Articles

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

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

Low-carbon energy technology (LCET) startups could play a key role in accelerating India’s decarbonization. Yet, understanding of the LCET startup landscape and what shapes it remains low. This paper provides an analysis of the Indian LCET startup landscape to fill this gap.

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.

A new theory of war duration suggests that strategic narratives explain why the U.S. war in Afghanistan endured and ended. A robust anti-terrorism narrative generated audience costs for presidential inaction. As the narrative weakened, these costs declined, and the war ended.

A narrow focus on technology innovation and deployment outcomes by academic researchers can lead to recommendations for the design of policy mixes that compromise key dimensions of sociotechnical change, such as job creation, find Alejandro Nuñez-Jimenez, Christof Knoeri, Joern Hoppmann, and Volker Hoffmann.

The expansion of renewable energies not only lowers carbon emissions, it also redistributes resources among actors. This article argues that green industrialization – specifically, manufacturing and the development of renewable energy technologies — creates economic gains that impact political processes and increase renewable energy policy ambition. Building on a combined framework of policy feedback and global value chain literature, authors Laima Eicke and Silvia Weko see domestic value creation as a key determinant of coalition strength and learning effects for policymakers. 

An extensive canal irrigation network in South Asia has developed over the past 170 years that consists of thousands of kilometers of constructed channels and distributaries. These canals cut across many energy-poor regions along their paths. In India, this canal network provides a unique opportunity for renewable energy generation that is yet to be realized.