Status Updates From Global Politics (Palgrave F...

There are no friends at cards or world politics.
~Finley Peter Dunne

International Law

‘Whenever law ends, tyranny begins.’
~JOHN LOCKE, Second Treatise on Government (1690)

International law governs states and other international actors, although it is widely considered to be ‘soft’ law, because it cannot, in most circumstances, be enforced.

Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention

‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and
rights.’
~ UN Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, Article 1

Human rights are supposedly universal, fundamental, indivisible, and absolute.

Distinctions are nevertheless drawn between civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights and solidarity rights.

Terrorism

‘Fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent.’
~ FRANZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Terrorism, broadly, refers to attempts to further political ends by using violence to create a climate of fear, apprehension, and uncertainty.

Effective solutions to terrorism have usually involved encouraging terrorists to abandon violence by drawing them into a process of negotiation and diplomacy.

‘The human race cannot co-exist with nuclear weapons.’
~ ICCHO ITOH, Mayor of Nagasaki, 1995–2007

The idea of a nuclear-free world has been advanced by both peace activists and, more recently, senior politicians in the USA and Russia.

‘Identity is the theft of the self.’
~ Estee Martin

˝There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women, and their families.’
~ Margaret Thatcher, interview, 1987