Publications

This account of the complex negotiation process on the final status of Kosovo analyses how the international community ended up with the very result of independence that it had most wanted to avoid at the outbreak of the crisis. It tracks the process from the initial negotiations in Vienna in 2006 to Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008.

This policy brief reviews the recent US National Intelligence report on global trends in 2025, which predicts a more multipolar and heterogenous world, characterised by non-state actors and rising powers with different priorities such as China, India and Russia. In a world where Europe risks losing its clout, the brief urges the US and the EU to work together in reforming multilateral structures, developing common strategies to engage the new global players, and facing new environmental, demographic and economic challenges.

Barack Obama won the election of 4 November because he communicated effectively to the Americans that he is the candidate of change. Indeed in all major respects Obama could not be more different from the outgoing and unpopular President Bush. Unlike Bush, Obama is a man of humble origins, brought up outside mainstream America: in Indonesia and Hawaii.

So far the European Union has not been very successful in its attempts to apply a strict positive conditionality approach towards Belarus. Since the parliamentary elections in 2000 − the first national elections after the controversial constitutional referendum of 1996 − Belarusian elections have been treated by the EU as a litmus test for the improvement of relations.