Himalayan Sub-regional Cooperation for Water Security
Issues:Climate change, Competition over resources
Trans-boundary collaboration over the issue of shared water is critical since water is scarce in most areas. Today, the Himalayan region is facing severe water stresses. To overcome the challenge, there is a need to promote Himalayan Sub-Regional cooperation to ensure water security and a climate of peace and progress. There is no alternative to cooperation in view of the retreat of glaciers, resulting decline in river flows in parts of the region and flooding in other parts, tectonic changes in the Himalayan region, threat to food security and the risk of increase in inequity. A cooperative and open approach to Himalayan rivers, starting with new fundamentals has become imperative in this regard.
In this backdrop, BIPSS hosted the Second International Workshop on “Himalayan Sub-regional Cooperation for Water Security” in Dhaka on January15-16, 2010 in collaboration with the Strategic Foresight Group, India.
Speaker presentations, participant lists and previous reports are available here.
Yemen: Latest U.S. Battle Ground
Issue:Global militarisation
Excerpt: The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counterinsurgency war which, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian apparently planned in Yemen, the alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre to a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing U.S.-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused U.S. attention on that country.
Read more »Posted on 19/01/10
The New Faces of Violence and War: Peace and Security Challenges
Issue:Marginalisation
In this recent article, Mariano Aguirre, Director of the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre in Oslo, examines the complex and unpredictable challenges to peace and security.
Excerpt: The new vision on war, low intensity armed conflicts and violence is increasingly based on the inter-relation among different factors that generate the use of force. This is not a new approach, but is is the way that has been adopted, and there are several factors that are considered direct or indirect roots of conflicts as poverty, climate change, scarce resources and lack of democracy and representation are aggravating the competition for political power, territories, natural resources and cultural hegemonies among different countries and particular communal groups.
Attach PDF:
Al-Qaida: the Yemen factor
Issue:Global militarisation
Expert: Most of the focus of the United States war on al-Qaida since 9/11 has been on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq; relatively little attention has been given to the two states on either side of the Gulf of Aden - Yemen and Somalia. Any surplus resources away from the middle east and southwest Asia have tended to be devoted to Algeria and Mali as potential sites for al-Qaida activity.
Yet, Paul Rogers points out that with Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab's attempt on 25 December 2009 to destroy a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit and his connections with Yemen, al-Qaida may simultaneously be in decline in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but growing in the Gulf of Aden.
Read more »Posted on 6/01/10
Iraq: the path of war
Issues:Competition over resources, Global militarisation
Most analysts agree that the security situation across Iraq as a whole has improved in 2008-09. The lower incidence of violence owes something to the consolidated sectarian geography of Baghdad and its environs as a result of the ferocious conflict of the mid-2000s. In any event the decline is relative rather than absolute, for Iraq continues to be a perilous place for many of its citizens.
In conjunction with the opening of the official inquiry in Britain into the circumstances of the then prime minister Tony Blair’s decision to join the United States-led military campaign against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, the persistent violence in Iraq reopens the question of the impulse of the war and whether other decisions with better outcomes could have been taken.
Originally published in openDemocracy.
Read more »Posted on 6/01/10
Copenhagen: the challenge ahead
Issue:Climate change
Copenhagen failed dismally to set firm targets either for greenhouse gas reductions and the aid offered to poorer countries to counter the impact of climate change was minimal. Scarcely anything was achieved other than most states accepting that the global temperature increase must be kept below 2ºC. In this article, Paul Rogers, looks at at what should have been the result of the climate change negotiations and why it failed, before turning his attention to where we go from here.
Photo: Julie Grath
Read more »Posted on 21/12/09
