The growth of world demography and the acceleration of the development processes of the most economically backwards States will create a disquieting progression in the emission of greenhouse gas. This trend shall have inevitable consequences on our planet’s temperature levels : a significant increase is to be expected for the next century. The risks created by this evolution for international security, are multiple and heterogeneous. This climatic warming will be different in each area, (...)  lire suite

The environmental importance of forests and their global relevance were not an occasion, at the Earth Summit (Rio, 1992), to assert a compulsive commitment about the forest sustained management, obvious way to transform it into a global rule. The concept’s supporters, mainly Western and fitted with an old forest tradition have hardly worked to build a forest sustained management, at a regional scale and State cooperation level, in order to apply to themselves. However, Western forests are (...)  lire suite

Public health’s governance came to a turning point when the SARS epidemic occurred in 2003. The crisis was managed by working out a strategy which materialized as an exceptional involvement of the concerned actors together with a big turnout of human and technical means. A quick assessment allowed arranging reply plans in case of any epidemic resumption. The WHO was the driving force, and thus restored its legitimacy by showing its capacity for managing the field of health, considered as a (...)  lire suite

A combination of expatriate and stateless person (« apatride » in French), the « expatride » becomes the hyperbolic figure of a globalization which does not limit itself to globalizing our way of life but also completely dissolves our identity. A true « citizen of the world », the « expatride » is a nomad who left his country to live somewhere else and finds himself in an ‘in-between’ legal and cultural situation. He represents a challenge for the State. Some States have been invaded by (...)  lire suite

This paper considers the reasons for the United States’ return to UNESCO in 2003, in the light of those put forward for their departure in 1984. The conditions for this seemingly paradoxical return appear less as a rupture than as a radicalisation of previous positions ; they have to be interpreted more as a hardening than a softening of American positions in foreign affairs, due to the changes the Bush doctrine brought to the soft governance system his predecessors had elaborated and (...)  lire suite

Catalysis diplomacy, a concept made popular by Brian Hocking, is defined as an association of plural actors (States and civil society representatives, for the main part) interweaving flexible relations around specific aims : it mirrors this trend towards the emergence of the increasingly salient part played by NGOs on the world scene, what Mario Bettati has coined the new spur in international diplomacy. Although it is questioned by some States, this new form of diplomacy seems to be (...)  lire suite

Global climate is a collective world asset and the fight against the greenhouse effect raises issues of equity and efficiency. The first issue : how to define an operative rule of differentiation, is required to integrate developing countries into a longterm global program. The second issue concerns the contribution, in terms of economic efficiency, of tradable emission-permit systems. The « mechanisms of flexibility » envisaged by the Kyoto Protocol introduce an economic logic that is (...)  lire suite

For 30 years, a political process, aiming at finding a response to the problem of global warming caused by the greenhouse effect, has developed in the international arena. Non-state actors such as scientific networks, environmental organisations, and industry groups, have been trying to influence the course of global climate politics. Despite the permanent presence of non-state actors, states seem to remain the main actors of international politics. Their positions, and the characteristics (...)  lire suite

This essay underlines the main difficulties faced by the United Nations in « peacebuilding » activities. They are linked to persistent institutional and financial issues at the UN, but also to political constraints, as illustrated by the practices observed for more than a decade. The author first focuses on the consequences of the blurring in perceptions of problems of world security since the end of bipolarity. Then, it analyses the main conceptual, organisational and political (...)  lire suite

Far from being unified and homogenous, the anti-globalization protest movement includes different types of organizations, whose propositions and means of action are often divergent, and sometimes contradictory. It is possible to discern a protest of a political order, mostly present in Southern countries, and a protest originating mostly from industrialized countries, which is essentially animated by organizations belonging to civil society. The themes in protest dialectics range from the (...)  lire suite