By Amitai Etzioni
The start of a second Obama administration provides an opportunity for civilian authorities to live up to their obligations in this matter and to conduct a proper review of the United States’ China strategy and the military’s role in it.
Read MoreBy Yangmo Ku
To what extent could North Korea’s new leader Kim Jong-un follow the path of economic reform that Deng Xiaoping adopted in China starting in the late 1970s? This article analyzes the role of individual leadership, domestic context, and systemic considerations to determine whether or not China’s past is applicable to North Korea’s present. This comparative study shows that the prospect for economic reform in North Korea is not very promising.
Read MoreBy Salar Ghahramani
International financial relations have largely been defined by cross-border trade, foreign direct investments, and global banking relations. This paper demonstrates that another activity, sovereign investments by special vehicles known as sovereign wealth funds, is rapidly redefining the traditional paradigms, providing both opportunities for further integration of the financial markets as well as posing particular challenges for policy makers.
Read MoreBy Dawood Ahmed
The United States has been carrying out drone strikes within Yemen and Pakistan since 2002 and 2004 respectively. Opponents have attempted to halt the use of drones by invoking legal arguments against the United States government. In doing so, they have overlooked the possibility that it may have taken ‘two to drone.’
Read MoreBy Hugo de Zela Martinez
The history of the Organization of American States (OAS) mirrors that of its member states and their sixty-four-year-old struggle to balance the principle of non-intervention with exceptions to it in the name of democracy and human rights.
Read MoreBy Hilary Dauer
The pesantren is an essential part of many Indonesian communities. It disseminates ideology, both religious and political, through the key community services it provides such as education for the community’s youth and the administration of important religious rites. Through the provision of these services, pesantrens provide the ideological underpinning for societal stability.
Read MoreBy Cassandra R. Veney and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Since the 1990s, Kenya, like most African countries, has undergone a protracted transition to democracy. Studies on the subject tend to focus on specific events, actors, challenges, and roadblocks and offer prognoses that are often soon overtaken by new developments. In many studies ethnicity looms large as an explanation.
Read MoreBy Aiden Warren
In its drive to produce fissile material for weapons, augment its weapons production facilities, deploy additional delivery vehicles, construct additional nuclear reactors, and expand its reprocessing capabilities, Pakistan has clearly placed the expansion and improvement of its nuclear weapons arsenal at the heart of its overall security strategy.
Read MoreBy Thomas Graham
The future of the Russian-led effort to consolidate the BRICS (the BRICs plus South Africa) as an influential multilateral organization is less certain because of inherent contradictions in the members’ ambitions, prospects, and security challenges. The United States engages Russia for strategic, not economic reasons.
Read MoreBy Jolyon Howorth
The total absence of the European Union, as a bloc, during the Libyan crisis of spring 2011 has led analysts to pose tough questions about the future of Europe as a collective security actor. The progress made toward the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) since 2003 was to some extent a reflection of the extraordinary nature of this relative pooling of sovereignty in the security field.
Read MoreBy Andreas Borgeas
This study finds that militant Islam amongst the Uighur in Kazakhstan remains a fringe and localized presence, which will struggle to gain sufficient popular support for historical and contextual reasons. Even so, the United States can take specific steps to help Kazakhstan ensure that Islam remains a moderate—rather than extremist—force in the country.
Read MoreBy Paul Rexton Kan
This article explores the online clash between the hacker group, Anonymous, and the Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas. This type of cyberwar was unique: it was an incident where two clandestine non-state groups used the digital domain to attack each other and it was largely a private affair.
Read MoreBy Nicoli Nattrass
U.S. commitment to fight- ing AIDS in Africa has traditionally been, and still is, buoyed by bi-partisan support. This support has remained strong post-2007. Even so, the view is widespread that African country governments ought to take greater ownership of combating the problem and reducing aid dependency in managing it.
Read MoreBy Stephen S. Roach
The United States needs to wean itself from excess consumption and subpar saving, while China needs to do the opposite—greater emphasis on private consumption and the absorption of surplus saving. These transformations are daunting but provide major opportunities for both nations.
Read MoreBy John-Michael Arnold
The phenomenon of strategic surprise—a category of unexpected events so consequential that they call into question the premises of existing strategy—has posed a recurring challenge to U.S. foreign policy. Although there is a voluminous literature on the subject, most scholars have focused on surprises unleashed as a deliberate strategy of states in their effort to seize the advantage against adversaries.
Read MoreBy Jonathan Papoulidis
Fragile states constitute a global development crisis. Government capacity and public institutions in these states are weak and international aid approaches are often fragmented and piecemeal.
Read MoreBy Rob Cuthbert
The licensing system is not only a formidable check on a free press in Burma, it is another example of Burmese interiors and exteriors contradicting each other. As Burma gives journalists more freedom, the license requirement ensures that the Burmese Government retains ultimate control over the press.
Read MoreBy Michael Morrison
As the Chinese Communist Party prepares for a major leadership transition, China’s foreign policy think tanks are poised to contribute to the conceptualization and propagation of major foreign policy initiatives. This article examines the degree to which Party and State leaders look to think tanks for analysis, and how think tanks can be used as a window into Chinese decision-making.
Read MoreBy Patrick Mendis
A series of Chinese-built ports and airfields across the Indian Ocean comprises a grand “string of pearls” strategy within which Sri Lanka has become a crown jewel. The new forces of global power are geoeconomic, in which every capital in the world—from Washington, Beijing, London, and New Delhi to Karachi, Tehran, and Tokyo—seeks out Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, as part of the twenty-first century’s latest “Great Game.”
Read MoreBy John Teton
The long-recognized human right of freedom from hunger remains unrealized because traditional remedies for addressing it continue to prove inadequate. Nonetheless, the goals of ending starvation and malnutrition worldwide can be achieved through a global commitment to the International Food Security Treaty, which will place that right under the protection of enforceable national and international laws, and catalyze the development of systems necessary to effect those goals.
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