InternationalRelations

The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution Monday calling on Israel to quickly open its nuclear program for inspection and backing a high-level conference to ban nuclear weapons from the Middle East which was just canceled.

174-6 with 6 abstentions

Those voting "no" were Israel, the U.S., Canada, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau

in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food

After World War II, the United States was routinely producing a grain surplus, which became an essential element of its Cold War political, economic, and humanitarian strategies -- not to mention the fact that American grain fed millions of hungry people across the world

Futures markets traditionally included two kinds of players. On one side were the farmers, the millers, and the warehousemen, market players who have a real, physical stake in wheat. This group not only includes corn growers in Iowa or wheat farmers in Nebraska, but major multinational corporations like Pizza Hut, Kraft, Nestlé, Sara Lee, Tyson Foods, and McDonald's -- whose New York Stock Exchange shares rise and fall on their ability to bring food to peoples' car windows, doorsteps, and supermarket shelves at competitive prices. These market participants are called "bona fide" hedgers, because they actually need to buy and sell cereals. On the other side is the speculator. The speculator neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat, and wouldn't have a place to put the 20 tons of cereal he might buy at any given moment if ever it were delivered. Speculators make money through traditional market behavior, the arbitrage of buying low and selling high. And the physical stakeholders in grain futures have as a general rule welcomed traditional speculators to their market, for their endless stream of buy and sell orders gives the market its liquidity and provides bona fide hedgers a way to manage risk by allowing them to sell and buy just as they pleased.

In the final hours of negotiations, the United States, as well as Russia and China, all large weapons exporters, said more time was needed.

Fifty-one senators had urged the administration not to sign it in a letter sent Thursday. That letter sent an important signal of defeat because ratification requires 67 Senate votes. “As defenders of the right of Americans to keep and bear arms, we write to express our grave concern about the dangers posed by the United Nations’ arms trade treaty,” the senators said in the letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Our country’s sovereignty and the constitutional protection of these individual freedoms must not be infringed.”

Galen Carey, vice president of government relations at the National Association of Evangelicals, criticized gun lobby members for disparaging the treaty, saying, “Those spreading misinformation about alleged links between this treaty and the Second Amendment should stop doing so.”

Turnover of cross-border organized crime is about $870 billion a year, more than six times the total of official development aid, and stopping this "threat to peace" is one of the greatest global challenges, a U.N. agency said on Monday.

The total estimated figure of $870 billion is equivalent to 1.5 percent of the world's gross domestic product, it said, warning that crime groups can destabilize entire regions.

the first time the agency had compiled an estimate for transnational organized crime, using internal UNODC and external sources, so there were no comparative figures to show any trend.

doing this kind of research requires going beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries: you need to mix not just the empirical information about technologies, jurisdictions, transnational firms, the specific national laws of countries governing the diverse domains you might be covering –from economy to civil society. Beyond the empirical, which in a way is not so difficult—though it takes a lot of time—there is the challenge of developing conceptual framings that allow you to accommodate these fragments from diverse disciplines. In my experience one has to construct a kind of conceptual architecture that encompasses (as does a building!) many diverse elements. The critical challenge here is the organizing logic.

Can you help us to make methodological sense of contemporary global relations? Theory is critical: we need to grasp that which we cannot reduce to empirical measures. Empirical data to document globalization is important, but it is not enough.

In sum, conceiving of globalization must not occur only in terms of interdependence and global institutions, but also as inhabiting and reshaping the national from the inside, which opens up a vast agenda for research and politics. It means that research on globalization needs to include detailed studies and ethnographies of multiple national conditions and dynamics that are likely to be engaged by the global and often are the global, but function inside the national. This will take decoding: much of the global is still dressed in the clothes of the national. Deciphering the global requires delving deeper into subsumed phenomena and structures, rather than simply considering the self-evident.

The regimes in North Korea and Iran perceive integration into an international community whose dominant power is the United States as a threat to their survival. Integration might yield short-term regime-sustaining economic benefits, but it carries the risk of regime-terminating political contagion.

Pyongyang and Tehran seized on NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya as evidence that Qaddafi had been duped by the West. Essentially, by taking down regimes in Iraq and Libya, Washington priced itself out of the security assurance market in Pyongyang and Tehran

The trouble is that “containment” as a strategy is increasingly denounced by hard-liners in the U.S. policy debate as tantamount to appeasement, reducing the administration’s political space