Vaughan Lowe (Oxford) and Antonios Tzanakopoulos (Glasgow): Humanitarian Intervention. John Yoo (UC-Berkley): Fixing Failed States. From Strategic Studies Quarterly, James F. Dobbins (RAND): Guidelines for Nation Builders. The international aid system has a dirty secret: Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, the nations and organizations that donate and distribute aid do not care much about democracy and they still actively support dictators. From TED, Stefan Wolff on the path to ending ethnic conflicts. From Political Theology, Mark C. Johnson on international peacemaking and the anti-war movement. Elizabeth Kier on her book In War’s Wake: International Conflict and the Fate of Liberal Democracy. An interview with Wendy Brown, author of Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Seth Kaplan on rethinking state-building in a failed state. Rape is not an inevitable consequence of war, says new UN special representative Margot Wallstrom — and there's far more UN peacekeeping troops could do to prevent it. Should we care about failed and weak states? Paul Staniland investigates. A review of New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding. Max Miller on how humanitarian aid prolongs wars. Divide and rule or the rule of the divided? The effect of national and ethnic institutions on African under-development. A panel on Rebuilding War-Torn States: The Challenge of Post-Conflict Economic Reconstruction by Graciana del Castillo. Philip Gourevitch on the moral hazards of humanitarian aid. Waging war, building states: Nikolas Gvosdev and Derek S. Reveron on seeking an elusive blend of hard and soft power. Is Google the new United Nations? A Google Maps skirmish shows increasingly how reliant we've become on corporations, even benign ones, to confer international legitimacy. No easy fix for US foreign aid: Obama's got the right idea, but it will be harder than he thinks.
