Quadriga - Global Security: Cooperation or Confrontation?
Old enemies become new allies and emerging countries demand more of a say: Whether at the UN, NATO or within the European Union. Coalitions of the willing are necessary because few foreign policy goals can be achieved unilaterally. Globalization means major new opportunities but also new risks and fewer certainties. This can have a major, and sometimes debilitating, influence on policy in individual countries. The global financial crisis has underlined how dependent countries are on each other, and shown how the complete euro zone can be put in jeopardy.
Old threats remain - war, weapons of mass destruction, natural disasters, food shortages – but new ones, including terrorism and organized crime, have emerged.
How can states best protect themselves against these threats? Which values should all states be required to adhere to? What should a system of international law look like? Which states have the biggest influence? How can we all live in a safer world? How can states on the one hand act as controls of each other and on the other respect each other? And who will set the rules?
Tell us you opinion: Global Security: Cooperation or Confrontation?
Our guests:
Markus Kaim - After graduating in political science, Markus Kaim went to Washington on a fellowship. That was followed by time spent lecturing at the University of Jena, and later back in Washington. In 2007 he went to Toronto as a guest lecturer having worked since 2005 for the Research Division "International Security" at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. Today he's the head of that division.
Alexander Rahr - After completing studies in history and political science at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, Rahr became a researcher at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's research institute in Munich and later a project manager at the former German Federal Institute for Eastern European and International Studies in Cologne. He is a member of the steering committee of the Petersburg Dialogue, a program to promote understanding between German and Russian civil society. Rahr has been the head of the Berthold-Beitz Center (a think-tank on Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Central Asia) and has written several books about Russia. They include two biographies – one on Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 and one on Vladimir Putin in 2000.
Alison Smale - is a British journalist who graduated from Stanford University in the US. In December 2008, she became the first woman to take up the post of Executive Editor at the International Herald Tribune. In an article about the IHT's redesign in April 2009, which Smale oversaw, The Independent called her "the most powerful British female editor overseas." In her reporting days, Alison Smale was AP's bureau chief for Eastern Europe, where she covered the rise of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and changes in Russia. As Deputy Foreign Editor at The New York Times she organized much of the paper's coverage of the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan. She is now the New York Times bureau chief in Berlin.