Articles

Dozens of in-depth interviews in Lebanon after its civil war show how wartime displacement transformed localities in ways that transcend religious identity. With more than 80,000 people displaced from southern Lebanon because of fighting since October 7, 2023, the Israel-Gaza war is likely to strengthen Hezbollah’s grip when the displaced populations return and in localities in south Lebanon where displaced populations settle. 

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.

Anatol Klass recounts how Uyghur chieftain Yolbars Khan came to be buried in a Chinese Nationalist grave in Taipei. It reveals much about China's violent relationship with its most western province.

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. 

Mass killing such as cleansing and genocide is a common occurrence in war. Communities face the terrible choice of leaving their homes ahead of military action, or staying. Analysis of the previously restricted “Village Files,” a Zionist survey of Arab Palestinian communities conducted in the 1940s, finds that the key indicator of whether a community flees imminent violence is social cohesion.

David C. Logan and Robert C. Watts IV respond to Isaac B. Kardon and Wendy Leutert's spring 2022 article, "Pier Competitor: China's Power Position in Global Ports."

Meghan M. Garrity, an International Security Program postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center discussed her research on government-sanctioned mass expulsion events at a virtual seminar on November 3, 2022.

This article introduces the Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset documenting cross-border mass expulsion episodes around the world from 1900 to 2020. This new dataset focuses on mass expulsion policies in which governments systematically remove ethnic, racial, religious or national groups, en masse. The GSME dataset disaggregates mass expulsion from other exclusionary politics concepts to isolate policies of intentional group-based population removal. This allows for a systematic examination of governmental expulsion policies, distinct from policies aimed at annihilation (genocide), control (massacre) or cultural elimination (coercive assimilation).

The authors write that this is a moment of great hope for Iran but also great worry. Although the extensive frontline participation of women in protest movements often makes them more effective, it also raises the stakes dramatically. Defeat of today's protesters could be followed by an even deeper patriarchal backlash. 

We used the US-TIMES energy-system model in conjunction with integrated assessment models for air pollution (AP3, EASIUR, InMAP) to estimate the consequences of local air pollutant (LAP) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) policy on technology-choice, energy-system costs, emissions, and pollution damages in the United States. We report substantial policy spillover: Both LAP and CO₂ taxes cause similar levels of decarbonization. Under LAP taxes, decarbonization was a result of an increase in natural gas generation and a near-complete phaseout of coal generation in the electric sector. Under a CO₂ tax, the majority of simulated decarbonization was a result of increased electric generation from wind and solar. We also found that the timing of the CO₂ and LAP taxes was important. When we simulated a LAP tax beginning in 2015 and waited until 2025 to introduce a CO₂ tax, the electric sector was locked into higher levels of natural gas generation and cumulative 2010–2035 energy system CO₂ emissions were 8.8 billion tons higher than when the taxes were implemented simultaneously. A scenario taxing CO₂ and LAPs simultaneously beginning in 2015 produced the highest net benefits, as opposed to scenarios that target either CO₂ or LAPs, or scenarios that delayed either LAP or CO₂ taxes until 2025. Lastly, we found that net benefits compared to business as usual are higher under a regional versus a national LAP-tax regime, but that efficiency gains under the regional tax are not substantially higher than those under the national LAP-tax policy.