Case 1 - Future of Assad in doubt as UN unanimously supports Syria peace process

(Kevin Rawlinson, 19Dec2015, The Guardian.com)

Resolution signals rare show of unity from 15-nation council, although future of president Bashar al-Assad
is not mentioned
The UN security council has unanimously agreed a resolution endorsing an international roadmap for a
peace process in Syria, a rare show of unity among major powers on a conflict that has claimed more than
250,000 lives. “This council is sending a clear message to all concerned that the time is now to stop the
killing in Syria and lay the groundwork for a government that the long-suffering people of that battered
land can support,” the US secretary of state, John Kerry, told the 15-nation council after the vote. The
resolution came after Russia and the US clinched a deal on a text. The two powers have had very different
views on what should happen in Syria, where Islamic State militants control considerable territory. Kerry
made clear that there were still differences on the future of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, a close
ally of Russia and Iran. Western governments want him to be ousted. The resolution does not touch on the
question of Assad’s fate. “We are under no illusions about the obstacles that exist,” added Kerry. “There
obviously remain sharp differences within the international community, especially about the future of
President Assad.”
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said of the resolution: “This is a clear response to attempts to
impose a solution from the outside on Syrians on any issues, including those regarding its president.” The
French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said talks between the Syrian government and opposition would
only succeed if there were “guarantees on the departure” of Assad. Fabius said: “How could this man unite
a people that he has in part massacred? The idea that he could once again stand for elections is
unacceptable to us.”
The text called for the UN to present the council with options for monitoring a ceasefire within one month
of adoption of the resolution. It also backed a timeline previously agreed in Vienna for talks between the
government on a unity government and opposition, and eventual elections.
The talks between Syria’s government and opposition should begin in early January, the resolution said. It
also endorsed the continued battle to defeat Isis. The British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, called the
resolution a “significant step” towards ending the civil war. But he accepted that there was “still a very long
way to go” and that the text failed to address what role Assad should play. Britain remains insistent that
Assad can remain in place temporarily as part of a transitional administration, but cannot have a long-term
role in government. Hammond said: “This process necessarily involves the departure of Bashar al-Assad,
not only for moral reasons because of the destruction that he has unleashed on his own people, but also for
practical reasons – because it will never be possible to bring peace and unity to Syria as long as he remains
in office. “But we must and will protect the institutions that are necessary for the future governance of
Syria and that will be possible with a representative transitional governing body.” Kerry praised “the
unprecedented degree of unity” in the council, which has been stymied in the past over a political solution
in Syria, and called the resolution a milestone.
Foreign ministers met for more than five hours to discuss how to implement their call in Vienna last month
for a ceasefire and the start of negotiations between the government and opposition in early January. At the
same time, diplomats worked to overcome divisions on the text of the resolution.
The resulting agreement “gives the Syrian people a real choice, not between Assad and Daesh, but between
war and peace”, Kerry said, using the Arabic acronym for Isis. “We’re under no illusions about the
obstacles that exist ... especially about the future of President Assad”, where “sharp differences” remain,
Kerry said. But he made clear that Assad must go if there is to be peace in Syria. “Assad has lost the ability
... to unite the country,” Kerry said. “If the war is to end, it is imperative that the Syrian people have to
agree on an alternative” to their government.

Questions:
1. Can a resolution of this kind be regarded as an example of a successful global governance?
2. What role does the UN Security Council play in global governance?
3. How significant is this resolution in the process of peacemaking in Syria? Why is it described as a „rare
show of unity“?
4. What are its key limitations?
 Case 2 - Paris climate change agreement: the world's greatest diplomatic success
(Fiona Harvey, 14Dec2015, The Guardian.com)
With all 196 nations having a say, the UN climate deal, with all its frustrations and drama, has proven that
compromise works for the planet
In the final meeting of the Paris talks on climate change on Saturday night, the debating chamber was full
and the atmosphere tense. Ministers from 196 countries sat behind their country nameplates, aides flocking
them, with observers packed into the overflowing hall.
