The United Nations: past and present

The UN is approaching its seventieth birthday in 2015. Kofi Annan, its seventh secretary general, and the only incumbent not to have come from a national government, has written the most honest and insightful memoir of any occupant of the thirty‐eighth floor, Interventions. Despite terrible setbacks in Bosnia and Rwanda, the United Nations remains the most representative and successful international organization in history. As Mark Mazower points out in his Governing the world, an acutely penetrating history of international governance, the successes of the UN are more than the founders of the ill‐fated League of Nations could have dreamt of. Mazower's tour de force combines a history of the intellectual ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their eventual realization in the League of Nations and the UN. While his conclusions question whether faith in international institutions has been lost, the reality of universal membership of the UN and establishment of an International Criminal Court might suggest otherwise.     

联合国与丝绸之路

联合国开发计划署2006年6月1日宣布在中国设立丝绸之路投资论坛,以促进丝绸之路沿线各国的发展,并将首次会议定在丝绸之路的起点城市西安举行。联合国开发计划署推出这个论坛,得到了联合国和中国一些机构的支持。论坛的设立促进了丝绸之路沿线国家和地区的经济文化发展,为推动世界和平与发展做出了重要贡献。     

Contest and conquest: Russia and global internet governance

For more than a decade, Russia's foreign policy has sought to challenge the international consensus on a number of issues. Today, as the international internet ecosystem is becoming more volatile, Moscow is eager to shift the western narrative over the current global internet governance regime, in which the United States retains considerable leverage. In a context wherein states increasingly forge links between cyberspace and foreign policy, this article explores Russia's deepening involvement in internet governance. The disclosure by Edward Snowden of the US government's wide net of online surveillance contributed to legitimize the Russian approach to controlling online activity. While the struggle around the narrative of internet governance has been heating up since then, Russia actively seeks to coordinate internet governance and cyber security policies with like‐minded states in both regional forums and the United Nations. By introducing security concerns and advocating more hierarchy and a greater role for governments, Moscow is contributing to the politicization of global cyber issues and seeking to reshape the network in accordance with its own domestic political interests. Indeed, the Russian leadership has come to consider the foreign policy of the internet as the establishment of a new US‐led hegemonic framework that Washington would use to subvert other sovereign states with its own world views and values.     

An Acutely Embarrassing Affair: Whitehall and the Indian-South African Dispute at the United Nations (1946)

ABSTRACT

Before the Second World War it was a cardinal Commonwealth principle that intra-imperial disputes must be kept away from international fora. Yet in 1946 the not-yet-independent India complained to the United Nations about South African legislation discriminating against people of Indian origin. It did so without seeking Britain's approval, and went on to level fierce criticism at Britain's opposition to the UN General Assembly's discussion of the matter.

This article explains the circumstances which led to these events; uncovers the divergent responses of the relevant British government departments – the India Office, the Dominions Office, and the Foreign Office – and shows how they were resolved; depicts the way in which Britain's delegation to the General Assembly handled the matter; and discusses the significance and consequences of the dispute for South Africa and for Anglo-Indian relations.     

The potential and pitfalls of global environmental governance: The politics of transfrontier conservation areas in Southern Africa

This article examines the potential and problems associated with global environmental governance with particular reference to Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in Southern Africa. By taking a political ecology approach, it reflects on theories and practices of global environmental governance through an analysis of transboundary environmental management. In particular, it examines the politics of the struggle over control of and access to key natural resources and how it impacts on the implementation of transfrontier conservation. In order to do this, this article includes an analysis of the complex role of local and global NGOs, the changing role of the state in relation to international actors, the importance of community based natural resource management, the commitment to tourism to make conservation pay its way and the problems associated with illicit networks of traffickers of wildlife products, cars and people.It is important to investigate the politics of TFCAs because they are part of a wider context of increasing forms of transnational management of the environment; such transnational forms of management are often deemed to be more effective than national level management because of the transboundary nature of environmental problems. This article argues that the assumption that transnational management can be neatly implemented needs rethinking. In particular, it highlights the ways that complex networks of actors constitute a significant challenge to global environmental governance. This in turn raises more general questions about the effectiveness of other forms of global environmental governance centred on managing problems such as climate change, pollution or trafficking of endangered species and tropical hardwoods.