Articles

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gone too far with his challenging of Greece's sovereignty and territorial waters, former US Ambassador to Greece Nicholas Burns told the online 31st annual Greek Economic Summit of the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday.

A social exchange network approach reveals how three U.S. allies—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—contributed to the emergence and shape of the hub-and-spokes alliance system in East Asia. This finding enables scholars and policymakers to devise appropriate policy responses as the system changes.

When and why do rising states prey upon or support declining powers? A state’s choice of policy toward a declining power depends on two factors: whether that power is useful against challengers to the rising state, and the declining state’s military strength.

The SAIS Review interviews Nicholas Burns on June 10, 2020.

On a cool day late last September, half a dozen Chinese engineers walked into a conference room in the heart of Geneva's UN district with a radical idea. They had one hour to persuade delegates from more than 40 countries of their vision: an alternative form of the internet, to replace the technological architecture that has underpinned the web for half a century. 

Whereas today's internet is owned by everyone and no one, they were in the process of building something very different - a new infrastructure that could put power back in the hands of nation states, instead of individuals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken our economic and political institutions. Less detectably, the crisis also rattles our ideals of democracy and individual freedom. Public health imperatives have collided with democratic principles as fundamental as the freedom to come and go. We have every reason to believe that the exigencies of the moment will also come into conflict with privacy.

As coronavirus continues to spread, the Trump administration has declared a public health emergency and imposed quarantines and travel restrictions. However, over the past three years the administration has weakened the offices in charge of preparing for and preventing this kind of outbreak.

Delta Force commandos took two Islamic State fighters as prisoners and a trove of intelligence from the now-destroyed compound where AbuBakral-Baghdadi, the world’s most wanted terrorist, had been hiding, officials said Monday.

In Pakistan and Nigeria, jihadist entrepreneurs have capitalized on external trigger events not only to successfully challenge established religious doctrine and norms, but to adopt radically new norms, including the use of gendered violence.

Societal insecurity, stemming from historical and functional realities has emboldened the identity-based gap of states vs. societies in the Arab region. The division of the Ottoman Empire into new states without much attention to identity lines, created a historical identity challenge in those states. On the other hand, Arab ruling elites’ efforts to enforce state-centred identities failed to prevent the challenge of conflicting identities. Later on, their functional inefficiencies emboldened the identity dichotomy.

As a result of threats perceived by Arab societies against their collective identity as well as separate challenges facing each state, the state-society gap continues to challenge state identities. Collectively perceived threats create and strengthen collective frameworks intended to address those threats. And among other frameworks come radical and terrorist organisations.