Lithium is flowing from the Global South to the Global North, powering a massive electrification effort in high-income countries, particularly due to its criticality in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. However, this silvery metal is not a silver bullet. Lithium mining comes with high environmental and social costs to the land and local population, disproportionately harms…
The news about the United States spying on United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and his deputy, Amina Mohammed, revealed dissatisfaction in leaked US intelligence documents over Guterres’s perceived lack of toughness regarding the Russians and their invasion of Ukraine in 2022. One would expect the Russians, undoubtedly also spying on Guterres, to have different views, annoyed by…
When in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama evangelized “the end of history,” he did it in the context of a widely held belief that the collapse of Communism and the victory of Liberal Democracy was a major milestone in human evolution. Beyond the end of the Cold War, this was supposed to…
The attack on Ukraine has had tragic consequences for all Ukrainians and many Russians. The horror of families being killed and divided is a spectacle that nearly all Europeans believed had been banished forever from our Continent. Even most of the attacking troops and the Ukrainian population refused to believe it might happen. But the…
Lately, I came across a very interesting article “The Roots of Russia”, written exactly sixty years ago by Dr. Lev Dobriansky (1918-2008), a renowned Professor of Economics at Georgetown University and former US Ambassador to The Bahamas[1]. Dobriansky’s article was re-published in January 1964, in An Cosantóir (The Defender), The Irish Defence Journal, courtesy of…
In the West, there are two different competing narratives about the war in Ukraine. The prevailing narrative is that it is a struggle between the “bad guys” and “good guys”. For many, Russia led by dictator Putin represents imperialism and is alone responsible for this unprovoked war, whereas Ukraine represents freedom and democracy as well…
Whom to call when you want to talk to Europe was the famous question attributed to Henry Kissinger that pointed to the lack of a central node of international contact and decision-making in the European integration project. The question remained unanswered for decades, despite earnest efforts to provide a credible answer, notably with the establishment…
The nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine’s words inspired Raphael Lemkin, the drafter of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “Burning books is not the same as burning bodies…but when one intervenes … against mass destruction of churches and books one arrives just in time to prevent the burning…
This essay is written to distance proper understanding of the Russian war against Ukraine from any false equivalence that this is a conflict between two belligerents, whose perspectives deserve equal recognition as a prelude to a negotiated outcome. Attempts to explore alternative avenues to peace, and identify differentiated messages and appropriate envoys and institutions should…
War undermines the lives, health, and safety of all human beings, but for approximately 2.7 million persons with disabilities and their families living in Ukraine, the situation is much worse. Although accurate statistics are hard to come by, many Ukrainians with a disability, especially those with the most severe conditions, have not been able to…
