When will we learn that, where Islamism is involved, we have to get involved early and not late? We may well look back in years to come and ask ourselves why it was that we managed to lose on two fronts; not only that we let thousands of civilians be massacred, but also created the ideal conditions for a new generation of terrorists to boot.

Humanitarian intervention has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, been an issue that has dominated discourse in international law and diplomacy. Debate concerning the topic can be generally placed into two camps. In the first, the realist belief of the sacrosanctity of states’ sovereignty when it comes to dealing with their internal affairs, no reason but self defence should allow states to bear arms against one another

Guest Contributor: Siiri Makela de Oliveira 5th September 2013 The nature of the crisis in Somalia is ever changing; Somalia experienced a civil war in the 1980s and state collapse, clan factionalism and warlordism in the 1990s.  Over the last ten ...

Guest Contributor: Harry Langford 28th August 2013 It appears that intervention is now inevitable following confirmed reports that the Assad regime used chemical weapons as part of a widespread assault on an Eastern suburb of Damascus. I have previously explored ...

Guest Contributor: Kenny Stevenson 28th August 2013 ‘Was the price too high?’ asked Kirsty Wark. ‘Of course the price is very, very high’, replied Tony, ‘but think of the price people paid before Saddam was removed’. Defiant as ever, Blair strolled ...

Guest Contributor: Robert Halfon MP 27th August 2013 There are always three and half arguments against intervention: first, that it is outside the framework of international law; second, that Realpolitik should be the order of the day; and third, ‘What ...

Guest Contributor: Dr James D. Boys 25th August 2013 During his all too brief time as president, John F. Kennedy was understood to have lamented the difficulty he faced in making the threat of American power credible. ‘The place to ...

Guest Contributor: Dr James D. Boys 9th August 2013 Russian and Chinese intransigence over Syria has doubtless enabled President Assad’s forces to re-group and repel rebel advances. The great challenge for the US, however, is knowing quite who the rebel ...

Guest Contributor:  Advisory Board Member Peter Watt 5th August 2013 There has been an awful lot of noise again recently about Iraq. The overall sense was that in deciding to commit British forces in the second Iraq war Tony Blair had ...

We were wrong about Saddam Hussein. By ‘we’ I don’t mean the international intelligence community and I don’t mean the governments of the Coalition of the Willing. I mean the public and the media who, to this day, believe and say that what was found in Iraq after the fall of Saddam’s Baathist regime showed Saddam was not a threat to the international society.