The Broker Online
The Broker Online

Author

Ko Colijn

Ko Colijn

Ko Colijn (1951) is special professor of Global Security Issues at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is also well known as a journalist, columnist for the weekly Vrij Nederland and commentator on radio (Radio 1, BNR and ‘het oog op morgen’, Belgian VRT) and television (NOS Journaal and NOVA) on war and peace, international arms trade, terrorism and the war on terror, foreign policy and multilateral organizations like the UN or the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. He lectures at the Clingendael Institute and is board member of the Nederlands Genootschap voor Internationale Zaken. He graduated in 1989 with a study of Dutch arms export policy.

System crisis

Three months ago, the term ‘system crisis’ was only heard in think tanks and sleepy research institutes. Who else worried about it? Now it is competing with ‘meltdown’ to become the most-used term in newspapers and on the television and radio.

Mind the gap

Thomas P.M. Barnett has given well over a thousand presentations worldwide. Barrett is a well known defence expert whose career trajectory has run from Harvard University to the US Naval War College, and from being just another Soviet Union specialist to the general strategic futures explorer in the Bush Administration.

Talk talk - Conflict mediation on the rise

Collecting data on conflict resolution trends began in the 1960s with the early empirical research by the Correlates of War Project. However, little international follow up on the study was done until the surprisingly optimistic findings of the Human Security Report appeared in 2005. The study reported a decline in armed conflict and war fatalities, and its findings increased interest in conflict resolution research.

Do-it-yourself crisis making - NATO and the trap of success

It is a well known anecdote that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was inaugurated back in 1949 with a small ceremony in the Department of State, during which the house orchestra played George Gershwin’s I Got Plenty of Nothing. Indeed, diplomats of a dozen member countries raised their champagne glasses and congratulated each other with promises, not guarantees.

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