Articles

In this Q&A, Joseph S. Nye talks about his advice for the interim and future president of Harvard in the wake of Claudine Gay's resignation, which countries should be highest on our radar to prevent the threat of nuclear war, what role the U.S. should play in the Russia-Ukraine war, the significance of U.S. alliances in the Middle East, and more.

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

Calder Walton recounts how Russia and China are using their intelligence agencies to reverse the outcome of the Cold War

Hostile foreign states are using weaponized information to attack the United States. Russia and China are disseminating disinformation about domestic U.S. race relations and COVID-19 to undermine and discredit the U.S. government. These information warfare attacks, which threaten U.S. national security, may seem new, but they are not. Using an applied history methodology and a wealth of previously classified archival records, this article uses two case studies to reveal how and why a hostile foreign state, the Soviet Union, targeted America with similar disinformation in the past

Kelly Greenhill argues that by exploiting political divisions that exist within targeted states, the threatened or actual deployment of engineered flows of migrants has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail, its use.

The Gazette spoke with Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Chenoweth studies mass protest movements, civil resistance, and political violence, and is the author of "Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know." 

Analysis of the West's differing responses to Ukrainian and Armenian mass movements reveal that, contrary to the popular Wilsonian narrative, the West assists democratic movements only when that assistance coincides with its material interests.

William James reviews Comparative Grand Strategy: A Framework and Cases edited by Thierry Balzacq,  Peter Dombrowski, and Simon Reich (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Nathaniel Moir reviews Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual by Daniel Bessner.  He concludes that the book shows how and why it is important to think carefully about democracy and the role scholars and intellectuals contribute to its survival.