Author: M Barbu

The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers “freedom” from Putin’s labor camps only to send those released convicts to the front lines of the conflict, often on brutal suicide missions.

The United States operates the world’s largest immigration detention system. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains migrants and asylum seekers in some 200 facilities, including privately operated detention facilities, local jails, juvenile detention centres, field offices, and “family residential centres.” On any given day, it can have upwards of 30,000 non-citizens in detention, which includes the tens of thousands of people apprehended every month on the U.S.-Mexico border by a separate enforcement agency, Customs and Border Protection. The costs of ICE’s detention operations are astronomical: The FY2023 detention budget was 2.9 billion USD.

On Tuesday 25 April, the GDP held the fourth in its series of interactive webinars designed to help grassroots activists learn how to harness the UN human rights system to challenge abusive and arbitrary detention practices in their countries.

In his article, “The Unipolar Moment”1, which was based on a series of lectures delivered in Washington, D.C. in September 1990, Charles Krauthammer wrote that a new world order was emerging in which the United States would be the only superpower. In the second paragraph of the article, Krauthammer introduced three main theses being discussed in the US political science community at the time: (1) the rise of multipolarity (interestingly enough, he suggests a “diminished Soviet Union/Russia” as one future pole, thus anticipating the collapse of the Soviet Union), (2) weakened consensus on foreign policy within the US, and (3) a diminishing of the threat of war in the post-Soviet era. Krauthammer promptly dismissed these arguments as erroneous, and instead spoke of the coming triumph of a unipolar world under the undisputed dominance of the US and its Western allies. Krauthammer did, however, immediately make one reservation: “No doubt, multipolarity will come in time. In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era.”

The world is presently in the midst of an epochal transition from unipolarity to multipolarity that is expected to characterize the foreseeable decades of the 21st century, if not its entirety. There are multiple dimensions to this paradigm-shifting process, which can leave observers completely overwhelmed when trying to make sense of it all, and most analysts tend to focus just on one or a couple factors while leaving out the rest of the bigger picture. This isn’t through any deliberate fault of their own, but rather due to their expert specialization in certain fields and the attendant time commitments that this typically entails, both of which largely hold them back from researching other related trends and grasping a comprehensive sense of everything else that’s happening.

The international system and the world order are going through deep turmoil today

There is full agreement in science that the modern international order and the modern system of international relations developed after the end of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the conclusion of the Westphalia Treaty (1648).