Do we have a moral obligation to save wild bees?
23 March 2025
In a new study, scientists show that 80% of crop pollination across five continents is carried out by just 2% of all wild bee species in the areas they studied. The other 700, rarer species serve only a marginal funct...
The complexity of history: Beyond cause and effect
14 March 2025
In a previous post, I mused that we are only beginning to understand the complexity of social realities and history. It sounds clever, but what do I really mean? As luck would have it, I have recently been reading abo...
What can the Amazons teach us?
06 March 2025
It is a fact – even though it may have escaped The New York Times – that the Amazons were real fighting and warring women of the Scythian steppes, which extended from the Danube basin all the way to Mongolia. In t...
The evolution of diplomacy: From personal ties to institutional networks
27 February 2025
(probably a light-hearted or light-minded fairy tale) I’ll maintain that, in order to remain useful, diplomacy has been Protean in the past and will be even more so in the future. In particular, I’ll show how d...
Subhas Chandra Bose: A tragic destiny
19 February 2025
I’m not sure how many people outside India know of Subhas Chandra Bose, a major leader of this country’s independence movement who, after escaping from The British Raj at the onset of WWII, set up the Provisional ...
Overcoming overconsumption: Lessons from Wikipedia
06 February 2025
In her article 'Over-Consumption Model Needs Replacement, Not Tinkering' on the Fung Global Institute website, Pamela Mar posted the following comment: Our collective challenge is to look beyond the current econom...
From fire to flight: Key milestones in human evolution
28 January 2025
(If anyone thinks writing about evolution in a diplomacy blog is far-fetched, I’ll point to Robert Sapolsky’s article 'A Natural History of Peace’) We’ll never know for sure, but on the path to humankind’...
The rights of future generations: A practical approach
10 January 2025
The Brundtland Commission and the rise of sustainable development While there were certainly many precursors, the ‘rights of future generations’ theme entered the international political mainstream with the Bru...
Micro and macro philosophy
03 January 2025
That’s what it is to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those… of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be alwa...
Unofficial diplomacy: Jean-Yves Ollivier
21 December 2024
If you want to go into an African village, always let someone from the village accompany you.– Félix Houphouët-Boigny, President of the Ivory Coast Since their beginnings in the Renaissance (see Renaissance Dip...
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