The current rank of being the fourth most failed state in the world that South Sudan occupies on the state failure index does not come as a tremendous surprise and there is little reason to celebrate this second anniversary of South Sudan’s statehood. At best, it is an achievement that the situation has not deteriorated further into civil war or an all-out military confrontation with Sudan.
International Conflict Management
Self-Determination After Kosovo
Using Kosovo as an illustrative case study, this article discusses the meaning of self-determination in its historical and contemporary contexts and examines the different options available for the accommodation of contested self-determination claims.
Taliban talks are the centrepiece for a joined-up peace deal in Afghanistan
The announcement by the United States that it intends to enter into direct negotiations with the Afghan Taliban represents a significant opportunity to manage the Western ‘exit’ from the country by the end of 2014.
Bilateral Ethnopolitics after the Cold War
Using the relationship between Hungary and Slovakia as a case study, this article discusses the problems associated with ‘bilateral’ ethnopolitics in the context of cross‐border minority situations. It starts by outlining a theoretical framework for such an analysis,...
Content and Context: Sunningdale and Belfast Compared
Published as a contribution to Aspects of the Belfast Agreement (ed. by Rick Wilford, Oxford University Press, 2001), this chapter takes as its starting point the observation that both the 1973 Sunningdale and 1998 Belfast agreements are, in essence, consociational...
Coincidence or Commonality of Interests? German and American Views on NATO Enlargement
Initially, Germany and the United States were the strongest advocates of NATO enlargement. They were the first two alliance partners to change their stance from firmly ruling out the admission of former member states of the Warsaw Pact Organization to supporting...
Ethno-territorial Cross-border Conflict in Western Europe
Minorities in Western Europe have been subjected to discrimination and forced assimilation, and they have resisted such repressive state policies in a variety of ways. The ethnic conflicts that have developed in the past were a form of group conflict wherein at least...