Globalaffairs

Issue 20/April-June 2010
By Glen Ruffle

On 11th May 2010, the 53rd Prime Minister in Britain’s history, David Cameron, took power. Yet it was not in the way that nearly every other took power before him. Under the First Past the Post electoral system, Britain is usually given one strong party that wins and allows clear and strong leadership.

However, this time, despite an electoral system that helps produce winners, there was no single, victorious party. The Conservatives, 13 years in opposition, almost achieved the magic 326 seats to make a majority, but fell 20 short. This meant they could try and govern as a minority, constantly risking losing every vote, or try to forge an alliance to govern as a majority.

The outcome has seen a most unusual alliance emerge. The right-wing Conservatives, anti-European, market-orientated and socially traditional, have teamed up with the Liberal Democrats, the most pro-European party, which talks of social regulation and a liberal society.

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Issue 20/April-June 2010
By Niruban Balachandran

From finger-pointing to reciprocal accusations of stubbornness to seemingly endless differences in opinion, America’s and China’s increasingly tense yet tightly-interdependent relationship will continue to give policymakers from both nations multiple sources of irritation (and rising blood pressures) over the next several months. Here are five points of conflict between America and China to watch this year.

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Issue 17/October-November 2009
By Mauricio Palma Gutiérrez

A couple of weeks ago, Kan Guek Evan, alias Comrade Duch, made headlines as he publicly expressed his remorse for the demise of nearly 12,000 people who died while in his charge as the director of the S21-the most infamous prison camp from the Khmer Rouge era. However, the attention his declarations attracted was minor compared to the more recent events surrounding the bringing to justice of those who are accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.

The issuing of arrest warrants by the International Court or the mandates of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have attracted the most attention around the world and thereby the majority of the academic discourse on the matter. Notwithstanding, the case of the Tribunal for the Cambodian Genocide is seen as singular and innovative in its legal constitution and regulation of international legal elements for the statutes and the legal bodies established in the budding international legal order. The declarations of this person have become the perfect excuse to conduct an evaluation of the understandings of the action-taking logic of a peculiar legal body in action, within the context of one of the most remembered genocides of the latter half of the twentieth century, perhaps only comparable to the Rwandan genocide.

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