Harvard International Review articles from March 2007

Harvard International Review archives from March 2007

The wrong problem.(CORRESPONDENCE)
March 22, 2007... A mantra of the Irish political leader, John Hume, during Northern Ireland's troubles was that the first step needed was for the parties to agree on the nature of the problem. This came to mind when I was reading Professor Reynolds's erudite...

The need to protect.(CORRESPONDENCE)
March 22, 2007... In a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1968, Arthur Leff, a Yale law professor, condemned what he saw as a feeble international response to horrific events during the Nigerian Civil War. "Forget all the blather about international...

Righting wrongs: affirmative action in South Africa.(AFRICA)
March 22, 2007... South Africa has in recent years passed legislation instituting the world's most rigorous form of affirmative action. The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Bill strives for the "effective participation of black people in the economy" in...

A worthy ally? Reconsidering US-Libyan relations.(AFRICA)
March 22, 2007... In June 2006, the United States restored full diplomatic relations with Libya and removed it from the State Department's list of terrorism sponsors, ending decades of tense relations and US-imposed sanctions. Analysts hail Libya's stunning...

Over the hill: Canada's demographic challenge.(AMERICAS)
March 22, 2007... Canada's population is aging. Demographic findings released by Statistics Canada project the 65 years and older population to rise from 3.92 million in 2001 to roughly 9.2 million people by 2041, or approximately one in four Canadians. The...

The New Right: political winds in South Korea.(ASIA PACIFIC)
March 22, 2007... Progressive politicians have dominated South Korean politics for the past half decade. This environment has fostered a more participatory democracy, manifested by the strengthened voice of non-governmental organizations. However, the current...

A rivalry revived: confrontation in the Caucasus.(EUROPE)
March 22, 2007... Russian president Vladimir Putin recently announced his country's interest in normalizing relations with former satellite state Georgia. That statement, coupled with the restoration of Russia's ambassador to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi,...

Neglect's costs: Turkish integration in Germany.(EUROPE)
March 22, 2007... The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 exacerbated a labor shortage in West Germany. In response, the Federal Republic decided to include Turkey in its foreign worker recruitment program. In the following years, Turks were allowed into...

Dwindling oasis: Egypt's water politics.(MIDDLE EAST)
March 22, 2007... There isn't much to drink in the desert. Military conflict over water in the Middle East has long been the rule rather than the exception, and control of the resource was a major flashpoint during the Israeli-Arab wars of the late 1960s and...

Rebuilding a nation: myths, realities, and solutions in Iraq.(PERSPECTIVES)
March 22, 2007... A failure to understand Iraq's history risks catastrophic blundering, likely to result in an exponential rise in the region's entropy, as US policymakers and Iraqis ponder how to deal with the violence which has engulfed Baghdad. Several...

The politics of a health crisis: why AIDS is not threatening African governance.(PERSPECTIVES)
March 22, 2007... Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic has engendered many nasty surprises. In the 15 years after the continent's first AIDS cases were reported on the shores of Lake Victoria in the early 1980s, the virus spread further and faster than any epidemiologist...

Europe as a global player: a parliamentary perspective.(PERSPECTIVES)
March 22, 2007... In the 28 years since the European Parliament was first elected, it has developed from a largely advisory forum into a full-fledged branch of Europe's legislature. Since the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the...

Falling behind HIV: The need for prevention.(WORLD IN REVIEW)
March 22, 2007... Since scientists isolated the first known case of AIDS in 1959, the highly resistant HIV has mutated, showing great resilience in the face of various treatments. In 2005 alone, 38.6 million cases of HIV infection were reported worldwide, up...

Spinning the color wheel: constitutional reform in the Ukraine.(WORLD IN REVIEW)
March 22, 2007... Over the last two years, Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe, has fallen off the radar of international news and events. For most of its post-Soviet history, Ukraine struggled to adapt to world markets while its nascent democracy...

Writing the rules: the need for standardized regulation of Islamic finance.(WORLD IN REVIEW)
March 22, 2007... Islamic finance has been one of the fastest-growing areas of the global financial services industry over the last decade. This growth, estimated at 15 percent annually over the last three years, has been primarily driven by vast inflows of...

Balance of power revisited: predicting the next world order.(who will rise? A TILTED BALANCE)
March 22, 2007... On November 9,1989 the government of East Berlin announced that it would begin dismantling the Berlin Wall, which for 28 years had stood as a concrete symbol of the global divide between Eastern and Western blocs. Two years later, the Soviet...

Unipolar stability: the rules of power analysis.(who will rise? A TILTED BALANCE)
March 22, 2007... The potential for the rise of a multipolar world order certainly seems far more plausible now than it did several years ago. In 2003, pundits considered the term "unipolar" to be too modest; only "empire" could capture the extraordinary...

Precipitate decline: the advent of multipolarity.(who will rise? A TILTED BALANCE)
March 22, 2007... As recently as 2003, it was considered absurd to talk of the decline of the United States. Now, however, such a belief has become common currency among theorists, policymakers, and the media. What significantly raised the awareness of this...

China's rise: an unlikely pillar of US hegemony.(who will rise? A TILTED BALANCE)
March 22, 2007... The rise of China is perhaps one of the most discussed topics in current scholarship on international politics. In many ways, it is actually an over-analyzed concept. Within Chinese political dialogue, China's return to eminence is often...

Dark power: globalization, inequality, and conflict.
March 22, 2007... The question of whether another state would rise to challenge US hegemony became relevant in the 1990s after the implosion of the Soviet Union left the United States with seemingly unprecedented might. It became even more pressing after the...

Terrorist rivals: beyond the state-centric model.(United States defense spending trends)
March 22, 2007... By any standard measure, the United States is currently the most powerful country in the history of the world. Its defense budget of US$440 billion in 2007 (US$560 billion if one includes the budgets for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) is...

Searching for a solution: Israel in a time of terror.(AN INTERVIEW WITH c)(Interview)
March 22, 2007... ALAN DERSHOWITZ is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Imagine a Middle East with a HAMAS-led Palestinian government, a Hezbollah-led Lebanese government, and a pro-Iranian government in...

Rebuilding justice: Douglas Rutzen reviews Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... In Plato's Apology, Chaerephon approached the Oracle at Delphi and asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Pythian priestess replied that there was no one wiser. Socrates was perplexed. He had faith in the Oracle, yet he knew that he...

Proclaiming sovereignty; Glenda Sluga reviews The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... The most recent states to emerge on the world scene appeared just over a decade ago. Almost all of them, over 30 in total, were the practical and political consequences of the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union and...

A new climate treaty: US leadership after Kyoto.(ENDPAPER)
March 22, 2007... For years, despite a steady accumulation of science showing the clear and present dangers of global climate change, efforts toward an effective international response have been at a virtual standstill. The principal reason is that the United...