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Is Humanitarian Aid in the Gaza Strip Problematic?

The Gaza Strip has been a Palestinian enclave for more than 70 years. Palestinians that lived in now modern-Israel areas have been forced to the over-crowded and under-resourced city of Gaza and its surrounding areas. The population consists of around 2.1 million people where 1.4 are Palestinian refugees. Half of the population of Gaza is unemployed and more than half live in poverty. These people live without consistent access to food, clean water, and other basic necessities. Due to these horrible conditions that people in face in Gaza, they are sent humanitarian aid from organisations, such as the UN, and other countries. Although this sounds like the right thing to do (to note: I don’t argue that global attention, acknowledgement, and at least the intention of aid is wrong), there are consequences and issues with humanitarian aid into areas. Firstly, there is the argument that foreign aid is never properly specialised to the area that is receiving it. The narrative of what helpf
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Should the US always serve as the savior in global politics?

     In August, the biggest talk of every news station in America was the removal of US troops in Afghanistan as well as the effects it had on the landscape of international politics. While I am definitely not saying the strategy of exiting Afghanistan was executed well, should the US have even been there for as long as they were in the first place? I am all for global peace and having no threats to the well-being of the planet, but is it the US’s job to always be the savior? I understand that the US is a wealthy nation with a strong military, so the narrative is always that the US can almost “save the world” like a Superman-esque figure. One thing with the Afghanistan debate on how or when the US should have pulled out of there was interesting to me. In Nicholas Grossman’s article Every Option in Afghanistan Was Bad, he quotes on a similar case in the Middle East a couple of years back, “We got September 11th and ended up back in. Similarly, the United States withdrew from Iraq in 201
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Cybersecurity/Warfare

  Thomas White The New Technological Age of Warfare     Throughout this course, warfare was one of the most consequential and influential factors within the International system. As we learned, there’s an entire system of viewing international politics that says war is the most fundamental interaction between states or governmental bodies. This concept, known as realism, is one that I have previously discussed in a blog post, where I attempted to prove why it is an incorrect viewpoint for the 21st century. I discussed how in the modern age there is too much interaction between states that is not driven by war or seeking power. However, this post is meant to be an exercise in arguing the other side and in an atypical lens. Today, as social media has been skyrocketing to unprecedented and previously unimaginable heights, warfare has taken what may be a new look. Two examples of this are TikTok and the Russian SolarWinds hack on the US, both of which are different scenarios with different
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Blog 5

  For my final blog post, I wanted to further explore the topic which I discussed in my last analytical essay, climate change and its relationship to international relations.  I found this topic to be extremely interesting as it highlights a real issue that continues to stay unresolved due to the fact that any means of international organization is extremely difficult.  I felt like my paper was lacking in the broader ramifications of climate change in relation to how climate change will impact physical relations, rather than a focus on the inability of asserting some sort of international governance to mitigate climate change.   I was still interested in exploring other facets of this topic, and found the answers to a lot of the questions that I had in a recently published Phys.org article, “Can the World Change Course on Climate?” by Kathryn O’neil.  This article is Q&A style with MIT professor Nazli Choucri.  One of the most interesting points that Choucri brings up is the topic
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Is Globalization a Good Thing?

According to the Chicago Council Poll on Foreign Policy of 2021, 68% of Americans say that Globalization is mostly good for the US. This number represents an all time high for the support of globalist practices, but it doesn’t recognize the whole story. Despite Globalization’s impressive accomplishments in improving quality of life, through increased economic activity and interconnectedness, this is not the case for all communities. One can easily argue that globalization has caused just as many problems as opportunities, through the example of increased terrorism, crime, and environmental degradation. But this argument also fails to address everything that globalization contributes to life as we know it. In this blog post, I will argue that without the sunny side of globalization, life as we know it would disappear, and therefore globalization, on the whole, is a beneficial force in our lives.  Firstly, one can regard globalization as beneficial because it strengthens the economy. As
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Human rights in the soccer community

 Eli Webb Human Rights in Soccer Soccer can help us focus on human rights and discrimination around the globe. The book we read by Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World , pointed out many issues and characteristics of the world, and in each chapter he focused on different aspects of the world that soccer could help explain. I would like to focus on the general conversation of discrimination that Foer mentioned in his chapters “How soccer explains the pornography of sects” and “How soccer explains the Jewish question”. Both chapters discuss the sectors of team support and where rivalries came from, and for a little snippet, the conversation about race/religion in the soccer world.  The focus on this blog post is the recent endeavors by the soccer community on human rights and discrimination across the globe. Foer wrote his book in 2004, yet the discussion about inclusion and race is still in the news today. Specifically this week (Dec. 1), I got a notification on my phone abo
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Who is deemed a terrorist?

     An act of terrorism can be defined as unlawful, politically motivated violence and/or intimidation that is usually used against civilians. A person who does acts of terrorism is a terrorist. The definition seems simple, but who is really deemed a terrorist?      The word terrorist has been pinned to a certain stereotype through the use of media and the cultivation of the American enemy. The image that comes to mind (and in a quick Google images search) for the word terrorist is a Middle Eastern man. This stereotype has been fostered by influences ranging from movies continuously portraying brown Muslims as terrorists to the president of the United States’ words.       In March 2016, Donald Trump said “It’s very hard to separate (Islam and terrorism) . Because you don’t know who’s who” (Corbin. 476). Having these words come from the president of the United State’s mouth is extremely influential and detrimental to verity. As well as this, Trump and the United States’ government foc
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