The UN Human Rights Council has taken an increasingly prominent role in pressing for global action on the Syrian crisis. In the latest installment of the Internationalist Video Series, I explain how this furthers the revival of the world’s preeminent rights body, which replaced a discredited rights commission. Watch below for the five things you need to know about the reconstituted forum: Read more »

Nearly three years ago, the first arrest warrant for a sitting head of state was issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The date was March 4, 2009, and the leader was Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, who remains that country’s leader to this day. As this glass half-full anniversary approaches and the international community faces what UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has called “almost certain” instances of crimes against humanity in Syria, the complex issue of human rights has once again assumed the center stage in world politics. Read more »

Terra Lawson-Remer explores the important question of how the G20 can improve its legitimacy and effectiveness. Lawson-Remer is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and assistant professor at the New School University. She was formerly senior advisor for international affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Lawson-Remer holds a JD and PhD. Read more »

Meeting last weekend in Los Cabos, Mexico, for their first, “informal” gathering, G20 foreign ministers made a pivotal decision: to expand the G20 agenda to encompass pressing political and security matters. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister, emphasized that on crucial issues that “affect the lives of billions…the international community is failing,” and announced that the group would reconvene at the G20 leaders’ summit from June 19 to 20 to consider a raft of global issues ranging from transnational crime to green growth and food security. Read more »

This weekend, foreign ministers from the Group of Twenty Nations (G20) will meet in Los Cabos—the first such meeting in a group which has been dominated by finance ministers and central bank governors since its inception. With foreign ministers at the table will the G20, like the G7 and G8 before it, expand its remit to address a broader suite of global challenges? Read more »

Last week, as the world’s media focused on the deepening crisis over Syria, it missed a less pressing story with profound long-term implications. The High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, released a sobering assessment for the world’s seven billion inhabitants. The document—Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing­­—offers humanity a stark choice: modify our patterns of production and consumption, or risk crashing through the “planetary boundaries” of growth and social progress. Read more »

On Saturday, Russia and China cast a double veto of a UN Security Council resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for an orderly departure of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria, and the creation of a transitional government in that country. This was the fourth time since 2007 that the duo has vetoed resolutions criticizing brutal crackdowns in Myanmar (2007), Zimbabwe (2008), and Syria (2011, 2012). Read more »

For the past decade, the challenge of weak and failing states has dominated the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Once dismissed as third tier strategic concerns, poorly governed and conflict-ridden states rose to unprecedented prominence after 9/11. Al-Qaeda’s ability to launch the most devastating attack on the United States in U.S. history from one of the most wretched countries on earth persuaded George W. Bush, in the words of the 2002 National Security Strategy, that the nation was “now threatened less by conquering states than we are by weak and failing ones.” Allied nations and international organizations from NATO to the United Nations drew the same conclusion, describing the world’s forty-odd fragile states as “weak links” in the chain of global collective security, generating risks ranging from jihadist terror to transnational crime, WMD proliferation to infectious disease. Read more »