The year 2010 commemorated ten years of the adoption of Resolution 1325 by the UNSC but the commemoration is without celebration. The apparent dissonance between the policy and the practice of the Resolution 1325 renders it inappropriate. This paper reviews the evolution of gender perspective in UN peacekeeping operations and assesses the gains and failures of the Resolution 1325 in gender balancing, recruitment and retention of women in the security sector.
Soon after naming the North Korean regime as its “enemy”, South Korea has, quite abruptly, invoked the desirability of reverting to the Six-Party Talks.
Would China’s strategic error in inviting Japanese hostility place more blocks to its rise as an unchallenged regional power or would it be able to override the Japanese threat in ample measure by altering its strategic game and finding a meeting ground with the United States?
The UNSC statement is more a testimony to Sino-US compromise arrived at after nearly a month and half of negotiations rather than being a “diplomatic victory” as has been hailed by North Korea.
The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) emphasis two realities, first the challenge of nuclear terrorism and proliferation; and second, it affirms the end of the Cold War rivalries. But the “resetting” of relationship with Moscow had created an enemy vacuum for the U.S. To fill this gap, North Korea has been constructed as an enemy which justifies the continuity of the “nuclear umbrella” in the Northeast Asian region. But as an asymmetrical, surrogate enemy it is actually the pretext to maintain ‘critical bases’ in Northeast Asia which functions as hubs for U.S. global military power projection.
The issue at stake is the US upholding and expanding its role as the key shaper of geopolitics in Northeast Asia, and China unwilling to be sidelined by the United States.
