South Asia

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.

Meghan Garrity details the history of mass expulsions since the centennial of the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.

Charli Carpenter comments on  U.S. President Joe Biden's executive order, issued in February 2022, releasing $7 billion in frozen, U.S.-held Afghan central bank reserves. It has been proposed to use half of the funds to pay reparations to the families of 9/11 victims.

Charli Carpenter critiques U.S. President Joe Biden's recently issued executive order releasing $7 billion in frozen, U.S.-held Afghan central bank reserves. She argues that those funds belong to the Afghan people, and not to the United States and the Taliban.

Charli Carpenter and Lise Howard write that a U.N. peacekeeping mission could help avert civil war in Afghanistan.

The Russian/Chinese-led bloc is expected to approve Iran's accession this week amid uncertainty over President Raisi's foreign posture and ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan.

Stephen Walt argues that opponents of the withdrawal from Afghanistan are blocking foreign policy changes the United States desperately needs.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has published a document from the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs concerning nuclear problems and tensions in the time of COVID-19. The document has been co-signed by a large number of Pugwash colleagues and personalities.