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During the period from 1964 to 1966, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) moved from a position of denying the existence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union to voicing open public criticisms of Soviet policies towards its Jewish minority. These criticisms were unprecedented for an official Communist Party, and had considerable influence on the international communist movement. This paper explores the negotiations between Jewish community leader Isi Leibler and the CPA which induced these criticisms. It is argued that Leibler negotiated with the CPA on two fronts: official dialogue with the elected Sydney-based CPA leadership, and unofficial private discussions--which can arguably be termed secret collusion--with other senior CPA officials in Melbourne. These unofficial discussions seem to have been crucial in shifting the CPA from its traditional position.

China's attitude towards the United Nations Peace Keeping Organization is analyzed in both the Chinese and English literature examined in various depths is presented. The United Nations peacekeeping is more agreeable to the China due to the United Nations peacekeeping missions that were conducted and reformed after the Brahimi Report in 2000.

This paper explores the relevance of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and its related National Action Programmes (NAPs) to people affected by land degradation and change in Swaziland. Household data collected from three chiefdoms are examined, together with policy analyses and information from interviews with policymakers and NGO representatives, as the barriers that inhibit successful implementation of the UNCCD at the national level are explored. We demonstrate how the issues addressed by Swaziland's NAP do not always match the environmental challenges that most threaten the sustainability of rural livelihoods, despite the 'participatory' and 'consultative' approach taken in developing the policy. This is because the more powerful members of society restricted the public's access to policy space. We argue that local involvement in environmental policy and decisionmaking as prescribed from the international political arena is insufficient to ensure empowerment and democracy in dealing with land degradation in national and local contexts, particularly within highly centralized political systems. Although the UNCCD represents a useful global framework in which to situate local anti-degradation initiatives, in centralized political systems, its success depends upon changes being made to the ethos of national facilitating organizations. Only when the power balance is challenged and greater moves are made towards decentralization will local land users be able to assume a meaningful role in combating desertification. KEYWORDS: Swaziland, land degradation, policy, UNCCD, power, participation

'Nation-building' is an increasingly frequent activity of Western governments and the United Nations, with Kosovo an important recent example. This study examines the reconstruction by the United Nations of Kosovo's internal security infrastructure from 1999 to 2004. It analyzes United Nations and other activities to build democratic police and justice systems. Through a model of security reconstruction, it examines in detail the primary, security challenges facing Kosovo, the specific efforts the United Nations made to address these challenges, the ultimate effectiveness of the reconstruction in establishing stability and rule of law, and the linkages between reconstruction efforts and democracy. It concludes with several lessons for improving the effectiveness of such efforts in the future. Keywords: Kosovo; nation-building; internal security; police; justice; democracy; United Nations

"Washington resists linking the political and military issues that Americans understand as 'security' with the economic and social issues arising from the deep poverty prevalent in four-fifths of the world's nations. Others think the linkage is obvious."

This article examines a range of 'good governance' discourses and practices at the United Nations as elements of global governmentality. It explores the emergence of 'good governance' as a political [...]

In October 2000, when a dozen women from various international nongovernmental organizations sat in the observers' section of the United Nations Security Council chamber, they became witnesses to a landmark [...]

This article discusses the impact of ideas and concepts in global governance on the making of international public policies, highlighting the role that the United Nations plays in developing these concepts. Focus is placed on intellectual debates on such issues as decolonization, human rights and localization; also analyzed is the tension between international practitioners and academics who use the term 'governance' to signifying complex processes and structures and popular writers who use the term synonymously with 'government.'

This article discusses the political activity of Abdoulaye Wade, the president of Senegal, and his attempts to control the violent rebellion of the 'Mouvement des forces democratiques de la Casamance' (MFDC) in Casamance. According to the author Wade has utilized various methods to quell the rebellion, such as appealing to the United Nations for help, however the problem remains unresolved.

United Nations The arrest in Britain, on a Spanish warrant, of a former head of state of Chile was a major advance in the realisation of international law. The central [...]

We present a statistical model that predicts the force size of United Nations peacekeeping operations, relying on experiences from thirty-nine peacekeeping operations over the period 1945-1994. As we expected, the type of mission performed by the peacekeeping operation was a major factor in determining force size. Although the second-generation mission category includes a panoply of different mission types, these new peacekeeping operations still on average require almost 12,000 more personnel than observer operations. Our results indicate, however, that the size of a peacekeeping operation is not solely a function of mission type; the context of the conflict situation matters as well. Specifically, the severity of the violence in the crisis precipitating UN intervention has a significant effect, as does the addition of more actors to the conflict. In general, the geographic characteristics of the area (except the size of the deployment area), the type of conflict (civil or interstate), and superpower involvement had no statistically significant effects., The character and the size of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations have changed dramatically over the past fifty years. What began as an experiment in 1948 in sending a small [...]

IT CAN be said that international peacekeeping is marginally better than the alternative of all-out war. Popular perceptions of peacekeeping frequently include noble, blue-helmeted soldiers hailing from a cross-section of [...]

The United Nations has assumed a prominent post-cold wax role as an agent of democratic transitions in Third World states long torn by civil strife. Called 'postconflict peace building' by the secretary general, this new brand of UN peacekeeping mission has seen notable success in countries such as El Salvador, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Namibia. But the record is mixed. The United Nations faces serious challenges in peace building because of dilemmas generated by deep tensions between the practices of peace building and long-standing UN principles of sovereignty, neutrality, and securing a democratic peace. Even when these dilemmas can be resolved, the United Nations confronts three constraints that fundamentally limit its capability to build the peace: the political will of UN member-states, the will and ability of local actors, and the capacity of local institutions. The long-term success of the United Nations' foray into peace building will depend in part on how skillfully UN officials are able to draw and apply lessons from the first 5 years of UN peace building and to address these conflicts of principle and practice.

This article examines whether state participation in UN peace-keeping results from a state's idealistic commitment to the global community and international peace or whether participation is tied to the state's national interest. With the high profile of UN peace-keeping in this post-Cold War era, the answer to this inquiry may suggest to us whether the emerging international system will be organized on the principles of community or self. This inquiry is conducted through an examination of the eighteen UN peace-keeping operations fielded from 1948 until 1990. Specifically, this article examines the incidence of state participation and the types of contributions states have made both to observer missions and peace-keeping forces at the aggregate level. This article also explores the perception of peace-keeping successes and failures and the perceptions of the dominant peace-keepers to determine whether an idealist or a realist perspective better accounts for state participation in peace-keeping. The findings provide support for the realist account. Further, the findings suggest that those states whose interests were better served by the continuation of the international status quo - that is, the states of the advanced industrialized West and non-Western states who have enjoyed some prestige in the international status quo - have dominated UN peace-keeping.