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Introduction The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which came into effect in January 2016, are a new, universal set of economic, social and environmental goals and targets that United Nations (UN) member states are expected to achieve by 2030. The SDGs build and expand on the eight Millennium…

The results of the European Union summit on March 7 with Turkey will be decisive for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s proposed “European-Turkish solution” to the refugee crisis. Ahead of the summit, observers expected that the Turkish government would agree to take back asylum seekers from Greece.…

Under the flag of the United Nations, more than 125,000 civilian experts, police officers and soldiers are currently deployed in 16 missions worldwide to give peacebuilding efforts a better chance of success. In most cases, these efforts take years. Even as politicians and military leaders…

For the past two decades, evaluation of development assistance has relied on criteria of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to assess the merit of development interventions in a structured and comparable way. In thousands of evaluations each year, evaluators thus assess the relevance,…

Last December in Paris, 195 countries reached a landmark agreement committing nearly every country to lowering greenhouse-gas emissions in response to the effects of climate change. The Paris agreement holds a great deal of promise. Negotiating countries dedicated themselves to preventing global…

Consulting people about the aid they receive is recognized as central to improving the quality of humanitarian assistance. This is particularly valuable in insecure contexts, such as Afghanistan and Somalia, where humanitarian staff have limited opportunities for face-to-face contact with the…

Für den Oxford-Wirtschaftswissenschaftler Paul Collier liegen die Dinge klar. Angela Merkel ist verantwortlich für die Flüchtlingskrise. „Wer sonst?“. Er weiß auch ganz genau, warum Deutschland so gehandelt hat: „Deutschland gefällt sich offensichtlich in der Retterrolle“. Es wäre leicht, dies als…

Executive Summary In 2011, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) principals adopted the Transformative Agenda to give new momentum to the 2005 Humanitarian Reform and strengthen leadership, coordination and accountability in humanitarian action. Their ultimate objective was to enhance…

For Oxford economics professor Paul Collier things are crystal clear: “Angela Merkel is responsible for the refugee crisis. Who else?” It would be easy to dismiss Collier if he were not part of a growing chorus that sees Germany’s refugee policy as a morality play — with Merkel in the lead, chasing…

Few people are usually passionate about taxation. Nevertheless, for more than a week now, the tax settlement between HMRC and Google has inflamed the passions of the British public as well as politicians. A number of sparks fuel the debate: There is the question whether the tax settlement is a…

The 10th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held in Nairobi in December 2015, yielded only limited results. While the United States and the European Union called for the conclusion of the so-called Doha negotiating round, developing and emerging countries expressed a…

Ende des vergangenen Jahres versetzten Hinweise auf eine Kooperation zwischen dem FBI und einem der bekanntesten US-amerikanischen IT-Sicherheitsteams die Netzgemeinde in Aufruhr. Demnach sollen Forscher des renommierten Cert/CC dem FBI dabei geholfen haben, das Anonymisierungsnetzwerk Tor zu…

When reports emerged late last year that researchers from CERT/CC, a respected American network security team, had helped the FBI to hack the anonymity network Tor, IT security experts were worried. Bodies like CERT/CC (the CERT Coordination Center), Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and…

Now that Germany has joined the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, its planned deployment of troops to Mali has fallen into the background even more. But the United Nations' peacekeeping operation in Mali is a critical component of the peace process currently underway in the West African…

Die Beteiligung am Krieg gegen den „Islamischen Staat“ (IS) drängt den bevorstehenden Bundeswehreinsatz in Mali in den Hintergrund. Auch hier möchte die Bundesregierung Hunderte Soldaten ins Ausland schicken. Der Blauhelmeinsatz ist entscheidend für den seit 2012 andauernden Friedensprozess. Statt…

In 2015, the number of asylum applications to the European Union reached an all-time high. But numbers alone do not explain why the events of 2015 were commonly referred to as a refugee (or migrant) “crisis.” It is important to contextualize the high number of entries against an EU that is not only…

Das Jahr 2015 markiert den vorläufigen Höhepunkt des Trends steigender Asylanträge in der Europäischen Union. Nach Angaben des europäischen Statistikamts ersuchten allein in der ersten Jahreshälfte rund 400000 Menschen internationalen Schutz in der EU; eine Steigerung von etwa 85 Prozent gegenüber…