By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 5 August 2026 (IDN) — Almost forgotten in the story about the Coronavirus is the story of AIDS. The drive to deal with it, the search to find medicine to cure it, and the self-discipline by homosexuals only began in 1981, when the disease was discovered and its causes understood. […]
War-War and Jaw-Jaw
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 22 July 2026 (IDN) –Donald Trump will find out the hard way in Iran that, as Winston Churchill famously observed, “Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War.” If war can be avoided through a warm, lengthy, private conversation—without advisers, accompanied by generous gestures and promises of international recognition when his opponent, […]
When the Centre Cannot Hold
The Changing Architecture of Global Power in the Twenty-First Century By Ramesh Jaura This article first appeared on https://rjaura.substack.com/ Author’s Note: International affairs are often discussed in terms of individual crises—Ukraine, the Middle East, artificial intelligence, the strategic rivalry between the United States and China, or the future of the United Nations. This essay argues […]
Truth Before Power: Shakespeare on Judgment
By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 16 July 2026 (IDN) – Few literary works have generated as many competing interpretations as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Psychoanalytic critics have found an Oedipal drama. Existentialists have found a meditation on freedom and death. Feminist critics have found a tragedy of patriarchal domination. The feminist reading has become particularly influential in […]
South Pacific – Samoa: When the Ocean Moves Closer
By Thomas George Tofaeono APIA, Samoa. 8 July 2026 (IDN/Wansolwara) — Waves no longer appear in the usual areas they used to in many Samoan Villages, and the lands that connect our homes to the sea are becoming smaller. This raises concerns about how we should fight this threat. After heavy rainfall, it is saddening […]
Can the World Still Work Together?
Hamburg and the Future of International Cooperation “The United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” – — Dag Hammarskjöld By Ramesh Jaura This article was first published on https://rjaura.substack.com BERLIN | 7 July 2026 (IDN) — Eighty years after the founding of the United Nations, the […]
Eritrean Human Rights Mandate Renewed as UN Council Defies Opposition
By Daniel Tesfa and Filmon Gebremikael ANTWERPEN | Belgium | 6 July 2026 (IDN) — The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has voted to renew the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea for another year, following strong advocacy from the European Union and Eritrean civil society […]
Africa’s Security at a Crossroads: A Continent Confronts a Changing Worl
By Ramesh Jaura This article was first published on https://rjaura.substack.com/ BERLIN | 4 July 2026 (IDN) — There was a time when Africa was often portrayed as standing at the margins of international politics—its conflicts treated as regional crises, its development challenges largely divorced from the wider currents shaping the global order. That perception no […]
Malawi Has No Coastline. We’re Fighting for The Ocean Anyway
By Dr George Chaponda The writer is the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Malawi. LILONGWE, Malawi | 1 July 2026 (IDN) — When Malawi became the first landlocked country to ratify the BBNJ Agreement, we affirmed a simple but powerful principle: stewardship of the global commons is a shared responsibility, not a […]
Whither the Law of the Sea?
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 1 July 2026 (IDN) — David Attenborough said in his wondrous documentary film, Ocean, that it had taken him a long time in his 99 years of life to understand that for the survival of our planet the oceans are more important than the land. This past four months, as […]