Africa

Stephen Walt argues that relinquishing influence and sticking an adversary with a costly burden can sometimes be the epitome of strategic wisdom.

The authors offer a comprehensive review of the scholarly literature on compellence. They highlight the findings that could be of use to contemporary policymakers and identify gaps that inhibit a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of compellence.

Ruolin Su responds to Alexander B. Downes and Lindsey A. O'Rourke's fall 2016 article, "You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations."

In this Project on Managing the Atom Discussion Paper, Philipp C. Bleek chronicles nuclear weapons proliferation choices throughout the nuclear age. Since the late 1930s and early 1940s, some thirty-one countries are known to have at least explored the possibility of establishing a nuclear weapons program. Seventeen of those countries launched weapons programs, and ten acquired deliverable nuclear weapons.

A podcast from the Advanced Training Program on Humanitarian Action produced from a Middle East Initiative event on humanitarian negotiations with non-state armed groups featuring Professor Claude Bruderlein; Ashley Jackson; Stig Jarle Hansen; and Abdi Ismail Isse.

In recent decades, the United States has attempted to overthrow the regimes of several other countries in the hopes that the new regimes will be friendly toward Washington. Does foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) succeed in making target states more accommodating to interveners’ interests? A new dataset and an analysis of foreign interventions in the Congo Wars show that FIRC damages relations between intervener and target state more often than it improves them.

Dr. Ian Bremmer, expert in political risk and founder of the Eurasia Group, gave a seminar sponsored by the the Future of Diplomacy Project on Thursday, November 9 at the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World."