Articles

114 Items

Jawaharlal Nehru with Zhou Enlai

Public Domain

Journal Article - Cold War History

'China Marching with India': India's Cold War Advocacy for the People's Republic of China at the United Nations, 1949–1971

| 2023

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.

An Israeli soldier stands near the fence on the Israeli border with Lebanon

AP/ Tsafrir Abayov

Journal Article - Middle East Policy

Hezbollah's Coercion And the Israel-Lebanon Maritime Deal

| 2023

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.

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and U.S. President Richard Nixon

AP/Henry Burroughs

Journal Article - International Theory

Conceptualizing Interstate Cooperation

| 2023

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.

Robert Stavins

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Newspaper Article - Harvard Gazette

Glimmers of Movement, Hope at COP27

    Author:
  • Alvin Powell
| Nov. 23, 2022

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.

Ugandan Asians have their papers examined by ship's officer of the SS Haryana before they boarded the ship

AP Photo

Newspaper Article - Harvard Crimson

Kennedy School Postdoc Discusses Government-Sanctioned Mass Expulsion at Belfer Center Seminar

    Authors:
  • Cam E. Kettles
  • Jasmine Palma
  • Rysa Tahilramani
| Nov. 04, 2022

Meghan M. Garrity, an International Security Program postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center discussed her research on government-sanctioned mass expulsion events at a virtual seminar on November 3, 2022.

Tel Aviv Coastline seen from Jaffa

Wikimedia Commons/ Kallerna

Journal Article - Elsevier Inc.

The ecological tradeoffs of desalination in land-constrained countries seeking to mitigate climate change

| Feb. 18, 2022

The global demand for desalinated water is increasing at a remarkable rate. In a future with increasing demand for water and low-carbon electricity, an interesting ecological dilemma emerges. In a decarbonized world, providing desalinated water for domestic use and aquatic ecological restoration could increasingly come at the expense of open space lost to renewables such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines. In this article we examine the environmental tradeoffs of providing freshwater from desalination under a solar photovoltaic-based decarbonization strategy, using Israel as an example.

Robert Stavins

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Newspaper Article - Harvard Gazette

Separating Signal from Noise at COP26

    Author:
  • Alvin Powell
| Nov. 17, 2021

For an assessment of what was done, and left undone, at the recent United Nations’ Conference of the Parties on climate change, the Gazette spoke with Rob Stavins, the Harvard Kennedy School’s A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development and head of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, who attended his first COP in 2007 in Bali. 

West George Street in Glasgow during coronavirus lockdown.

Wikimedia CC/Daniel Naczk

Magazine Article - Resources Magazine

The State of Global Climate Policy after the Delay of COP26

| May 15, 2020

Former U.S. lead climate negotiator Sue Biniaz shares her thoughts on the postponement of COP26 in this interview by Professor Robert Stavins. Stavins and Biniaz explore ways to reimagine future United Nations climate negotiations, unresolved concerns from COP25, and how the United States might approach rejoining the Paris Agreement.