While State sovereignty has been a cornerstone of international relations and the foundation of the Charter, many participants expressed their unease about the possibility that ambiguous definitions and norms could undermine that bedrock.

With its economic, military, and demographic heft China generates considerable unease in Russia. Consider the demographic situation in eastern Siberia, where six million Russians live across the border from up to 120 million Chinese.

Understandably, Iran s empowerment has made America s closest allies in the region extremely uncomfortable. In their different ways, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and some of the smaller, more vulnerable Gulf states have let their unease be known.

In some quarters, pessimism, sad to say, dominated the recent celebrations marking the European Union s 50th birthday. Unease about the EU s future is, of course, understandable, especially given the uncertainty surrounding efforts to revive the Constitutional Treaty.

In addition to reports of troop movements, relations between ethnic communities have become increasingly polarized, with a series of alleged human rights violations involving ethnic targeting and local Rwandaphones' unease over the integration of the province's military forces.

Doubts linger about whether longtime northern PDP leaders, used to cutting midnight deals with their southern counterparts, would break ranks and support Ribadu next year. Conservative northerners also view Buhari, an ascetic politician popular with the region s poor, with unease.

Rising soft dictators what the journalist Bobby Ghosh calls authoritarian democrats have used these feelings of unease and alienation to attract votes. Their supporters do not want to be oppressed, but they do want stability and national sovereignty desires that their leaders fulfill partly by limiting opposition.

Some of the unease about ECT stems from psychiatry s dark past, when patients in many countries had fewer legal rights than prisoners. Not so long ago, physical treatments such as lobotomy and ECT could be inflicted on patients without their consent, and sometimes for punitive purposes.

The return to Chechnya of an amnestied Zakaev would greatly increase Kadyrov s prestige. But the Kremlin wants to avoid this, owing to Kadyrov s growing power and its general unease with a Russian Muslim elite that, while formally acknowledging Russian suzerainty, increasingly demands a redistribution of power within the Russian Federation.

Unfortunately, Bush s strategy of democracy promotion has mainly contributed to unease around the world and alienation from Western goals. Especially in view of the Iraq experience, Putin has won substantial public sympathy by arguing that opposition to Western democracy promotion is resistance not to democracy itself, but to Western intervention against Russian sovereign democracy.

The same impulse appears to be at work behind Italy s policy on Autostrade, Spain s on Endesa, Poland s on its banking sector, the former Swedish Prime Minister s on Volvo, German unease about locust like funds on Deutsche Börse, or the United Kingdom s ever louder defense of the London Stock Exchange s independence from the United States.

But, beneath the surface, unease in the bilateral relationship persists, partly for historical reasons. Nationalist Chinese remember imperial Russia s conquests, while many Russians have a morbid fear of the yellow peril, even though the Mongols conquered and reigned in China, while they were eventually repelled from Russia (not to mention that the Chinese never invaded Russia).

The unease, suspicion and even cynicism that bedevil Israeli Palestinian relations can be attributed in large part to the fact that the disengagement is not taking place within an unequivocally agreed framework for the next steps towards the overall solution to which both sides claim adherence, that is, two States living alongside one another in peace.

With North Korea's announcement on the 26th of its nuclear development plan based upon the agreement stemming from the Six Party Talks, and the United States' commencement of procedures to remove North Korea from its designation on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, the families of abductees have expressed growing unease that it may constitute an abandonment of the abductee issue.

What has people outraged is the notion that Facebook is manipulating its unwitting users to advance its own agenda, with many citing the secrecy surrounding the research to illustrate the company s misconduct (though the company published the results with no apparent sense of unease). But, though Facebook s lack of transparency is certainly disconcerting as is its deafness to its users concerns these complaints miss the point.

After waging the longest war in its history, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives and nearly a trillion dollars, the US is combat weary and financially strapped. But the American effort to cut a deal with the Pashtun based, Pakistan backed Taliban is stirring deep unease among the non Pashtun groups, which suffered greatly under the Taliban and its five year rule.

One of the factors driving the UK s sense of unease in its relations with an increasingly bureaucratized Europe is the belief that its values and institutions are closer to those of the US, or of other English speaking former colonies. By the 1990 s, British Euro skeptics coined the term Anglosphere to describe a model that was more successful and more expansionary than that of the EU.

PRINCETON Last week, in a highly anticipated speech, German President Joachim Gauck cautioned against the blind pursuit of an ever closer European Union, acknowledging that the growing inequality among member states is generating a sense of unease, even unmistakable anger, and increasing the risk of national humiliation. He pointed out that, in addition to the economic crisis, there is a crisis of confidence in Europe as a political project.

The second pointer is that foreign affairs, though rarely a major factor in any country s national elections, can contribute to a general sense of unease about political leadership. It had been widely assumed that the UK s continued membership in the European Union would be a leading campaign issue, given the rise of the UK Independence Party and Cameron s pledge that, if re elected, he would hold a referendum on the question by 2017.

Indeed, disaster has stalked South Korea this year, beginning in April with the sinking of the ferry Sewol, which claimed some 300 lives, most of them high school students. The trial of the Sewol s captain, the apparent suicide of its owner, and a series of scandals involving beatings and bullying leading to death and suicide among army conscripts have cost Park key ministerial resignations, and have created a pervasive sense of unease about how the country is governed.