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Freedom of Expression: The Ethos of a Democracy
I can well imagine the slack jawed expressions on some our front benchers’ beatific faces on seeing political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi’s cartoons on the net. Personnally I didn’t think they were extraordinarily funny and were more the work of an amateur artist. Yet the portrayal of the three lions in […]
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As peace slowly restores, Rio Tinto slowly returns
It’s been almost fifteen years since the end of the civil war and the landowners on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are discussing the return of the mining giant Rio Tinto. Rio’s infamous Panguna mine, owned by its subsidiary Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) was at the […]
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Germany’s dubious arms exports: Encouraging dictatorship and conflict on Europe’s doorstep
Germany has an official agenda of supporting democracy and peace. However, the German arms industry sells weapons to dictators or conflict-suffering regions, sometimes to the detriment of even the country’s own interests. Compared to other NATO-states, Germany is generally reluctant to engage in wars. The most recent example is last […]
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Nepal: Democracy Dreams
“An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.” Voltaire suggested more than two centuries ago. Scan the headlines of any major broadsheet today and you can see that many countries (Nepal included) have taken the assassination bit more seriously than the democracy part. Nepal has been flirting with […]
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El encuentro con el otro: en busca de nuevos caminos
Abstract: Just a brief look at our everyday environment verifies the presence of conflict as an inherent fact in community life. From the most basic relational structures as the family, to the more complex forms of human association as the nation-state, implicitly involve places of disagreement between different interests […]