The more nuclear reactors there are, the higher the risk. This is the logical conclusion made by Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria. ‘As more countries build more nuclear reactors, the risk of nuclear incidents will probably grow,’ he says. And so accidents cannot be excluded. Does this mean the world is on the brink of a nuclear renaissance?   read more >>

The usually serene world of peace researchers is currently being rocked by a veritable war about who can count the best, and who is counting what. The row is not about something trivial, but about war victims.   read more >>

Described as a ‘pocket-sized medium power’, the Netherlands has always struggled with its size. It has never felt satisfied, like a teenager in front of a mirror. Within NATO, the Netherlands has for years wanted to be the biggest of the small. When the large member states had finished talking, often there would be time for just one last presentation by the largest of the little ones. With the expansion of NATO, the eastern European members refused to see why the Netherlands should have that honour. Within the European Union the same picture emerged. Under the weighted voting system of the Treaty of Nice, the Netherlands fought hard to get the 13 votes needed to participate in European decision making – just one more than Belgium. There had to be a difference!   read more >>

‘No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other’. — US President Barack Obama, from his address to the Muslim world, Cairo, Egypt, 4 June 2009.   read more >>

In 2008, the South Korean electronics company Daewoo agreed to lease 1.3 million hectares of land in Madagascar. Daewoo pays no rent for the land and intends to use it for producing maize and palm oil – not to satisfy the hunger and needs of the local people, but to ship the harvest to South Korea. The Financial Times called it ‘food colonialism’.   read more >>

Three months ago, the term ‘system crisis’ was only heard in think tanks and sleepy research institutes. Who else worried about it? Now it is competing with ‘meltdown’ to become the most-used term in newspapers and on the television and radio.   read more >>

Thomas P.M. Barnett has given well over a thousand presentations worldwide. Barrett is a well known defence expert whose career trajectory has run from Harvard University to the US Naval War College, and from being just another Soviet Union specialist to the general strategic futures explorer in the Bush Administration. Of late, he has been a hard-hitting but influential speaker at conferences organized by the government and NGOs in the Netherlands – a country that has just started to reflect on its own ‘strategic futures’ for the armed forces.   read more >>

Collecting data on conflict resolution trends began in the 1960s with the early empirical research by the Correlates of War Project. 1 However, little international follow up on the study was done until the surprisingly optimistic findings of the Human Security Report appeared in 2005. 2 The study reported a decline in armed conflict and war fatalities, and its findings increased interest in conflict resolution research.   read more >>

It is a well known anecdote that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was inaugurated back in 1949 with a small ceremony in the Department of State, during which the house orchestra played George Gershwin’s I Got Plenty of Nothing. Champagne glasses were raised and diplomats congratulated each other with promises, not guarantees.   read more >>

As instruments of peacemaking, global institutions like the United Nations are not really popular. In the stiff ‘new-speak’ of the modern policy sciences we should evaluate these institutions in terms of their accountability, policy targets accomplished, customer orientation, governance-to-cost ratio and policy efficiency. This is unjustified.   read more >>

Coalitions of the willing have been accused of undermining multilateralism. But if they work from the bottom up, they can actually strengthen global governance. Witness the efforts to ban landmines and, most recently, cluster munitions.   read more >>