By Stephen Zunes
Category: Development
The Hexagon map of the multipolar world
By Johan Galtung
How do we come to grips, intellectually, with today’s world?
Some time ago the geopolitical map was based on the direct East-West conflict, the two superpowers USA/USSR with alliances, and the neutral-nonaligned treated as a residual category. The world was Bipolar. The implosion of the USSR made it Unipolar, “the only surviving superpower”, 2-1 = 1. Or so we were told.
Today we have four huge states: the three largest in population, China-India-USA, and the largest in area, Russia. And the EU, a region with five middle-range states: UK-France-Germany-Italy-Spain.
But there is one more pole on the geopolitical map: Islam.Read More »
A law of the sea?
By Jonathan Power
Last week as we watched Mitt Romney win the right to challenge Barack Obama in November’s general election the last thing that most people were thinking about were sea and oceans. Yet the last Republican president, George W. Bush, at this point in the electoral cycle announced that, if elected, he would move to ratify the UN’s Law of the Sea. He never did. But also last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flanked by the senior brass from the military announced that this Administration was immediately going to push Congress to vote for the long delayed ratification of the treaty.
All the road blocks of the last thirty years since President Reagan decided to torpedo the treaty have been removed and Congress is poised to give the White House the green light on ratification. Read More »
Neither capitalism nor socialism: Eclecticism & Peace Economics!
By Johan Galtung
Thinking aloud: we need all good ideas to combat our double economic crisis: the increasing misery crisis at the bottom, now also in rich countries in the West, and the increasing system crisis, also striking those countries; but both are all over.
So the following are notes for an epilogue to a forthcoming book, Peace Economics, about how to overcome the flagrant structural violence in the misery crisis, and the threat of direct violence, not only terrorism and state terrorism, but a major world war to get the West out of the system – like the Second World War lifted them out of the Great Depression.Read More »
Third World poverty is falling fast
By Jonathan Power
We all know the clichés: Is the glass half full or half empty? Is the light in the tunnel the train coming towards you? But this time the new World Bank figures for the decrease in Third World poverty are absolutely clear. The glass is filling up. The train is not going to crash into us. The doomsayers from Malthus in 1798 to Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” to the Club of Rome to some of the activists at World Trade meetings and to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation which in a quite recent mistake it now admits to, reported that the number of hungry people soared from 875 million in 2005 to one billion in 2009, have been proved to be wrong.Read More »
Climate warming lobby is lost in the cloud
By Jonathan Power
Forgive my cynicism about climate change. Thirty years ago I wrote a column for the Washington Post for which I had interviewed four of the world’s top climatologists. They all told me the problem was that the climate was cooling and that this would have devastating effects on agriculture and food supplies. When scientists a decade later turned around I wondered how it could be that for measuring things that changed only over ten thousands of years opinion could change so fast.Read More »
The face of the crisis – and some alternatives
By Johan Galtung
From Madrid, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia-UNED, Foro Los Nuevos Problemas Sociales, 24 Mar 2012
Here is one of the hidden faces of the economic crisis:
(¶C/¶t) + (¶C/¶S)rS + (1/2)(¶2C/¶S2)q2S2 = rC
The famous Black-Scholes equation to find the “correct price” for financial derivatives. Based on partial derivatives over time, this is classical calculus for continuous change; useful within a zone of stability, but not at the edge of that zone, the tipping points explored in René Thom’s catastrophe theory years earlier.
Black-Scholes is intellectually like calculating increasing speed of an accelerating car heading for a wall or an abyss. But, with warnings, no 1997 “Nobel Prize in Economics” (actually a Swedish State Bank’s prize honoring Alfred Nobel)? And one year later their company “Long Term Capital Management” had lost $100 billion and collapsed. The trade in derivatives is now at $1 quadrillion a year (15 zeros), ten times the industrial economy of the whole 20th century. Many got rich, but the system collapsed. Maybe prison would have been more adequate for intellectual sloppiness?Read More »
Africa’s lions are roaring
By Jonathan Power
Abuja, Nigeria
Approximately half the people of Africa own a mobile phone. In many African countries phone technology is ahead of Europe and North America. Money can be transferred from the city to an upcountry village. Bills can be paid. In Ghana farmers can receive text messages reporting the price of yams and corn two towns away and thus find the best market without a middleman. In Kenya residents of small villages can receive texts to say when the perambulating doctor will next be coming. In parts of West Africa nurses are storing patients’ data on phones.
It may be more difficult to build up fast internet penetration on pcs but in some countries 40% of mobile owners are using phones for email and the internet. The IMF says that the telecommunication sector is adding 2% to Nigeria’s already handsome annual economic growth.
Black Africa has come late to the party but a majority of its 48 countries is leaping ahead. Read More »
Is Gambia a viable state?
By Gunnar Westberg
Gambia, or properly The Gambia, is a curious remnant of the British Empire, a crooked British finger poking from the Atlantic coast into Francophone Senegal. It is the smallest state in Africa, with about 1.6 million inhabitants.
Gambia was a hot spot for tourism 20 or 30 years ago, but is now largely bypassed by many other attractive subtropical or tropical countries and Gambia never discussed in international media.Read More »
Nigeria – I have seen the future and know it works
By Jonathan Power
Did you know that Nigeria, the most populated country in black Africa, is now one of the top five fastest growing big economies in the world? (The others are China, India, Turkey and Argentina.)
The image of Nigeria is of poverty, crime, corruption, election fiddling and maladministration. Africa, I find from my family and friends, is still a continent where death stalks – war, starving children and impoverished refugees.
But the tale of progress is unsung. This wretchedness is the only news that penetrates. Only one western newspaper, the Financial Times, has a full time correspondent in Nigeria where one third of all the black people in the world live. The rest get their news from the fickle eye of television and the rest of the newspaper pack.Read More »
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