Articles

Although China's motives for developing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been well studied, scholars have yet to comprehensively examine why states seek to join the initiative. The authors fill this gap by examining how and why states join the BRI. Countries join by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with China on cooperation under the BRI framework.

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.

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

Hostile foreign states are using weaponized information to attack the United States. Russia and China are disseminating disinformation about domestic U.S. race relations and COVID-19 to undermine and discredit the U.S. government. These information warfare attacks, which threaten U.S. national security, may seem new, but they are not. Using an applied history methodology and a wealth of previously classified archival records, this article uses two case studies to reveal how and why a hostile foreign state, the Soviet Union, targeted America with similar disinformation in the past

Der Tagesspiegel  profiles asymmetric conflict and cybersecurity expert Ivan Arreguín-Toft. 

Kelly Greenhill argues that by exploiting political divisions that exist within targeted states, the threatened or actual deployment of engineered flows of migrants has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail, its use.

An influential model of democratic civil-military relations insists that civilian politicians and officials, accountable to the public, have "the right to be wrong" about the use of force: they, not senior military officers, decide when force will be used and set military strategy. While polls have routinely asked about Americans' trust in the military, they have rarely probed deeply into Americans' views of civil-military relations. 

Sheila Jasanoff, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, speaks to TNM about the need for Science and Technology Studies, policy playing catch-up with the progress of science, data collection in democracies and more.

Nathaniel Moir reviews Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual by Daniel Bessner.  He concludes that the book shows how and why it is important to think carefully about democracy and the role scholars and intellectuals contribute to its survival.