It is necessary to take a country-by-country approach to assess the bigger picture. To touch on a few of the significant indicators: Substantial improvements, expressed in terms of reforms in favour of democracy, good governance, civil society engagement and respect for human rights, appear to have been achieved in Tunisia, with more modest gains in […]
It is necessary to take a country-by-country approach to assess the bigger picture. To touch on a few of the significant indicators: Substantial improvements, expressed in terms of reforms in favour of democracy, good governance, civil society engagement and respect for human rights, appear to have been achieved in Tunisia, with more modest gains in […]
It’s the politics, stupid. Canada, like the US and the rest of NATO devoted troops and treasure to the dual pursuit of defeating Al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan. They spilled blood, trained armies, and funded economic activities. As there presence endured, they shifted – belatedly, haltingly – to building up the credibility and capacity of […]
Questions for Author Michelle Shephard: 1. What is the best international affairs book you have read in 2011 (Canadian or otherwise?) I really enjoyed both A History of the World Since 9/11, by Dominic Streatfeild and Peter Bergen’s The Longest War. 2. What was the biggest international event of 2011? What a year it has […]
Questions for Editor Janice Stein: 1. What is the best international affairs book you have read in 2011 (Canadian or otherwise?) I cannot answer because I am on the Lionel Gelber Prize Board. 2. What was the biggest international event of 2011? The ongoing crisis over the euro, which can tip the world into recession. […]
Questions for Author Christopher Kennedy: 1. What is the best international affairs book you have read in 2011 (Canadian or otherwise?) I doubt that I’ve read any international affairs books this year. Not that I don’t follow events through the media, but so much of my work is concerned with longer-term issues that books on […]
Questions for Author Wade Davis: 1. What is the best international affairs book you have read in 2011 (Canadian or otherwise?) Several books by Max Hastings. Within the last months I have read Winston’s War, Armageddon, Retribution, and most recently his sweeping account of the war, Inferno. 2. What was the biggest international event of […]
Questions for Author David Malone: 1. What is the best international affairs book you have read in 2011 (Canadian or otherwise?) I loved Thant Myint-U’s insightful, beautifully written Where China Meets India, about Burma’s essential but turbulent relationship, past and present, with its two great neighbours. He had earlier written a marvellous semi-autobiographical work of literature on Burma, The […]
Questions for Author Samantha Nutt: 1. What is the best international affairs book you have read in 2011 (Canadian or otherwise?) There were several great international affairs books in 2011. At the top of my list: Arguably, by the late Christopher Hitchens. It is a collection of essays, only some of which deal with international […]
Questions for Author Mark Steyn: 1. What is the best international affairs book you have read in 2011 (Canadian or otherwise?) At the risk of straining admissability requirements, I re-read over the summer The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s great novel on the Habsburg twilight in the years before the Great War. As America and much of […]
No. The terminology here is important. The Egyptian uprising early this year succeeded in the removal the president and a few of his ministers, but it was a far cry from revolution. The underlying political, economic and social order remains in place. One has only to compare the results in Egypt to the events which transformed Russia in […]
It’s not too late to save the Euro zone, but tough choices lie ahead. That’s Lagarde’s strength: she’s not an economist, she’s a good politician, and the choices ahead are as much political as economic. Of course, that wasn’t Lagarde’s argument in running: rather, she made the case that because the Euro zone is the […]
The primary element in both spectroscopes and spectrographs is a narrow slit oriented perpendicular to the direction in which the grating or prism spreads the light. As with a pinhole camera, the small aperture images the light source sharply along the spectrum’s axis, which keeps the spread of wavelengths distinct. Each image of the slit, […]