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11. Re-thinking scales and culture: Rome and the city in and beyond IPE

Author:
Nana Rodaki
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
The article argues that critical International Political Economy can benefit from a trans-disciplinary approach to the role of cities as socio-economic actors in the global political economy. The constitution and exercise of agency is far from an automatic response to the global restructuring of capitalist social relations, but the product of historically and context-specific economic and extra-economic social processes and social struggles. Cities (re)emerge as subjects and objects of governance and intervention and seek to become (dis)embedded in multi-scalar networks of economic and symbolic power. In this process, they become active co-producers of the global political economy, in ways that cut across spatial scales and narrow geographical imaginations.
Topic:
International Political Economy and Culture
Political Geography:
Rome

12. Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Author:
Daniel Wahl
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
In 1943, on the coast of Andalusia in southwest Spain, a dead man “washed ashore wearing a fake uniform and the underwear of a dead Oxford don, with a love letter from a girl he had never known pressed to his long-dead heart” (pp. 323–24). It was near the high point of the Third Reich's reign, with Europe effectively under Nazi control; but, owing in part to this dead man, Hitler's days were numbered. Ben Macintyre tells the story of this fantastic ruse in Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. The book may read like fiction, but remarkably, the story is completely true. It begins during World War II when the Nazi war machine “was at last beginning to stutter and misfire.” The British Eighth Army under Montgomery had vanquished Rommel's invincible Afrika Korps at El Alamein. The Allied invasion of Morocco and Tunisia had fatally weakened Germany's grip, and with the liberation of Tunis, the Allies would control the coast of North Africa, its ports and airfields, from Casablanca to Alexandria. The time had come to lay siege to Hitler's Fortress [across Europe]. But where? Sicily was the logical place from which to deliver the gut punch into what Churchill famously called the soft “underbelly of the Axis.” The island at the toe of Italy's boot commanded the channel linking the two sides of the Mediterranean, just eighty miles from the Tunisian coast. . . . The British in Malta and Allied convoys had been pummeled by Luftwaffe bombers taking off from the island, and . . . “no major operation could be launched, maintained, or supplied until the enemy airfields and other bases in Sicily had been obliterated so as to allow free passage through the Mediterranean.” An invasion of Sicily would open the road to Rome . . . allow for preparations to invade France, and perhaps knock a tottering Italy out of the war. . . . [Thus]: Sicily would be the target, the precursor to the invasion of mainland Europe. (pp. 36–37) There was a major problem, however. Macintyre points out that the strategic importance of Sicily was as clear to the Nazis as it was to the Allies and that, if the Nazis were prepared for it, an invasion would be a bloodbath. So how could the Allies catch their enemy off guard? The solution was to launch what Macintyre calls one of the most extraordinary deception operations ever attempted. The British Secret Service would take a dead man and plant on him fake documents that suggested that the Allies were planning to bomb Sicily only as an initial feint preceding an attack on Nazi forces in Greece and Sardinia. They would then float their man near the Spanish coastline, making it appear as though he drowned at sea, and hope that one of the many Nazi spies in Spain discovered him and the documents and passed their content along to his superiors—convincing them to weaken Sicily by moving forces to Greece and Sardinia. . . .
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Europe, Germany, Tunisia, Rome, and Alexandria

13. U.S. Missile Defence Site in Europe as an Aliance Security Dilemma

Author:
Lukáš KANTOR
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The main aim of this article is to provide a more solid theoretical anchor for numerous past and present debates about the various versions of American missile defence in Europe. The author claims that the neo-realism's concept of alliance security dilemma is the most appropriate framework for Czech, Polish, Romanian, and EU-wide experts'reflections and political decisions regarding the possible accepting of elements of American or NATO missile defence. Under appreciated explanatory power of the concept of the alliance's security dilemma is illustrated in the text on the case of the original Bush's plan of the so-called third pillar in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Topic:
Security and NATO
Political Geography:
United States, America, Europe, Poland, Rome, and Czech Republic

14. The Berlusconi Government and Intervention in Libya

Author:
Ben Lombardi
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The International Spectator
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
This article offers an explanation for Italian decision-making in the early weeks of the Libyan crisis. Of the European NATO allies that have been engaged in military operations, none have been so conflict-ridden as Italy. It is the member of the European Union (EU) whose interests, economic and political, are most directly engaged by the unrest. Rome understood from the outset that those interests would be severely challenged by a policy of confrontation with the Qadhafi regime. Indeed, the government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi sought to maintain its longstanding relationship with Tripoli alongside its traditional solidarity with EU partners and NATO allies. From the beginning, that effort proved very difficult, and was ultimately made impossible by the approval of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (17 March 2011). Italian leaders were then forced to make choices that they originally had very much wanted t o avoid. By early-April, they endorsed the efforts by both the EU and the NATO-led force to effect Qadhafi's removal and later recognised the rebel alliance. Rome agreed to contribute forces to help enforce the arms embargo and allowed NATO to use seven air bases. Although Italian forces were initially not permitted to engage in combat, by late April even that caveat had been withdrawn.
Political Geography:
Europe, Libya, and Rome

