Articles

Matthew Evangelista examines the precedents and possibilities for postwar European security in an interview with International Security Executive Editor Jacqueline L. Hazelton.

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.

In an interview with Nada Ramadan Ahmed, North Africa Analyst with MEES magazine, she quotes Marina Lorenzini on the topic of the El Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant in Egypt: "Putin has used the Russian nuclear energy industry, through Rosatom, as a strategic export to build deep dependencies with geopolitically significant countries, such as Bangladesh, Egypt, and Turkey. So, even as times get tough in Moscow, Rosatom's foreign projects may not receive an immediate axe."

Other companies cannot necessarily replace Rosatom if needed, leaving Cairo "in a bind to negotiate with Moscow on a point-by-point basis on how to purchase and integrate new equipment. Moscow will likely not welcome such a move, and Cairo may not have a strong enough bargaining position, especially if it's not paying its bills on time, in order to introduce non-Russian supplies on site."

Recent scholarship on Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s has emphasized cooperation, revising previous narratives of an inexorable march towards the 1962 border war. This article reassesses that cooperation by focusing on India's role as an intermediary between the unrecognized government in Beijing and the United Nations (UN). Chinese sources reveal that Sino-Indian cooperation over UN affairs was complicated by competing conceptions of how the decolonizing world should fit into the international system and who should be at the helm. Despite such disagreements, the Cold War UN provided a setting where divergent post-colonial visions could be sublimated into meaningful international cooperation.

“This is not a decision or set of steps that are happening in haste by any means, and this is a practice that is common and consistent around the world and with the nuclear energy industry,” said Marina Lorenzini of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

According to data posted online by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, water with much higher levels of tritium has been discharged by nuclear facilities in countries including China, South Korea, Canada and France in line with local regulations.

Lorenzini said that the IAEA’s active engagement in the Fukushima process “makes me feel a lot more comfortable and confident with the events we see playing out today.”

The IAEA said this week that it would maintain an onsite presence at the Fukushima plant, where it opened an office last month, and publish real-time and near real-time monitoring data.

“I think we have good reason to believe that this will be a well-monitored and well-maintained operation,” Lorenzini said.

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

CIPHER BRIEF INTEL REPORT — During a recent visit to Kyiv centered around The Cipher Brief’s Kyiv Economic and Security Forum, a small Cipher Brief delegation met with a variety of representatives from government, business, and civil society, who conveyed a consistent and compelling message of unity and determination to win the war that Russia started in 2014 with the invasion of Crimea, and since February 24, 2022, when it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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.

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). The authors argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this article, the authors develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR.

Following the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Robert Stavins said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that the talks were both frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters—the U.S. and China—and movement to address climate-related damage to the world’s most vulnerable nations.