“Abandoning diplomacy for confrontation.....is a dive over a cliff,” - Antonio Guterres, UN Chief

“Soft power” is a term associated with political scientist Joseph Nye. He defines soft power as “the ability to shape the preferences of others,” or essentially when one country influences the desired outcomes of other states through persuasion, education, public opinion, and appeal of cultural ideals and customs. Nye compares this with “hard power,” which states harness when they use military force or economic pressure to force certain outcomes on the world stage (Wurtz, 2010). Let me admit that having gone through this book, I am inspired to lean more towards neo-liberal approach to international relations. This has been an eye-opener especially for some of us who highly rate America’s hard power. In the early chapters I had the feeling that the author was against military and economic strength but that seems not to be the case. What I have learnt is that military and economic power are essential, but they have their limits. The recent events where protests were held in Ghana aga...

We all remember that period when corvid 19 was ravaging Italy and Spain, recording high death rates and overwhelming numbers of infections. During that time, I listened to a reporter on Aljazeera outlining the progress that was being made on developing a vaccine and eventually a cure. His parting shot was “ our hope is in science ”. I have no problem with science because I believe all knowledge is a blessing from God and that statement reflected the hopelessness of the situation but for those of us who believe in a superior hope, that was a hard one to swallow. I also listened to some prominent preachers push the idea that this virus could actually be from God to remind us to rethink our ways. The fact that there was no certainty to that revelation is excusable but the thought of God unleashing death with a virus whatever the justification is really frightening. That is not the kind of God I have come to know but people believe what they want to believe yet one would ask, “Are we that ...

A methodological review of the paper titled ‘Are Women Peaceful? Reflections on the Role of Women in Peace-Building.’ by Hilary Charlesworth.  According to Charlesworth, the paper examines the way that women’s relationship to peace is constructed in international institutions and international law. It identifies a set of claims about women and peace that are typically made and considers women’s experience in the conflicts in Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. In reviewing this paper methodologically, I will endeavor to look at answering three questions which as stated by Punch(2009) include the ontological question of what reality is like, the epistemological question of what relationship is between that researcher and that reality, and finally the methodological question of what methods can be used or were used in studying the reality. Ontological questions are prior because they deal with the very nature of ‘being’; literally, an ontology is a theory of ‘being’...

I am not a fun of communism or socialism whichever way you may look at it despite the fact that I do accept capitalism has its weaknesses. Nevertheless, there is no system I know of that has lifted many out of poverty like capitalism. Enough of myself, I am here to write about the Odingas! Capitalism is simply an economic and political system whereby control of trade and industry is under profit-making private ownership rather than the state. When it comes to communism, ownership is with the community hence everyone contributes or receives based on their abilities or needs whereas socialism entails a political system that ensures all citizens have an equal allocation of state resources and social ownership of the means of production. The fall out between Jaramogi Oginga Odinga the then Vice president and his boss President Jomo Kenyatta not long after Kenya’s independence threw the young state into an ideological battle of ‘ East and West’ despite attempts to portray a non-aligned i...

“Eastleigh is our umbilical cord. You must arrest anyone who is spoiling Eastleigh — even if he is Adan Barre’s brother. Those who are detonating explosives in Eastleigh should do it elsewhere.”- Majority Leader, Aden Duale (“Duale in tight spot over Shabaab attack and his 30-day list”, 2015). I have retrieved the above quote from the online archives of the Daily Nation, a leading newspaper in Kenya. Wars have been with us for ages so much that there are those who have theorized it as part of human nature. Realist thinkers like Hans Morgenthau in his ‘ politics among nations’ all the way to Kenneth Waltz’s ‘ theory of international politics’ believe the world system is anarchic with no central government thus states must help themselves more so militarily because war is inevitable.   But is war really inevitable? Although inter-state wars have reduced and that partly due to liberal policies of democracy, transnational relations, complex interdependence and institutionalism wh...

I would have titled this article “ Death by China: A Case for Liberal Democracy ” but because it is not right to blame all the Chinese people for the Corvid-19 mess the world is in and bearing in mind the stereotypes that could bring, I have put the blame where it is supposed to be and that is with the leadership of the state. According to Wikipedia, the Communist Party of China (CPC) is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the second largest political party in the world. The CPC is the sole governing party within mainland China. The Corona virus which was given the name Covid-19 by scientists is said to have originated from Wuhan, a prosperous capital of China’s Hubei province although there have been calls not to refer to it as ‘Wuhan’ or ‘Chinese’ virus to avoid stigmatization. Wuhan has an animal market which is suspected to be the origin of the virus. The virus has symptoms like high fever, dry cough and difficulties in breathin...

A review of Kenneth Waltz's article titled ‘Structural Realism After the Cold War’  It is quite disappointing that Kenneth Waltz in trying to justify the relevance of structural realism after the cold war relies majorly on case studies that formed his thinking on balance of power politics while clearly not explaining why 30 years after the end of the cold war, the world is not really in a hurry to balance America’s power. If Europe is comfortable with America’s hegemony, it has to be because it is a liberal democracy otherwise if China was in that position then Europe would be speaking a different language. However, in his attempt to convince us that the United States is a unipolar power, Waltz chooses the path of fantasy where by “what America wants, America gets” but there is a lot out there to challenge this notion. America did not win the Vietnam war despite their capabilities and after 18 years in Afghanistan, there is no path to victory, Europe has rejected Washington...