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Features, Web Features, Europe
The Geo-Politics of Personal Data

Over the last forty years, a strong and principled argument that privacy is a fundamental human right deserving special protection in an age of high technology has confronted more pragmatic considerations from a variety of interests. The messy twists and turns of this international struggle have produced a sort of consensus on what it means for an organization to process personal data responsibly. But it is an uneasy consensus, hedged by exemptions and qualifications, and regularly shaken by monumental shifts in the processing powers of technology, and by game changers like the 9/11 attacks. 

By Colin Bennett  |  December 14, 2012
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Features, Web Features, Europe
Online Privacy in the European Union

Data protection is at the heart of the digital economy. Whether it is students posting photographs of themselves online, consumers typing in credit card details to book a flight, or individuals interacting with e-government applications, we constantly rely on our data being protected. As such, information technology has huge economic and social potential. However, this potential will only be fully realised if citizens trust that their personal information is protected: hyper-connectivity must go hand-in-hand with the protection of privacy online.

By Viviane Reding  |  December 14, 2012
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Features, Web Features, Americas
Beyond Survival

In 1982, a group of Yucatec Mayas created the Maya Literature Workshop in Yucatan, southern Mexico. According to writer Miguel Angel May May, the Workshop’s members had “a minimal degree of high school education, were all about the same age, and were native speakers of Maya.” They shared a common desire to cultivate their mother tongue. This collective experience was the beginning of a creative search by this group to produce their own works of written literature. In 1990, two of its members, Gerardo Can Pat and Maria Luisa Pacheco Gongora, published their first literary works in Maya ​​and in Spanish.

By Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante  |  October 4, 2012
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Features, Web Features, Americas
Solutions That Work. By Design

In the mid 1990’s, the war torn, drug ridden and corrupt city of Bogotá, Columbia, was described by its own citizens as a living hell: an anarchy of drive-by shootings, road rage, suicidal pedestrians, pollution, a corrupt police force and a youth destined to criminality. It was ranked as one of the highest risk cities in the world. Tourists were advised not to travel there. Traffic deaths alone, caused by carjackings coupled with a universal disregard for traffic lights abetted by the blind eye of corrupt cops, topped 1,500 a year. 

By Michele Stanners  |  June 30, 2012
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Web Features
Territory without Borders

Stuart Elden is professor of political geography at Durham University. 

By Stuart Elden  |  August 21, 2011
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Web Features, Europe
Kosovo’s Land for Peace Solution

James Ker-Lindsay is Eurobank EFG Senior Research Fellow on the Politics and International Relations of South East Europe at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. His main works include EU Accession and UN Peacemaking in Cyprus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans (I.B. Tauris, 2009), and New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (Routledge, 2010, co-edited with Dejan Djokic). He is currently working on a book examining how states attempt to prevent the recognition of secessionist territories, which is due to be published by Oxford University Press.

By James Ker-Lindsay  |  August 18, 2011
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Web Features, Asia Pacific
The Spratly Islands Dispute: Order-Building on China’s terms?

As the result of China’s participation in world trade and its consequent growing demand for overseas energy and raw materials, the South China Sea has become an increasingly important resource for Beijing. China’s demand for imported energy resources is predicted to rise to 500 million tons of oil imports and over 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas by 2020. For comparison, in 2009 China imported 204 million tons of oil and just about 5 billion cubic meters of natural gas.  Because of its rapidly increasing energy consumption, China will be more actively involved in oil and gas exploration in its adjacent sea areas and in securing the oil supply routes at sea.

By Jörn Dosch  |  August 18, 2011
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Web Features, Europe
Four Political Dimensions of Ukraine’s Future Europeanization

[This article is based on an interview taken by Olena Tregub, a foreign correspondent for the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, during the Canadian-Ukrainian Parliamentary Program’s 3rd Model Ukraine Conference “Ukraine’s Domestic and Foreign Affairs: Quo Vadis?” at the University of Oxford, UK, on 7 April 2011.]

Dr. Andreas Umland is a DAAD Associate Professor of Political Science at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,” Ukraine, and General Editor of the trilingual book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.html).


By Andreas Umland  |  June 28, 2011
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Web Features, Middle East
The Role of the Border in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

 

By Daniel Levy  |  June 26, 2011
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Web Features, Europe
Europe Was Yesterday

Mabel Berezin is the Professor and Chair of Sociology at Cornell University, is a political sociologist whose work explores the intersection of political and cultural institutions with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Europe. She is the author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security, and Populism in the New Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy (Cornell 1997), and editor with Martin Schain of Europe Without Borders: Re-mapping Territory, Citizenship and Identity in a Transnational Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).


By Mabel Berezin  |  January 7, 2011
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