A deepening democratic deficit?

Here’s a really well written comment piece by Gary Younge. It doesn’t say much about the power of big business as the byline would suggest, but does rather convincingly argue that national politicians are fairly powerless in the face of overriding global economic conditions.

Follow me on Twitter

On Twitter I have been posting links to news stories that are an essential daily read for students of Politics that I have come across as part of my personal reading on the web.

This type of heads up on what is in the news is not a substitute for students doing their own reading, but I know that for many students it is the case that there is so much information freely available on the web that it is not always easy to discriminate between items in terms of their direct relevance to the syllabus. This is where the posts are supposed to fill the gap. Just a couple of links each day, and if students have time to read more then they can use these stories as a starting point for further browsing.

My students have already said they find it useful, and I hope more can.

Follow me on @bgsmacca

Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations - Quiz

Many thanks to Andy Lawrence for producing this revision quiz on Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations:
Launch quiz on Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations

Getting students to introduce Global Issues (4D) to themselves

It is always good to start a new module with an overview of topics that are going to be studied. Even better to get students to introduce themselves to the subject matter and work out what key issues they’ll be tackling. Using a simple map of Afghanistan and Pakistan (along with some carefully placed questions) allowed a group to essentially extract from their own knowledge the nature of the course.

The conversation started with the war (‘New wars’, insurgency, the clash of cultures and the role of religion, differing views of human rights), navigated its way to terrorism (both in the region and domestically), managed to venture into WMDs (the starting point being the situation in Pakistan) and looked at possible solutions to the problem (poverty & development, nation building, international financial mechanisms etc). We didn’t quite manage to work environmental issues into the mix but three out of four wasn’t bad.

Iran , UN and multi-polarity

If World Order is now settling into Multi-polarity, as some commentators are predicting, then are we facing a period of brinksmanship of the worst realist kind; for as Professor Waltz claims, “multi-polarity creates instability between states”. And no longer do states simply seek power through military superiority, the new name of the game is survival, in a world rapidly becoming conscious of the importance of scarce resources, such as water, grain, arable land, minerals as well as energy products.

China unmoved on Iran sanctions

Political scientists use a number of tools to ascertain key issues as well as make predictions about developments on the world stage. In the light of China’s reluctance to pursue sanctions against Iran for its nuclear development program, we learn a great deal about the World Order.

More conflict in the pipeline?

According to a feature in the T2 section of today’s Times, key to understanding the conflict in the caucuses is the existence of 155 miles of pipeline snaking through Georgia.  The authors argue that the conflict between Russia and its neighbour is not solely due to oil (true also of America’s invasion or Iraq, remember), but the geo-political relationships in the region are heavily influenced by black gold

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