The uprising in North Africa and the Middle East calls for a thorough rethinking of the European Union’s and its member states’ policies towards the region. Europe’s reaction to the recent events in its backyard has been slow, ambivalent and witho…

In one of his last blog posts, Duncan Green pointed to Martin Jacques’ fascinating TED talk : Understanding the rise of China, which offers some confrontational and thought-provoking glimpses of China and its future role in the world.China will be…

Owen Barder writes in his latest blog post about the spending plans for the coming four years the Conservative government in the UK presented yesterday. ‘Overall, this spending review is a seismic political event’, Barder writes, with spending cut…

The Netherlands has a new government: Rutte-Verhagen. A two-party government (the ‘liberal’ VVD led by Mark Rutte, and Christian Democrat CDA led by Maxime Verhagen) that legitimizes right-wing populist, anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, by ope…

Whatever we think about the US or about the MDGs, a speech by an American president is always worth analyzing. Development, in the end, is about power and power relations. And the US is still the greatest power in the world. On Wednesday, the fina…

Last Sunday, my activities centred around Central Park. It was such a perfect day, sunny and warm. An Indian Summer. I started from the stiff and stuffy Upper East Side, where the only people you see during the week are cute little ‘Caucasian’ whi…

Some countries stage high-level side events to show their commitment to the MDGs or otherwise underline their own priorities. Today I went to one, organized by the German government and presided by German chancellor Angela Merkel herself. She mode…

I am now in a hilarious meeting. It is called the High Level Side-Event about ‘Innovative Financing for the MDGs’. It started by refusing entry to a group of forty people – journalists, NGOs, delegations – for half an hour. Nobody knew why. When w…

I am in New York for the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On Monday morning, the delegates from the UN member states will officially finalize the talks about how the targets set for 2015 can be met, despite the lack of progres…

Yesterday, the Davids Commission – a high-level group of independent experts appointed by the government – presented its report into the Dutch decision-making process regarding the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This came after a year of research, incl…