Atlas Corps Fellowship is a 12-18 month,…

• The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a new report discussing the threat of the terrorist group Lashkare-Taiba (LeT) in South Asia. The report suggests that the group is the second most dangerous terrorist group in the region, after al-Qaeda.
• The United States named…

• Two NATO soldiers were reportedly shot dead in southern Afghanistan by two Afghans, including a man believed to be a soldier on Thursday. On Friday, the country’s top religious council…

As a professional mediator, I am always encouraged by the use of mediation to resolve international conflicts. However, in the case of Syria, I have little confidence that mediation will bring peace to the conflict. Very few of the essential elements for successful mediation are present in this conflict.

The first consideration in convening any mediation is deciding who the parties at the table will be. In this case, the current Syrian government will certainly be a party. However,…

• US Secretary of State Clinton announced she had a “constructive discussion” of common concerns with her counterpart in Pakistan on Thursday; new details about American drone strikes were revealed by Reuters; Pakistani jets…

• President Karzai of Afghanistan confronted the Pakistani leadership on Thursday during a visit to Islamabad, accusing Pakistani officials of harbouring the Taliban; he also was quoted as saying there were secret contacts between the US, Afghan governments and the Taliban, and that the…

• A criminal court on the island nation of the Maldives issued an arrest warrant for the first democratically-elected President, Mohammed Nasheed, who awaited arrest in his home on Thursday, following last week’s alleged coup attempt. The ousted President…

• Officials in China clamed separatist plots to attack police and public buildings for clashes that recently led to Tibetan deaths on Wednesday; while residents of a small southern village held a symbolic election that…

Weh Yeoh of whydev.org argues that everything that we do in international development is about selling a message. But how do we convince people when a message goes against the grain of what they already believe?

Read on at: http://www.how-matters.org/2012/02/07/change-the-messenger/…

Here at the United States Institute of Peace's Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, we are excited to share with you about two upcoming courses on nuclear non-proliferation, taught by Bruce MacDonald and Mike Lekson at USIP's state-of-the-art facilities:  

(1)  …

New on TFF's new blog...

I'm pleased to alert you to a new comment on what increasingly looks to me as a build-up to yet another terrible unnecessary war. I argue that the Iran issue is not about nuclear weapons, that is only stage-setting. There is a larger drama in the theatre that is about to take fire - and it is the giant global change of forces and the…

• Human Rights Watch released a report accusing Myanmar/Burma and its army of continuing a “systematic repression” of citizens, including the use of anti-personnel landmines, child soldiers, forced labour, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and the use of human shields, despite the government’s promise of reform and ceasefire agreements with some ethnic armed…

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28254

The Globalization of War

The "Military Roadmap" to World War III



Michel Chossudovsky and Finian Cunningham (Editors)





December…

• Relatives of inmates on a hunger strike in Kyrgyzstanpicketed a pretrial detention centre on Wednesday to demand their relatives’ demands be met. The protesters are calling upon reviews for the inmates’ cases, who they claim have been sentenced for crimes they didn’t commit. On Tuesday, the Kyrgyz Parliament…

Most media focus on the nervous reactions, that this event may trigger instability and perhaps foreign-directed "provocations" as ambassador Donald Gregg is saying here. Well, it's hard to know.

But while there could be a kind of successor problem or even a military takeover, one could also see Kim Jong-il's death as an opportunity for improving relations both regonally and with the West.

Statements…

• A US citizen was jailed by authorities in Thailand for translating excerpts of a locally banned biography of the King and posting them online. On Friday, the former PM was being questioned by police in connection with a deadly military crackdown on the “Red Shirt” mass opposition protests that…

As a professional peacemaker, I tend to look at conflicts from the perspective of the people instead of politics. In the process of mediating thousands of conflicts, large and small, I find that conflict dynamics tend to fall into predictable patterns. This is especially true in family business conflicts. The same themes arise over and over again such that the conflict dynamics are predictable and systematic.

 While reading about the Syrian uprising some months ago, I read a brief…