Global trends &amp

From Grenzach-Wyhlen, Germany The probability of a devastating Third World War is not zero, but very far away from 100%. Let us explore why. The worst case scenario is a world war between the West–NATO, USA, EU with Japan-Taiwan-S. Korea–on the one hand, and the East—SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), Russia, China, Central Asia, with the observers India, Pakistan, Iran. With 4 vs 4 nuclear powers, and West vs Islam as a major theme. In the center is the explosive mix of a divided territory, and a divided capital, by a wall. We have been there before: the Cold War, Atlantic and Pacific theaters; 3 vs 2 nuclear powers, and West vs Communism as major theme. In the center was the explosive mix of a divided Germany, and a divided capital, by a wall; and a divided Korea, by a zone. And yet no direct, hot war, except by proxies; Korea,...

Keynote Speech at the UN Human Rights Council SOCIAL FORUM  Your Excellencies! The title for this Sixth Social Forum – in the context of the 10 Articles of the UN Declaration on the Right to Development of 4 December 1986 – is very well chosen. The focus is on people-centered development – as opposed to system – centered economic growth. And on globalization, a challenging process involving all states and regions, nations and civilizations, humans and nature – as opposed to a globalized market with only three free flows, of capital, goods and services, not labor; increasing the global economic gap. And this in the context of rampant poverty, widening domestic inequalities, economic crises due to the disconnect between real and finance economies and greedy speculation, rising unemployment and popular unrest. Yesterday’s map dividing the world in developed and developing countries makes little sense when many of the developed are...

During the Cold War the main geopolitical optic relied upon by policymakers and diplomats was associated with a bipolar structure of hard power. There were supposedly two superpowers with overwhelming military capabilities compared to all other sovereign states, and each controlled an alliance of subordinate states that staked their survival on global crisis management and territorial containment skills of either the United States or the Soviet Union. This framework was an extreme version of the balance of power system that had sustained global order in the West with mixed results during prior centuries. The Cold War nuclear version of the balance of power was frighteningly vulnerable to accident or miscalculation creating a lingering illusion that the current possession of nuclear weaponry on the part of nine sovereign states is a tolerable and stable situation in global affairs.

Chaiwat Satha-Anand, TFF Associate Chairperson, Strategic Nonviolence Commisssion, Thailand Research Fund Senior Research Fellow, TODA Institute of Global Peace and Policy Research On August 6, 2012, the neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page walked into the gurudwara (Sikh temple) of Wisconsin in Oak Creek and murdered 6 people including the temple president. He was killed by the police in the incident. While the Sikhs in the US had suffered from discrimination since they started coming to the United States in the early 20th century: they were driven out of Bellingham, Washington, in 1907; and out of St. John, Oregon in 1910, this most recent Oak Creek killing sparked global outcries from Washington DC to New Delhi. In India, members of Sikh communities staged protest demonstrations in several cities including New Delhi and Jammu, Kashmir. There are many ways to understand this abominable incident.

How do we come to grips, intellectually, with today’s world? Some time ago the geopolitical map was based on the direct East-West conflict, the two superpowers USA/USSR with alliances, and the neutral-nonaligned treated as a residual category. The world was Bipolar. The implosion of the USSR made it Unipolar, “the only surviving superpower”, 2-1 = 1. Or so we were told. Today we have four huge states: the three largest in population, China-India-USA, and the largest in area, Russia. And the EU, a region with five middle-range states: UK-France-Germany-Italy-Spain. But there is one more pole on the geopolitical map: Islam.

From Jondal, Norway Writes Eduardo Porter on The New York Times: “Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Libor scandal is how familiar it seems. Sure, for some of the world’s leading banks to try to manipulate one of the most important interest rates in contemporary finance is clearly egregious. But is that worse than packaging billions of dollars worth of dubious mortgages into a bond and having it stamped with a Triple-A rating to sell to some dupe down the road while betting against it? Or how about forging documents on an industrial scale to foreclose fraudulently on countless homeowners?” A useful summary of the situation as of today. But, a summary of what? What is this? We have been through many answers starting with credit squeeze, then a real estate bubble that burst, toxic assets, credit swaps, hedge funds, derivatives – bets with the money of other people,...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> The current belief of the government of Barack Obama is that there are two major fault lines in the world – one in the Middle East and one in the so-called “failing states”. “From Africa to Central Asia to the Pacific rim nearly 60 countries stand on the brink of conflict or collapse. These failed states are the perfect incubators for extremism and terror”, President Obama has said. But is this true? The evidence suggests it manifestly is not as a general case although obviously Al Qaeda’s operations in deeply troubled Afghanistan and Pakistan (which some say is heading towards becoming a failed state) suggest that there has been some truth in the assertion.

The UN Alliance of Civilization (AOC) was initiated by Kofi Annan in 2005 while he was Secretary General of the UN with the joint sponsorship of Turkey and Spain, with its principal center of operations in Istanbul. It was formed under the dark skies that existed after the 9/11 attacks, and seeks to provide an alternative narrative to that of inter-civilizational war, that starkly negative scenario of Islam versus the West associated with the inflammatory views of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington that continues to provide fuel for Islamophobia that burns ever more brightly in Europe and North America. It was several years since I had heard as many references to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis as I did during the discussions and presentations at the Istanbul Forum, which was opened by speeches made by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and Ban Ki Moon, the current UN...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Last week as we watched Mitt Romney win the right to challenge Barack Obama in November’s general election the last thing that most people were thinking about were sea and oceans. Yet the last Republican president, George W. Bush, at this point in the electoral cycle announced that, if elected, he would move to ratify the UN’s Law of the Sea. He never did. But also last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flanked by the senior brass from the military announced that this Administration was immediately going to push Congress to vote for the long delayed ratification of the treaty. All the road blocks of the last thirty years since President Reagan decided to torpedo the treaty have been removed and Congress is poised to give the White House the green light on ratification.

We are facing six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities. Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation. Are we able?

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> We all know the clichés: Is the glass half full or half empty? Is the light in the tunnel the train coming towards you? But this time the new World Bank figures for the decrease in Third World poverty are absolutely clear. The glass is filling up. The train is not going to crash into us. The doomsayers from Malthus in 1798 to Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” to the Club of Rome to some of the activists at World Trade meetings and to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation which in a quite recent mistake it now admits to, reported that the number of hungry people soared from 875 million in 2005 to one billion in 2009, have been proved to be wrong.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Forgive my cynicism about climate change. Thirty years ago I wrote a column for the Washington Post for which I had interviewed four of the world’s top climatologists. They all told me the problem was that the climate was cooling and that this would have devastating effects on agriculture and food supplies. When scientists a decade later turned around I wondered how it could be that for measuring things that changed only over ten thousands of years opinion could change so fast.