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New ISN Partner: FRIDE

FRIDE (the Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior) is a European think tank for global action, which provides innovative thinking and rigorous analysis of key debates in international relations. Its mission is to inform policy and practice in order to ensure that the EU plays a more effective role in supporting multilateralism, democratic values, security and sustainable development.

FRIDE benefits from political independence and the diversity of views and intellectual background of its international team. Based in the vibrant city of Madrid, FRIDE seeks to enhance the southern European perspective within EU debates and the European perspective within Spain.

Its main contribution to international debates stems from its empirical research on:

• The development and promotion of democracy
• The increasing role of emerging powers
• The role of international development cooperation in advancing universal values
• Global governance and multilateralism
• The complexity of threats to peace and security
• Fragile states and energy security

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A Reading List On: Market Intervention

Books in perspective. Photo: Flickr/darren 131

The prerogatives of the state are diminishing in some domains, but growing in others. In what will be a four-part syllabus series, the ISN will look at ‘intervention’ as an evolving norm in international politics, in a variety of contexts. We’ll kick off with the latest and greatest literature on ‘market intervention’ and the emerging role of the state in international political economy.

With the bailouts that accompanied the 2008 financial crises and the current Eurozone crisis, state frontiers may be making a comeback — even in Europe. But what do these developments say about ‘market intervention’ as an evolving international norm?

Read and form your own opinion!

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This Week at the ISN…

It's week 29 in our 2011 editorial calendar, Photo: Leo Reynolds/flickr

This week the ISN highlights the following topics:

  • We offer up a readers’ syllabus on market interventionism on Tuesday.
  • On Thursday, we highlight a mixed-media special feature about historical counterfactuals in civil wars and insurgencies.

And in case you missed any of last week’s coverage, you can catch up here on: the history of the Jewish presence in Pakistan; the US Institute of Peace’s conference on North Korea; evolving US-Czech relations on missile defense; a discussion of Pakistan as a ‘failed state’; and violence in South Kordofan.

South Sudan: Lessons from Timor-Leste

Free – but the challenges are far from over. Photo: bbcworldservice/flickr

Like many, I was moved by the joy and happiness of the South Sudanese over the birth of their new nation. Unfortunately, South Sudan’s future may not be quite as harmonious as its independence celebrations. State structures and institutions will have to be built from scratch, which means that internal power struggles are almost a certainty.

A recent TIME blog has outlined a few lessons that UN member #193 could learn from #191, Timor-Leste:

-don’t underestimate the legacy of violence;
-avoid letting foreign workers become a source of political tension;
-and listen to Norway when setting up systems of checks and balances to track (staggeringly high) oil revenues.

To these, let me add two more recommendations, addressed specifically to UNMISS, the newly established UN peacekeeping mission to South Sudan:

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Pakistan: A Failed State?

Pakistani protests over failed electricity distribution management. Photo: groundreporter/flickr

The term failed state is often used to describe a state perceived as having failed to meet some of the basic conditions and responsibilities of sovereign government. In international law, a failed state is one that, “though retaining legal capacity, has for all practical purposes lost the ability to exercise it.” According to the Fund for Peace that just released its seventh annual Failed State Index (FSI), a failed state is characterized by:

  1. loss of physical control of its territory or loss of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force;
  2. the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions;
  3. an inability to provide reasonable public services; and
  4. an inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.

The FSI is made up of 12 social, economic and political indicators − each split into an average of 14 sub-indicators. The Fund for Peace bases its assessment primarily on content analysis of thousands of electronically available articles and reports that are processed by special software.

According to the latest index scores, Pakistan ranks 12th out of 177 countries examined.

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