Asia & the Pacific

U.S. power extends beyond the military and economic spheres to include policing. The United States has used its global policing power to capture terrorists, warlords, and drug kingpins. But extradition is not simply a bureaucratic tool. States’ geopolitical interests shape their willingness to cooperate with others in extraditing fugitives. 

When the U.S. military trains other states’ forces, it tries to impart liberal norms such as respect for human rights. But when liberal norms clash, these soldiers prioritize loyalty to their unit, the military, and shared goals.

How can China make good on its pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060? In Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China, a team of experts from China and the United States explains how China's near-term climate and energy policies can affect long-term decarbonization pathways beyond 2030, building the foundations for a smoother and less costly national energy transformation.

White Southerners opposed to Reconstruction used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. Although structural factors made it harder for the U.S. government to suppress this violence, a series of policy failures prompted Reconstruction’s failure and generations of injustice.

This article examines both the premise and prescription of the argument to integrate renewable electricity in developing countries through elements of the standard model (such as a wholesale spot market, or an independent system operator for dispatch). This is done by highlighting the differences between power sector reform experiences in the developing and developed worlds, and the causal mechanisms underlying these differences.

The cryptocurrency depends on the integrity of the blockchain. But China's censors, the FBI, or powerful corporations could fragment it into oblivion, warn Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier.

In order to fully appreciate the global climate-change challenge that the Biden administration will face, Robert Stavins reflects on the history of international negotiations that brought us to this point.

The authors argue that more determined efforts to globalize renewable energy transmission can confer significantly higher economic and environmental benefits from renewables on billions of people. This can be done by exploiting spatial differences between electricity loads and net renewable generation across time zones (temporal arbitrage) and latitude (seasonal arbitrage). Using very long distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure, temporal and spatial arbitrage can move low-cost clean electricity from areas with excess capacity to high demand zones in other countries and even continents.

This policy brief describes the persistent challenge of poor electricity reliability in India and how it interacts with key regulatory policies, analyzes Delhi’s experience with outage compensation since 2017, and highlights areas for additional economic and policy research on this topic.

In this paper, a quantitative Waste to Energy Recovery Assessment (WERA) framework is used to stochastically analyze the feasibility of waste-to-energy systems in selected cities in Asia.