Division International Studies

Our colleague Dr. David Kiwuwa reflecting on this week’s events.

http://rt.com/news/gaddafi-captured-sirte-wounded-289/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/opinion/gilad-shalits-release.html

Two important events that have significant ramification happened last week. The two happening almost simultaneously in a volatile region of North Africa and the Middle East. On one hand was the release from captivity (since 2006) of a long held Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by a militant Palestinian group Hamas through a ‘peaceful’ trade-off or prisoner swap. On the other, the violent ‘conclusion’ of the Libyan conflict with the summary justice by execution of the eccentric Colonel Muamar Gadhafi, the former leader of Libya. These two events can be situated within the broader context of conflict resolution.

The Colonel had ruled Libya with an iron fist for 42 years and the Arab spring attempt to unclench this fist was meant by an equal determination to fasten his grip characterised by a brutal repression of the uprising. Unfortunately for the Arab strong man, the world has changed since 1969 when he took power and now democratic norms and values and what has become known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) have become largely accepted global doctrines. Why this is important is three-fold. Continue reading →

Only if you’re South Korean I am afraid.  Sorry.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427,00.html

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

South Korea’s hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. “One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable,” President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

The Red Cross reported this week that the number of fat people has over taken the number of hungry people:

“In statistics used to underline the unequal access to food, the IFRC stressed there were 1.5 billion people suffering obesity worldwide last year, while 925 million were undernourished.”

1.5 billion people are obese? It sure looks like it in places like Australia and America. Now there are problems with the definition of obesity but there is no denying that the world is getting better fed. It is one of the big changes in my life time – when I was a teenager famine was an ever-present reality in the Third World. Now we should worry about Africans with diabetes and heart disease? Well maybe not yet.

Is this good news? I think so. The Red Cross does not.

“If the free interplay of market forces has produced an outcome where 15 percent of humanity are hungry while 20 percent are overweight, something has gone wrong somewhere,” secretary general Bekele Geleta said in a statement.”

I know what he means, but I am not sure that a system that means one in five of the world’s population is obese is all that bad. It is better than the alternative. Or to put it another way, the American political comedian said, and I am paraphrasing (which I am allowed to do because I have cited him – see no plagiarism), mankind has moved forward from saying “Are we going to be lunch?” to “Is there going to be lunch?” to “Where are we going to eat for lunch?” Everyone in UNNC simply assumes there will be plenty for lunch if they want. That is not true for all people in China, but I doubt any of us even think about it for two seconds.

What is interesting is what the Red Cross does not blame. Something else happened this week”

“It turns out that a lot of corn is used to make the biofuel. in 2010, for the first time, farmers actually used more corn for ethanol than they did for animal feed. The difference was small (5 billion bushels for feed, 5.05 billion for ethanol) but the implications may be big. More corn is now being feed to our cars than to our animals.”

By corn, the article means sweet corn or maize. Which the West usually uses to feed animals or to make sweeteners. Now most of it goes to making ethanol for cars? It is not cost-effective but the American and European governments now require by law that ethanol is used.

What the Red Cross does not point out is that the main danger this century from famine has not been natural disaster but government mismanagement. The greatest famine ever in the history of humanity was a result of the Great Leap. When these ethanol laws were passed in 2008 there was a massive spike in food prices and riots all over the world. Less damaging than collectivisation, but still the result of government policy.

Which means that someone ought to be studying history and political science so they can learn the right lessons and give our governments some better advice.