Ramesh Thakur - The Japan Times

August 15, 2024

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Ramesh Thakur

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Ramesh Thakur

Ramesh Thakur is Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; adjunct professor, Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law, Griffith University, and editor-in-chief of Global Governance from Jan. 1, 2013. He began writing for The Japan Times in 1998 as Vice Rector of the United Nations University.

COMMENTARY

Apr 5, 2010

Governments have duty to aid citizens caught in a nightmare

WATERLOO, Canada — Australian businessman Stern Hu has been convicted of taking bribes and stealing state secrets and sentenced to 10 years jail in China. International standards of a free and fair trial do not seem to have been met.

COMMENTARY

Dec 18, 2009

Realities of disarmament

WATERLOO, Canada — The international commission on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, chaired by former foreign ministers Gareth Evans of Australia and Yoriko Kawaguchi of Japan, faced two hurdles even before its work was completed.

COMMENTARY

Sep 8, 2009

Revisiting the folly of India's nuclear tests

WATERLOO, Ontario — Three recent events reopen the debate on the wisdom of India's nuclear tests in 1998, as judged from within the narrow framework of its own interests. Or rather, they confirm the folly of the tests:

COMMENTARY

Aug 12, 2009

Seven global lessons from a teachable event

WATERLOO, Ontario — Apparently Sgt. James Crowley's arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Boston on July 17 was "a teachable moment." Here are seven lessons relevant to world affairs.

COMMENTARY

Jul 31, 2009

Next word on intervention

WATERLOO, Ontario — The 1990s was a decade of conscience-shocking atrocities in Rwanda, the Balkans and East Timor. Unilateral actions by India and Vietnam to end atrocities in the 1970s had drawn international opprobrium and condemnation. The crises of the 1990s provoked agonized soul-searching on...

COMMENTARY

May 15, 2009

Nonoption in Afghanistan

KABUL — A five-day visit to Afghanistan left me profoundly pessimistic about the accomplishments to date to stem the drain on international blood and treasure, yet convinced of the importance of not losing Afghanistan to the other side.

COMMENTARY

Mar 27, 2009

Perks of the warring states

WATERLOO, Ontario — Since the end of World War II, America, Britain and Israel have been among the countries most heavily involved in war and armed conflict. Don't expect to see any of their political or military leaders in an international criminal dock anytime soon.

COMMENTARY

Mar 6, 2009

Genteel pastime reaches end of innocence

WATERLOO, Ontario — In recent years, Australia, England and New Zealand have canceled cricketing tours of Pakistan because of concern for the physical safety of their teams. At best, Australia agreed to play Pakistan in the neutral venue of Abu Dhabi next month.

COMMENTARY

Dec 18, 2008

What can be done to protect Zimbabweans

WATERLOO, Ontario — The responsibility to protect (R2P) norm, embraced universally at the world summit in New York in 2005, remains operationally elusive. Calls are growing for international intervention to lift the shroud of Robert Mugabe's ruinous reign from Zimbabwe's body politic.

COMMENTARY

Dec 1, 2008

Lessons for India after three days of terror

WATERLOO, Ontario — Mumbai is remarkably resilient in bouncing back to a semblance of normalcy within days. We've been here before — in 1993 and again in 2006 — when terrorists killed more than 200 people each time. Each time the government expresses shock, promises resolute action against the...

COMMENTARY

Nov 26, 2008

Pirates feel the sting of India's naval muscle

WATERLOO, Ontario — The rising might of India and the growing menace of piracy collided recently in the Gulf of Aden, a 2.59-million-square-km stretch of waterway between Somalia and Yemen. This came after India's demonstration of prowess in space with the successful launch of a lunar probe. As a symbol...

COMMENTARY

Oct 27, 2008

Better governance for a global age

WATERLOO, Ontario — The financial crisis roiling the world is the result of serious shortcomings in domestic financial governance that have also highlighted gaps in the global governance of international finance and capital.

COMMENTARY

Aug 27, 2008

Showcasing best of China

It's been like watching the coverage of the Beijing Olympics on a split screen. Much of the Western media comment in the main news and opinion pages has been written up by the "nattering nabobs of negativism," in the immortal words of Vice President Spiro Agnew (albeit written by William Safire). The...

COMMENTARY / World

Aug 23, 2008

Payback time for Russia

You have to admire the chutzpah of the neocons for their castigation of Russia for attacking another country and emulating, in the Caucasus, NATO's behavior in the Balkans. Who does Vladimir Putin think he is — U.S. President George W. Bush?

COMMENTARY

Jun 2, 2008

Macho move would make Burma's plight even worse

Their paranoia and mistrust of the outside world are such that Burma's generals have been criminally tardy in permitting emergency humanitarian supplies and personnel to come into the country. More than 100,000 may have been killed and over 2 million displaced and made homeless by the cyclone.

COMMENTARY

May 12, 2008

Let the Asians push aid to Burma

WATERLOO, Canada — CNN has quoted Shari Villarosa, the top U.S. diplomat in Burma, as saying that more than 100,000 may have died in the country's delta region alone from the deadly cyclone that hit May 3.

COMMENTARY

Mar 26, 2008

Why this foreigner supports Obama

WATERLOO, Canada — Barack Obama's speech on race and politics on March 18 came from and spoke to the heart. It was brutally, searingly honest. Nothing he said or could have said will appease the detractors and the naysayers. But their sniping and carping will diminish them and betray their smallness...

COMMENTARY

Feb 22, 2008

Beware Kosovo's offspring

Last Sunday, Kosovo formally declared independence to the accompaniment of festive celebrations by the good citizens of the world's newest country. We can but wish them well as they chart a new course inside a new Europe free of the distracting conflicts that had ravaged the continent until the middle...

COMMENTARY

Feb 13, 2008

Our responsibility to protect

WATERLOO, Canada — Then Secretary General Kofi Annan's famous "challenge of humanitarian intervention" in September 1999 provoked a furious backlash from many countries. Yet a mere six years later, the norm, reformulated as the "responsibility to protect" (R2P), was endorsed by the world leaders gathered...

COMMENTARY

Dec 31, 2007

Killing cycle claimed Bhutto

WATERLOO, Canada — Born amid the mass killings of partition in 1947, Pakistan has never escaped the cycle of violence, volatility and bloodshed. Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007) is the latest casualty of that murderous cycle.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Sociologist Gracia Liu-Farrer argues that even though immigration doesn't figure into Japan's autobiography, it is more of a self-perception than a reality.

In search of the ‘Japanese dream’

By Thu-Huong Ha

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