In the Issue

• Fragile States, Global Consequences
• Can World Leaders Summon Their Inner Statesmen?
• G-8 Leaders' Failure Puts World at Risk
• Protecting the Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan
• A World Cup Peace Theory?

Features

Fragile States, Global Consequences. For decades, the balance of power among the world’s strongest nations was the dominant issue in discussions of global security. Many of today’s policies and international institutions were specifically created to deal with potential violent conflict between major powers. But today, the world’s most fragile states are emerging as the most serious threat to 21st-century global security. To be released in November 2010, Now Showing Fragile States, Global Consequences features a DVD that helps viewers examine the global challenge of nations on the brink of failure. Learn more and sign up today to receive your FREE Now Showing event-in-a-box toolkit this fall.

Can World Leaders Summon Their Inner Statesmen? The essential challenge for multilateral cooperation is a global agenda loaded with items that require heavy political lifting. With their disparate postures toward many issues, world leaders can reap little political gain “back home”—and potentially a lot of pain—from efforts to bridge those differences. If these times call on leaders, therefore, to summon their inner statesmen, then diplomatic venues like the recent back-to-back Toronto summits of the G-8 and G-20 are perfect settings to gauge how they’re responding. Read more from program officer David Shorr about the outcomes of the Toronto summits.

G-8 Leaders' Failure Puts World at Risk. The G-8 leaders kicked the nuclear terrorism "can" down the road during their recent meeting in Muskoka, Canada. By not extending the G-8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, they opted to take a risk the world can hardly afford, say Stanley Foundation program officer Jennifer Smyser and Fissile Materials Working Group cochair Alexandra Toma. Read the full opinion piece in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Beyond the Headlines

Protecting the Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan. The recent violence in Kyrgyzstan has once again highlighted the centrality of a direct, coherent, and as yet lacking, international response to mass atrocities committed against civilian populations. While lingering tension continues to obscure much about the crisis, the inability of the then-interim Kyrgyzstani government to protect its minority Uzbek population from identity-based violations amounting to ethnic cleansing has become vividly clear. Read the full article.

A World Cup Peace Theory? As the month-long FIFA World Cup ground to a halt, soccer fans worldwide feverishly anticipated the conclusion of the most widely viewed sporting event. But the World Cup should not be written off merely as just that. In recent history, the World Cup has had major implications on domestic, regional, and international politics. International relations’ theorists often tout the notion of a democratic peace theory, which holds that democracies rarely go to war with one another. The theory may not translate exactly to teams competing in the World Cup, as North Korea is technically still at war with the US and other international conflicts persist. But in some parts of the world, soccer has been a source of domestic political stability, even unity.

The Ivory Coast’s civil war was sidelined when it qualified for the 2006 World Cup, uniting its national team that consisted of players of various ethnic backgrounds from both the rebel-held North and the government-controlled South. It has been argued that the 1998 World Cup match between the US and Iran did more to repair relations between the two nations than decades of diplomacy. And the famous Christmas Truce during World War I may not have brought an end to the war, but its impact kept German and British soldiers from firing out of their trenches at their enemies. Still, skeptics argue that when the last vuvuzelas sound and the final whistle blows, the unity that the Cup has inspired will unravel, particularly in this year’s host country, South Africa. It wouldn’t be the first time that the worlds of politics and soccer collide, but in addition to wishing away the deafening wail of the vuvuzela, here’s to hoping that soccer helps to sideline, and eventually eliminate, conflict within, between, and among nations.