British national interest in the Gulf: rediscovering a role?

The British government is in the process of re‐energizing its relations with the Gulf states. A new Gulf strategy involving a range of activities including more frequent elite bilateral visits and proposals sometimes touted as Britain's military ‘return to east of Suez’ are two key elements of the overarching strategy. Such polices are designed to fall in line with British national interest as identified by the government‐authored 2010 National Security Strategy (NSS), which emphasizes the importance of security, trade, and promoting and expanding British values and influence as perennial British raisons d'etat. In the short term, the Gulf initiatives reflect and compliment these core interests, partly based on Britain's historical role in the region, but mostly thanks to modern day trade interdependencies and mutually beneficial security‐based cooperation. However, there is yet to emerge a coherent understanding of Britain's longer‐term national interest in the region. Instead, government‐led, party‐political priorities, at the expense of thorough apolitical analysis of long‐term interests, appear to be unduly influential on the origins of both the Gulf proposals and the NSS conclusions themselves. Without a clear strategic, neutral grounding, both the Gulf prioritization and the NSS itself are weakened and their longevity undermined.     

The UN and the African Union in Mali and beyond: a shotgun wedding?

The United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) have collaborated in building a viable African Peace and Security Architecture and have worked together in a number of armed conflicts over the past decade. Examples include the peace operations in Burundi and Somalia, and the hybrid peace operation in Sudan's Darfur region which is perhaps the most prominent illustration of this collaboration. Although the UN Security Council authorized the intervention in Libya, which was approved by leading regional organizations (the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Gulf Cooperation Council), it was opposed initially by the AU although the three African states in the Security Council voted for it. Relations cooled as a result and have grown colder still as the UN snubbed the AU and its initial efforts to engage in post‐conflict stabilization in Mali. While the AU sought to prove itself as a capable security provider and partner on the continent with its operation AFISMA, France's Opération Serval and the UN's peace operation for Mali, MINUSMA, bypassed the African Union. This article explores the underlying fault‐lines between the two organizations by examining interactions between the UN and AU since the latter's launch in 2002, but focusing on the Mali case. The fault‐lines emerging from the analysis are different capabilities, risk‐averse vs risk‐assuming approaches to casualties, diverging geopolitics and leadership rivalry.     

International development in transition

International development is in a period of transition. While the outcome of this is still unclear, this article argues that there are at least four areas in which the project of international development is changing. First, there is a debate, especially within the World Bank, about development strategy and how we think about development, particularly in terms of the balance between states and markets. This is evident in the debate over state failure and the new structural economics. Second, there is increasing evidence of a shift in lending, away from projects of ‘small’ human development, perhaps best encapsulated by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, towards more transformative ‘big’ development projects such as infrastructure. Third, ‘non‐traditional’ aid donors and new forms of private philanthropy are playing a more significant role in development financing and this, in turn, offers developing countries a new range of choices about what kinds of development assistance they receive. Fourth, aid relations are changing as a result of the renewed agency of developing states, particularly in sub‐Saharan Africa, and shifts towards increased South–South cooperation are growing as evidenced by increased funding from regional development banks and increased trade flows. The article reviews these changes and suggests a series of questions and challenges that arise from them for analysts of international development, developing countries and traditional aid donors.     

On re‐examining western attitudes to Russia

There are several strands in western antipathy to Russia which predate the Soviet era by more than a century. Public opinion was always divided on how to respond to the Russia problem; however, neither western nor Soviet leaders sought out war. There is fresh and credible evidence that Brezhnev was a ‘dove’, who was not interested in world revolution and genuinely wanted reconciliation with the United States. The attainment of democracy requires not only an enlightened leader but an intelligent opposition. However, the crucial factor in democratic transition is the avoidance of economic collapse. Nevertheless, the consensus in both Russia and the West in the 1990s was that a laissez‐faire policy was the only viable strategy. This article suggests another strategy which might have avoided or mitigated economic collapse. The consensus in both Russia and the West in the 1990s was that nothing should be done to impede the breakup of the USSR. The example of President Kennedy in the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is an example of magnanimity and a model of constructive reconciliation. In the present crisis over Ukraine there may be no alternative to confrontation—but confrontation in itself is a totally inadequate response. Western attitudes must not become an obstacle to reconciliation. Western public opinion can play an important part in forcing the clarification of such attitudes.     

The commentariat and discourse failure: language and atrocity in Cool Britannia

Recent terrorist events in the UK, such as the security alerts at British airports in August 2006 and the London bombings of July 2005 gained extensive media and academic analysis. This study contends, however, that much of the commentary demonstrated a wide degree of failure among government agencies, academic and analytic experts and the wider media, about the nature of the threat and continues to distort comprehension of the extant danger. The principal failure, this argument maintains, was, and continues to be, one of an asymmetry of comprehension that mistakes the still relatively limited means of violent jihadist radicals with limited political ends. The misapprehension often stems from the language that surrounds the idea of 'terrorism', which increasingly restricts debate to an intellectually redundant search for the 'root causes' that give rise to the politics of com placency. In recent times this outlook has consistently underestimated the level of the threat to the security of the UK. This article argues that a more realistic appreciation of the current security condition requires abandoning the prevailing view that the domestic threat is best prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. It demands instead a total strategy to deal with a totalizing threat. The empirical evidence demonstrates the existence of a physical threat, not merely the political fear of threat. The implementation of a coherent set of social policies for confronting the threat at home recognizes that securing state borders and maintaining internal stability are the fi rst tasks of government. Fundamentally, this requires a return to an understanding of the Hobbesian conditions for sovereignty, which, despite the delusions of post-Cold War cosmopolitan multiculturalism, never went away.     

Indian foreign policy and contemporary security challenges

India is fast emerging as an important player in regional and international arenas. However, it continues to be beset by a number of security challenges, both internally and externally. On the assumption that India's foreign policy has evolved in step with its domestic politics, this article briefly surveys the evolution of Indian domestic politics and foreign policy before discussing some of the domestic and international (including regional) security challenges India faces today. The article concludes that although economic diplomacy does at present serve India well in projecting power internationally, achieving great power status in the future will rest on the resolution of key political and security challenges.