South America

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

Companies that rely on certain countries in Asia for their supply lines will face continued challenges as geopolitical stresses, let alone global pandemics, cause supply shortages. Beyond causing economic harm, these shortages pose a direct threat to U.S. national security interests.

Commercial international port terminals owned and operated by Chinese firms provide dual-use capabilities to the People's Liberation Army during peacetime. They enable China to project power into critical regions worldwide by providing military logistics and intelligence networks.

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.

Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.

El Salvador this month became the first country to adopt a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, as legal tender.  One says “the first” as if there will be others.  But the idea is highly dubious.

I will admit, like many economists, that I fail to see what problem cryptocurrencies solve. They aren’t well designed to fulfill any of the classic functions of money — unit of account, store of value, or means of payment – in part because they are so extraordinarily volatile in price.  This volatility is not surprising, since they are backed neither by reserves nor by the reputation of a well-established institution, such as a government or even a private bank or other trusted corporation.

Cryptocurrencies are a baffling entity but adopting it as legal tender is the strangest, most worrying aspect of all.

We are living in an age of mass political participation, and civil resistance has emerged as a mainstay of the many social movements active around the world. On this episode of "Behind the Book", we speak with Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, about their new book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, which provides a robust introduction to the theory and practice of civil resistance.

Jacqueline Hazelton writes that regimes battling a counterinsurgency often depend on corruption to stay in power.