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, talked animatedly with his officials, while China’s foreign minister
Xie Zhenhua wore a troubled look. They had been waiting in this hall for nearly two hours. The French
hosts had trooped in to take their seats on the stage, ready to applaud on schedule at 5.30pm – but it was
now after 7pm, and the platform was deserted. After two weeks of fraught negotiations, was something
going badly wrong? Then at 7.16pm, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, returned abruptly to the
stage, flanked by high-ranking UN officials. The last-minute compromises had been resolved, he said. And
suddenly they were all on their feet. Fabius brought down the green-topped gavel, a symbol of UN talks,
and announced that a Paris agreement had been signed. The delegates were clapping, cheering and
whistling wildly, embracing and weeping. Even the normally reserved economist Lord Stern was
whooping. Outside the hall, a “Mexican wave” of standing ovations rippled across the conference centre as
news reached participants gathered around screens outside for the translation into their own language. The
50,000 people who attended the summit had been waiting for this moment, through marathon negotiating
sessions and sleepless nights. The contrast with the last global attempt to resolve climate change, at
Copenhagen in 2009, which collapsed into chaos and recriminations, could not have been greater. In a city
recently hit by terrorist attacks that left 130 dead and scores more critically injured, collective will had
prevailed. Paris produced an agreement hailed as “historic, durable and ambitious”. Developed and
developing countries alike are required to limit their emissions to relatively safe levels, of 2C with an
aspiration of 1.5C, with regular reviews to ensure these commitments can be increased in line with
scientific advice. Finance will be provided to poor nations to help them cut emissions and cope with the
effects of extreme weather. Countries affected by climate-related disasters will gain urgent aid.
Like any international compromise, it is not perfect: the caps on emissions are still too loose, likely to lead
to warming of 2.7 to 3C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the 2C threshold that scientists say is the
limit of safety, beyond which the effects – droughts, floods, heatwaves and sea level rises – are likely to
become catastrophic and irreversible. Poor countries are also concerned that the money provided to them
will not be nearly enough to protect them. Not all of the agreement is legally binding, so future
governments of the signatory countries could yet renege on their commitments.
These flaws may shadow the future of climate change action, but on Saturday night they took second place.
As the news spread through the world, the reaction from civil society groups, governments and businesses,
was overwhelmingly positive. Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, summed up
the mood: “It sometimes seems that the countries of the UN can unite on nothing, but nearly 200 countries
have come together and agreed a deal. Today, the human race has joined in a common cause. The Paris
agreement is only one step on a long road and there are parts of it that frustrate, that disappoint me, but it is
progress. The deal alone won’t dig us out of the hole that we’re in, but it makes the sides less steep.”
Even as delegates celebrated at the conference’s end, there was a palpable sense of relief from the
exhausted French hosts. At many points in this fortnight of marathon negotiating sessions, it looked as if a
deal might be beyond reach. That it ended in success was a tribute in part to their diligence and efficiency
and the efforts of the UN. “France has brought openness and experience in diplomacy, and mutual respect
to these talks,” said Stern, one of the world’s leading climate economists. “They have taken great care to
make everyone listened to, that they were consulted. There was a great sense of openness, of professional
diplomacy, and skill.” Saturday night was the culmination not only of a fortnight of talks, but of more than
23 years of international attempts under the UN to forge collective action on this global problem. Since
1992, all of the world’s governments had been pledging to take measures that would avoid dangerous
warming. Those efforts were marked by discord and failure, the refusal of the biggest emitters to take part,
ineffective agreements and ignored treaties. For these reasons, the Paris talks were widely seen as make-or-
break for the UN process. If they failed, collective global efforts would be at an end and the world would be
left without a just and robust means of tackling climate change. (...)
