If as expected Southern Sudan votes to secede in this weekend's referendum, territorial boundaries should be drawn neatly enough. Boundaries of human community may be more difficult. At issue is the status of southerners resident in the north and vice versa. The risk is that these individuals won't end up with citizenship in their place of residence, making them vulnerable to...
As of early 2009, it's officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia. (Okay, news travels slowly to Philadelphia; perhaps to your town, too?) That may seem like a technical change, but Stanford geographer Martin W. Lewis makes the case that it gives the lie to the very concept of nationhood as we conventionally understand it: The idea of the nation-state has become...
What will daily life in Jerusalem be like a century from now? This is the theme of the Jerusalem 2111 International Animation Competition, organized by the Association of Planning and Conservation- Jerusalem (Beit Hamodel). The blog io9 has a post with links to some of the submissions, which include visions of a depopulated Jerusalem under UN control, what looks like a...
The Guardian published an editorial by a Republican political operative today blaming WikiLeaks for releasing a State Department cable concerning a meeting between Tsvangirai and Susan Rice in which Tsvangirai discussed the possibility of peacefully removing Mugabe from power: Now, in the wake of the WikiLeaks' release, one of the men targeted by US and EU travel and asset freezes, Mugabe's...
Julia Preston's lead story in yesterday's NYT Times highlighted the shift to state governments as immigration battlegrounds. Several are looking to be SB 1070 copycats. I don't think those will go anywhere in the face of quiet but intense opposition from the business community, who want the cheap labor and who don't want to be in the cross-hairs of the...
Oxford has sent me the initial version of the book cover. Here it is: The painting, "The Red Stairway," is by Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born American artist who painted between the 1920s and the 1950s. In 1942 and 1943, Shahn created propaganda posters for the Office of War Information (OWI); his poster about the destruction of Lidice is an...
We've been light on blogging with the holidays this week. So, as 2010 comes to a close, I thought I'd open a comment thread for those readers still trolling the blogosphere this week to note your favorite Opinio Juris post of the year. For me, it turns out I'm fond of bird dung, at least when it becomes grounds for exploring...
To all OJers everywhere who celebrate it, Merry Christmas, and to everyone a joyous holiday season. It is snowing large wet flakes here in DC on Christmas morning. In my case, my wife and I drove down on Thursday to Chapel Hill, North Carolina and drove my wife's elderly parents up to DC to join us. Other family have arrived...
True to James Gathii's comment to my last post, the Prime Minister of Kenya, Raila Odinga, has made it clear that Kenya won't be withdrawing from the ICC anytime soon: Kenya's prime minister on Thursday dismissed as futile a motion by lawmakers to withdraw from the statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) - a move intended to head...
Another Indian diplomat gets the treatment, this time in Austin. Colum Lynch has this useful wrap in WaPo on the issue of diplomats and security screening, see also my post about another recent incident in Mississippi. I don't get it: Why don't diplomats get a pass, like crew? Has there ever been a terrorist attack undertaken by an accredited diplomat? It...
This according to the BBC: Kenyan MPs have voted overwhelmingly for the country to pull out of the treaty which created the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The move comes a week after the ICC prosecutor named six Kenyans he accuses of being behind post-election violence. The prosecutor's list included senior politicians and civil servants. The MPs do not have the...
When Fox News isn't busy making people dumber, it's writing chyrons like this: ...
