The World Today: December 2011: December 2011

This time exactly ten years ago, in December 2001, the hunt for Osama bin Laden was on and war was raging in Afghanistan. Way down south, on the other side of the globe, a country was sinking under the weight of its debts and hardly anyone was watching. In Argentina, you could feel the relentless slide towards catastrophe. The papers were talking about the country as a Titanic that had hit its iceberg and was going down.

When Indian and Brazilian citizens took to the streets this year in anti-corruption demonstrations, they were seeking to re-establish control over their politicians and to remedy the widespread failure of governing and opposition parties to address endemic corruption.

The Gleneagles summit of 2005 now seems a world away. Those proud calls to Make Poverty History witnessed the United Kingdom at its best - the international community caught the mood and we were all aboard, bound for a better place.

‘Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed – The MSF Experience’ takes its title from its focus on how one organisation with a strict ethos seeks to work in environments that are in part inimical to the totality of that ethos.

“Starting from scratch” – a term used widely over the summer to describe the challenges faced by the world’s newest state, the Republic of South Sudan. More recently, it has been used to describe the difficulties to be faced during the interim mandate of the National Transitional Council (NTC) following the death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi on October 20.

On December 5, foreign ministers from some ninety countries will converge on the Rhineland city of Bonn to discuss Afghanistan’s future. They will be meeting exactly ten years after an earlier Bonn conference appointed a new government for the country in the wake of the Taliban’s retreat from Kabul.