Questions:
1. How significant is this agreeement?How much can it contribute to battling the climate change?
2. What are its key limitations? Do IGO's and NGO's have enough power to impose the decision on states?
3. What do you think of the statement that “compromise works on this planet“?
 Case 3 - Doha is dead. Hopes for fairer global trade shouldn’t die, too
(Heather Stuart,20Dec2015, The Guardian.com)
It’s a sign of how Doha failed that leftwing protestors no longer target it as a symbol of capitalism. But
some good things will fade with it
Over the past few days, trade ministers from scores of countries have spent hours flogging the long-dead
horse that is the Doha round of global trade talks in Nairobi – and hardly anyone noticed. The World Trade
Organisation, which convened last week’s conference, was once regularly targeted by protesters as the
secretive, all-powerful puppet master of global capitalism. Back in 1999, in the innocent days before the
sub-prime crisis laid bare the sinister power of international finance, WTO talks in Seattle broke down amid
clouds of tear gas, as anti-capitalist protesters expressed their fury at the rigged rules of the global
marketplace, which, as they saw it, entrenched the wealth of the rich and excluded the poor. Yet last week’s
gathering, attended by Britain’s Lord (Francis) Maude, barely registered with the world’s angry young
radicals, who have turned their attention to bashing bankers – through the Occupy movement, for example.
As it became clearer in recent years that the Doha round was dying, the anti-poverty campaigners who once
spent hours poring over the intricate details of cotton subsidies and sugar tariffs have moved on too.
Launched in late 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York, the Doha round was meant to open up
new opportunities for developing countries to trade their way out of poverty and drive the next stage of
what then seemed the unstoppable progress of globalisation. But 14 years of talks have failed to yield an
achievable deal; indeed, the issues dividing the main protagonists have barely shifted since negotiations
collapsed acrimoniously in Geneva in July 2008. Back then, I watched US trade representative Susan
Schwab lambast her Indian and Chinese counterparts for wanting to protect their farmers from cut-price
imports. This issue of “special safeguards” was still being scrapped over in Nairobi. Doha failed for many
reasons, some more worrisome than others. It was probably always far too ambitious to try to tie up
simultaneous deals across agriculture, manufacturing and services. The hope was that countries would give
ground in some areas in return for concessions elsewhere, but this unwieldy, triple-track approach meant
deadlock in one area led to comprehensive failure. The one-country-one-vote constitution that makes the
WTO a more democratic institution than, for example, the International Monetary Fund, also makes
negotiations cumbersome and decision-making clunky. Political capital was another key challenge:
lowering barriers to foreign competition is a tough domestic sell, especially in hard times when workers
feel their jobs may be vulnerable. Optimists at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters hoped President Obama
would swing his weight behind their efforts to improve the global trading system, but other priorities – not
least the fraught passing of his healthcare reforms – have always seemed more pressing in Washington,
where suspicion of unfettered free trade runs deep on both sides of Congress. And most recently, a
flowering of “plurilateral” deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership between the US and Japan, has seen
groups of like-minded countries – economic coalitions of the willing – sign up to liberalisation on their own
terms. Meanwhile, the nature of contemporary capitalism means the hot political issues are no longer
import tariffs or agricultural subsidies but international taxation, financialisation and freedom of movement
for migrant workers.
If Doha is dead, some noble aspirations will be buried with it. It was conceived as a “development round” –
offering poor countries a stake in the global trading system to tackle poverty and prevent them from
becoming recruiting grounds for terrorism. It became increasingly clear, though, that rich countries were
unwilling, or politically unable, to offer much without a quid pro quo – and developing countries don’t
have much to give. So what began as an expression of the spirit of internationalism quickly descended into
a series of cross-cutting mercantilist spats. And while trade liberalisation continues apace through
plurilateral deals between powerful trading blocs, these rarely include the poorest countries. Afghanistan
became the WTO’s latest fully signed-up member in Nairobi last week. (This was one of the few concrete
announcements to come out of the summit.) But it is joining a train that has been stuck in the station for
more than a decade. The WTO still has a crucial role to play, as the policeman of the world’s trading
system. But after 14 years of deadlock, the ideal of deepening economic relationships between rich and
poor, north and south, in a way that would be mutually beneficial and to which all member countries could
sign up has been extinguished. Even protesters who once saw the WTO as the evil headquarters of
capitalism red in tooth and claw might spare a moment to lament the fading of one-country-one-vote
multilateralism it represented. (The Paris climate talks provided a heartening counter-example – albeit with
few details as to how new emissions targets will be met.) But for those on the left who dream of collective
global solutions to the other pressing ills of modern capitalism, from tax avoidance to reckless financiers,
14 years of failure ought to give pause for thought.
