Diplomacy & Crisis News

Violence at the hands of the Basque separatist organization ETA was for many years an anomalous feature of Spain’s transition to democracy. This report, which draws on the author’s book Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2014), explains why this was the case, examines both the factors that contributed to ETA’s October 2011 announcement of an end to violence and the obstacles encountered in moving forward from that announcement to disarmament and dissolution, and extracts lessons relevant for other contexts.

(Own report) - Today, Thursday, the first group of Bundeswehr soldiers will be leaving to go to war against the "Islamic State" (IS or Daesh). Participation in this war, which, according to government advisors will promote Germany to a "policy-shaping power in the Middle East," will assure Berlin reinforced integration into the most important command headquarters of the western war coalition against the IS/Daesh. It will also provide the German government more influence in the international power struggle over the reorganization of the Middle East. The establishment of an international protectorate is one of the issues. The first negotiations between the government of President Bashar al Assad, the Syrian opposition, and insurgent militias are due to begin at the beginning of January. Currently, opponents of the Syrian government and insurgent militias are in Riyadh to prepare for these negotiations, with the German government's approbation. Even though jihadist holy warriors are taking part in the Riyadh talks of the opposition, the northern Syrian Kurdish forces, which play a central role in the war against the IS/Daesh were among those not invited by the Saudi leadership.

Lawmakers took aim at the Obama administration Wednesday for failing to respond more aggressively to reports that Iran launched a second medium-range ballistic missile last month -- a potential violation of United Nations resolutions.

On a December evening in 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was beaten and brutally raped by five men and a youth on board an off-duty bus in the Indian capital, New Delhi. The injuries she sustained were so severe that she succumbed to them 13 days later, setting off protests in India and around the world for ending the scourge of violence against women.

To mark International Anti-Corruption Day the United Nations is calling for people across the globe to join a worldwide campaign to raise awareness about what Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called a “corrosive” scourge, and encouraging people from all walks of life to take action against this crime.

Croatia's president barely seemed to notice that her honoree's pants fell down during a photo-op.

"The EU-China relationship is perennially less than the sum of its parts at the topmost political level."

Donald Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric has his opponents likening him to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Such comparisons may be misplaced.

Even during the darkest days of the Cold War, we didn’t act like this.

The United Nations Security Council today adopted a historic resolution on youth, peace and security that urges greater representation by young men and women in the prevention and resolution of conflict amid “the rise of radicalization to violence and violent extremism amongst youth, which can be conducive to terrorism.”

Defense Secretary Ash Carter turns the tables on Sen. John McCain.

A UN report finds that torture remains "deeply entrenched" in China's criminal justice system.

The brave women spearheading female suffrage in the kingdom are worried that the forthcoming vote might not be the revolution they had hoped for.

The director of the FBI says the San Bernardino shooters were radicalized before they met.

Despite a significant reduction in hostilities in eastern Ukraine in the last few months in a conflict that has already left over 9,000 people dead and nearly 21,000 injured, serious human rights concerns persist, including killings, torture and impunity, the United Nations reported today.

The world is making “significant progress” toward malaria elimination with prevention and treatment efforts saving more than 660 million lives and $900 million in case management costs since 2001, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported.

"The world has somehow shifted," wrote one of the hundred-plus surveyed by FP.

In their 2003 article “Where Do the Peacekeepers Go?”, Michael Gilligan and Stephen John Stedman observed that the literature on the determinants of peacekeeping suffered from several methodological problems. The most prominent of these was “a tendency to select cases on the basis of the dependent variable and, by doing so, to restrict the sample to peacekeeping operations that the UN has chosen to undertake”. This led characteristics that these cases had in common to be used as the basis for understanding UN intervention, while ignoring the cases of civil wars or interstate aggression in which UN peacekeepers had not been present. The result was analysis that could not fully address the factors responsible for the decision to intervene.

As details emerge, the key question will be how did the attackers breach the airport’s security?