Articles

In the Henty Mance interview, Joseph Nye, who coined term 'soft power,' says that the turmoil facing the United States and Harvard was worse in the 1960s.

Plastic pollution in the Arctic marine system is sparsely quantified, and few enforceable policies are in place to ameliorate the issue. In this paper, Dewey and Mackie estimate the flux of plastic through rivers, sea ice, and ocean, and quantify marine plastic pollution from Arctic shipping and fishing. They also examine how a suite of proposed policy interventions would quantitatively change those concentrations.

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. The authors assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa.

This paper explores the unique conditions that made the Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean possible and examines how success was achieved by the interrelationships of science, policy, legal structures, politics, stakeholder collaboration, and diplomacy.

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.

This study provides a whole-systems simulation on how to halve global CO2 emissions by 2050, compared to 2010, with an emphasis on technologies and costs, in order to avoid a dangerous increase in the global mean surface temperature by end the of this century.

Nathaniel L. Moir reviews Antonio Giustozzi's The Taliban at War: 2001–2018 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).  He writes, "Through an assessment of the intra-politics of the Taliban's different shuras, along with the success and failures these shuras have achieved over the recent past, Giustozzi brings readers up to date on the Taliban's organizational status as it moved toward negotiations with the Afghan government."

The Arctic Initiative is pairing policy and science scholars with local experts to find practical climate solutions.

Harvard University has created a Presidential Committee on Sustainability (PCS) to advise President Larry Bacow and the University's leadership on sustainability vision, goals, strategy, and partnerships. The Harvard Gazette spoke with committee chairs Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor; John Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and Katie Lapp, executive vice president, about why it is so important to act now; the role of the PCS in developing collaborative and innovative projects; and how the campus community can get involved.

The U.S. military’s prevailing norms of military professionalism are poorly suited to meet today’s civil-military challenges. They undermine the military’s nonpartisan and apolitical ethos, weaken civilian leaders' control of military activity, and undercut the country’s strategic effectiveness in armed conflict.