15. Amendments to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Considered at the First Review Conference on the Court, Kampala, 31 May-11 June 2010

Author:
Roger S. Clark
Publication Date:
08-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Institution:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:
The first Review Conference on the International Criminal Court had three items on its agenda proposing amendments to the Rome Statute. The proposal to delete Article 124 of the Statute (which permits States to opt out of the war crimes provisions of the Statute for seven years) failed. Proposals for a comprehensive set of provisions facilitating the Court's exercise of its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression were adopted. The existing provisions on weapons that are banned in international armed conflict were incorporated also into the part of the Statute dealing with non-international armed conflicts.
Political Geography:
Rome and Kampala

16. The International Criminal Court's Exercise of Jurisdiction Over the Crime of Aggression – at Last … in Reach … Over Some

Author:
Astrid Reisinger Coracini
Publication Date:
08-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Institution:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:
The first review conference to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, held in June 2010 in Kampala successfully concluded decades of negotiations over a statutory definition of the crime of aggression and its prosecution by a permanent international criminal court. The main unresolved issues to be addressed by the review conference concerned the determination of an act of aggression as a (procedural) prerequisite for the exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression and the appropriate activation procedure for a provision on aggression. Most importantly, the compromise of Kampala could safeguard an independent and effective criminal prosecution of the crime of aggression by not subjugating the Court's exercise of jurisdiction to decisions of outside organs. However, in case of a referral of a situation by a State Party or the initiation of a proprio motu investigation, the Court's reach over perpetrators is significantly narrowed with a view to crimes of aggression involving a non-state party or a state-party that does not accept the Court's exercise of jurisdiction. These concessions, built on state consent to the exercise of criminal prosecution over individuals and elements of reciprocity, concepts that are alien to the Rome Statute, form part of a political compromise that enabled the activation of the Court's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.
Political Geography:
Rome and Kampala

17. Bridging the Divide: The reform of global food security governance

Author:
Chris Leather
Publication Date:
11-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
Another World Food Summit is being held in Rome to discuss world food security, in the midst of a chronic global food crisis in which one billion (one in six) people go to bed hungry every day of their shortened lives. During the two-and-a-half days of the Summit, more than 60,000 people, 70 per cent of them children, will die of hunger-related causes.
Topic:
Security, Agriculture, Food, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
Rome

18. Control of Illegal Immigration and Italian-EU Relations

Author:
Bruno Nascimbene
Publication Date:
08-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
Controlling maritime borders and flows of illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean is an issue where sharp tensions have been evident for some months now at the national, EU and international levels. Tensions evidenced by the reactions and outcry provoked by operations involving Italian naval units which have intercepted boats carrying migrants and sent them back to their ports of departure, most notably in Libya. The migrants concerned were deemed to be illegal regardless of their possible asylum-seeker status. Such interventions have raised, and continue to raise, concerns over the fate of the persons involved, especially as regards the protection of their fundamental human rights.
Topic:
Maritime Commerce, Immigration, and Law Enforcement
Political Geography:
Europe, Libya, Italy, and Rome

19. Ancient and Modern Empires: The United States as the New Rome

Author:
Riccardo Monaco
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The International Spectator
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
Review of: Are we Rome? : the fall of an empire and the fate of America, Cullen Murphy, Houghton Mifflin, 2007
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Rome

20. PolicyWatch #1296: Larijani's Resignation: Implications for Iranian Nuclear Policy and Internal Politics

Author:
Mehdi Khalaji
Publication Date:
10-2007
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
The October 20 announcement of Ali Larijani's resignation as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has intensified pressure on President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad. Faced with criticism over the resignation, Tehran ensured that Larijani attended the Iran-European Union (EU) nuclear talks in Rome on October 23. His continued presence in the negotiations raises serious questions about who is in charge of Iran's nuclear policy and other key issues, making the regime's intentions even more of an enigma to the Europeans. As EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana stated after the Rome meeting, "I found the same Larijani I had met before, and he had the role of chief negotiator."
Topic:
Government and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
Europe, Iran, Middle East, Tehran, and Rome