Questions:
1. What does the failure of Doha trade talks suggest about the limits of the global governance?
2. Why is there no success in this case? What role will WTO play in the future?
3. How can „the ideal of deepening economic relationships between rich and poor, north and south, in a
way that would be mutually beneficial and to which all member countries could sign up“ be accomplished?

Case 4 - Ebola is over in west Africa, says World Health Organisation

(Lisa O'Carroll, Sam Jones, 14Jan2016, The Guardian.com)
After last patient in Liberia tests negative, WHO hails ‘monumental achievement’
The World Health Organisation has declared the end of the Ebola epidemic in west Africa, with all known
chains of transmission of the virus stopped. The announcement comes two years after the first case in a
small rural village in Guinea, 42 days after the last patient tested negative in Liberia and almost two months
after the last case in Sierra Leone.
The virus, which can kill within five days of infection, devastated the region’s economies and ripped
through communities, killing more than 11,000 people and infecting more than 28,500. The WHO, which
admitted that it had failed to respond quickly enough when the virus was spreading in the summer of 2014,
said the battle was not over yet. Dr Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, said: “Detecting and breaking
every chain of transmission has been a monumental achievement. “So much was needed and so much was
accomplished by national authorities, heroic health workers, civil society, local and international
organisations and generous partners. But our work is not done and vigilance is necessary to prevent new
outbreaks,” she added.
Liberia had been declared Ebola free in May 2014 but was hit again months later because of the latency of
the virus. While Ebola clears from the blood relatively quickly in survivors, it can remain in some male
survivors for up to a year, causing a risk of sexual transmission. Virologists discovered last year that the
virus can also linger in the spinal fluid, after the Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey developed meningitis
caused by the virus nine months after she had received the all clear. The case of American doctor Ian
Crozier also demonstrated that the virus can also linger in ocular fluid after one of his eyes became
damaged and changed colour.
On Wednesday, a report from a group of international health experts convened in the wake of the crisis
warned that infectious diseases represented a threat matched only by wars and natural disasters when it
comes to endangering life and disrupting societies. But despite the scale of the menace, the Commission on
Creating a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future found that efforts to prepare for pandemics have
been chronically underfunded. It says a global investment of £3bn each year – or 40p a person – would go a
long way to reduce the threat posed by infectious diseases. The report recommends strengthening health
systems in low-income countries as a first line of defence, establishing a permanent WHO health
emergency centre to lead and coordinate defences and action, and stepping up research and development
into infectious diseases through an annual investment of at least £686m. The WHO has faced fierce and
sustained criticism over its handling of the crisis: the delay in sounding the alarm slowed the deployment of
medical personnel, protective gear and medicines, and prompted calls for the organisation to be stripped of
its role in declaring disease outbreaks as international emergencies. The WHO was also found to have toned
down its own admissions of failure. In April last year, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appointed a
high-level panel to study the lessons of the Ebola crisis and improve the world’s response to health crises. A
WHO spokesman said it had learned much from the outbreak and had already embarked on a “profound
shift” towards becoming a fully operational emergency organisation. Joanne Liu, Médecins Sans
Frontières’ international president, welcomed the announcement but warned against complacency. “Today
is a day of celebration and relief that this outbreak is finally over,” she said. “We must all learn from this
experience to improve how we respond to future epidemics and to neglected diseases. This Ebola response
was not limited by lack of international means but by a lack of political will to rapidly deploy assistance to
help communities. The needs of patients and affected communities must remain at the heart of any response
and outweigh political interests.”

Questions:
1. Would you agree that the success in the fight against Ebola was a „monumental achievement“?
2. Why was WHO criticized? What things could have been done better?
3. How much does this case help explain strengths and weaknesses of the global governence?