Research

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

In late 2017, Mexico made headlines as Italian company Enel bid what was then a world-record low price for renewable energy in the country’s third such energy auction. This development was possible due to the historical and sweeping energy reforms passed with broad support in Mexico in 2013. Then-President Enrique Peña Nieto had succeeded where previous Mexican presidents had failed, reversing decades of resource nationalism and overhauling the energy sector through constitutional reforms that gave the private sector a larger role and advantaged renewable energy in Mexico’s economy. The 2017 auction seemed to indicate Mexico’s bright future not only as a conventional oil producer, but also as a clean energy power.

Malcolm X advocated for brotherhood and unity, not violence. In 1964, he created the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), an organization with the goal of unifying the African and African American communities against global oppression.  In this way, he fought in an ideological war using ideas rather than weapons. The last few months of his life were dedicated to internationalizing the Black civil rights movement into a global struggle for human rights.

This article explores the symbiotic relationship between right-wing evangelicals and the apartheid state in undercutting racial equality in South Africa.

Nathaniel L. Moir writes of historical cases in which a U.S. tendency to over-rely on military capabilities and American economic strength proved unwise and how such power eventually proved to be irrelevant. In addition to the Vietnam War as an example, the rapid collapse of the Republic of China and its large military forces in late 1948 and 1949 offers some parallels with the collapse of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan Government, despite the United States investment of trillions of U.S. dollars.

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically disrupted people’s lives, livelihoods, and economic conditions around the world. The global shock has resulted in a tourism standstill (Djankov 2020), significant capital flight (Djankov and Panizza 2020), and a slowdown in remittances (Nonvide 2020), resulting in an urgent balance-of-payments need. Egypt responded to the crisis with a comprehensive package aimed at tackling the health emergency and supporting economic activity. The Ministry of Finance acted swiftly to allocate resources to the health sector, provide targeted support to the most severely impacted sectors, and expand social safety net programmes to protect the most vulnerable. Similarly, the Central Bank of Egypt adopted a broad set of measures, including lowering the policy rate and postponing repayments of existing credit facilities. The next section highlights the experience of firms in Egypt following these policies.

Guest Louie Dean Valencia-García joins Right Rising to discuss how far right movements create counter-narratives to accepted understandings of history. Along with host Augusta Dell'Omo, Louie takes on a deep dive into how the far-right's "alt histories" circulate all over the globe and the role that historians play in combatting that spread.

President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to create a new cabinet-level position for climate-related issues — and to choose so prominent a figure as former Secretary of State John Kerry to fill it — demonstrates Biden’s sincerity over putting climate at the very center of U.S. foreign policy. It is easy to understate the importance of this appointment, given the flurry of czars created by most new administrations.

The geopolitical and geo-economic forces wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, as examined previously in this series, are likely to slow the transition to a more sustainable global energy mix. Fortunately, the pandemic has also resulted in governments gaining vastly greater influence over whether this shift stalls or accelerates.