International Security

Stephen Walt writes that both U.S. and Chinese citizens have reason to be grateful; given how poorly their leaders have performed, it's a small miracle the other side hasn't taken better advantage.

Why would a state that lacks nuclear weapons choose to fight a state that has them? In this roundtable, four scholars evaluate Paul Avey's explanation for this phenomenon.

Drawing on two decades of government efforts to “secure the homeland,” experts offer crucial strategic lessons and detailed recommendations for homeland security.

Joseph  Nye writes that at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has run through four national security advisers in four years and seems unable to distinguish national interest from his personal interest, Brent Scowcroft's legacy is more relevant than ever. He remains the model for a modern public servant.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, launching the nuclear age. On the 75th anniversary of that somber event, Belfer Center experts reflect on the event and its aftermath. 

Rebecca Davis Gibbons writes that having a full appreciation of the consequences of nuclear weapons and their place in society means learning from the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but also from the stories from other survivors of nuclear explosions: those who lived and worked adjacent to testing sites in Algeria, French Polynesia, Australia, the United States, France, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Western China, and Kazakhstan.

Rebecca Davis Gibbons and Stephen Herzog provide an update on current efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. 

Joseph Nye writes that the world is increasingly obsessed with the ongoing power struggle between the United States and China. But the technology-driven shift of power away from states to transnational actors and global forces brings a new and unfamiliar complexity to global affairs.

This article argues that the decreased success of nonviolent civil resistance was due not only to savvier state responses, but also to changes in the structure and capabilities of civil-resistance movements themselves. Perhaps counterintuitively, the coronavirus pandemic may have helped to address some of these underlying problems by driving movements to turn their focus back to relationship-building, grassroots organizing, strategy, and planning.

Former International Security Program Postdoctoral Fellow Andrea Gilli and his co-author Mauro Gilli have won the America in the World Consortium (AWC) Best Research Article on U.S. Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy for "Why China Has Not Caught Up Yet: Military-Technological Superiority and the Limits of Imitation, Reverse Engineering, and Cyber Espionage," which appeared in International Security (Winter 2018/19).