By Dr Robert Crowcroft

If there is one observation that everyone thinks to be true, it is that the United Nations is a humanitarian vehicle for doing good around the world. Perhaps. But certainly not in the sense that is usually presented to Western publics. The UN Charter was shaped by the wartime 'Big Three' (America, Britain, and the Soviet Union) and ratified on 24 October 1945; yet this document was decidedly not a vehicle for Utopianism and delusion. Instead, it constituted a thoroughly conventional framework for a 'Concert' of the major powers, through which these states would impose stability on the rest of the world. The difficulty is that in contemporary public debate there exists deep misunderstanding as to what the United Nations is for. At a time when financial stringency is likely to further diminish the West's standing, parliamentarians and other opinion-formers need to be far more aware of how the UN was actually conceived.

By Leila Ouardani

No, most of our political elite have not realized that the world is flat - Thomas Friedman

As Thomas Friedman's "flatness" metaphor observes, the compression of time and space and the easy movement of people, weapons, toxins, drugs, knowledge and ideas have transformed the way in which threats emerge and challenged the traditional modes of obtaining security used by policymakers. The complexities underlying these transnational movements contest established International Relations theories of agency and scope and have made it increasingly difficult to

By David Hoghton-Carter, Research Associate U K Defence Forum

In 1648, a new world order emerged. The Treaty of Westphalia, putting an end to decades of war in continental Europe, set out the basics of the modern idea of the co-equal sovereign nation-state, and laid the foundations for three and a half centuries of international politics. Academics have waxed lyrical about it, students have been bored to tears learning about it, statesmen and politicians have cleaved to it as the cornerstone of the right to see to the affairs of their disparate nations without anyone else arbitrarily telling them what to do.

Elayne Jude, Great North News Services, reports

Russian Prime Minister Putin signed a clutch of energy deals with Japan during a 24 hour stopover Wednesday 13th May. On the same day President Medvedev announced Russia's new security strategy, a keystone of which is Russia's reiteration of her claims to Arctic territory thought to contain vast oil resources, and her right to use military means as necessary in support of those claims.