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.

Jay Mens asks: Why won't the U.S. admit that Iran's proxies, which include Hamas, are acting in concert?

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. 

Former International Security Program Research Fellow Rebecca Weiner is profiled by the New York Times after becoming the New York Police Department's deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. The former deputy commissioner of the bureau, John Miller, in 2014, said she had a "remarkable" ability to recognize how security threats were changing.

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

A textbook case of coercive diplomacy, Hezbollah's maneuver was calculated and deliberate, which reflects the group's strategic expertise. Drawing on open-source materials and public statements in Arabic and Hebrew, this article analyzes Hezbollah's coercive-diplomacy campaign and examines its implications for escalation scenarios between Israel and its central military opponent.

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."

New forms of international cooperation and technology competition with China are the main drivers of public investment in energy innovation, though it remains insufficient to help meet climate goals.

Do armed drone programs decrease or increase terrorism? Existing studies on this question produce conflicting arguments and evidence. Drone optimists contend that armed drones reduce a country's vulnerability to terrorism, while pessimists claim that this military technology provokes higher levels of terrorism. Prior research focuses almost exclusively on one particular context: the short-term effect of the US drone program in Pakistan. However, armed drones have proliferated rapidly over the last decade and eighteen countries now possess this technology. The authors expand the scope of prior studies by leveraging new data to assess how obtaining armed drones and conducting drone strikes changed the degree to which all drone possessors experienced terrorism between 2001 and 2019.

As latecomers to the industrialization process, developing countries may face barriers to upgrading from the production of mass-produced goods to higher-value technologies. Using a comparative qualitative case study focusing on three renewable energy technologies, this paper develops a typology of catching-up opportunities in green energy industries and finds that policymakers should target certain technologies in their industrial strategies based on certain technology characteristics, and should seek opportunities to capitalize on a local niche that creates a need for innovation.