Conflict & Conflict Resolution

Stephen Walt critiques Biden's foreign policy record and argues for creative solutions to the problems of a new era.

In the Foreign Affairs interview, Host Daniel Kurtz-Phelan discusses with Harvard's Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks why autocrats fear women, why feminist movements are such a powerful tool against autocracy, and what the assault on reproductive rights in the United States signifies for American democracy.

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.

Stephen Walt posits that realists recognize that evil acts occur and that some states behave worse than others, but they also understand that all states compete for security in an imperfect world and that no country's conduct is beyond reproach. 

Charli Carpenter writes: The role of government should be to make it easy for grassroots humanitarianism to take root and spread, not take advantage of volunteers as a way to duck its obligations under international law.

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.

Charli Carpenter elaborates on three important reasons to believe that the systemic mass rape allegations in Ukraine are highly likely to be evaluated by U.N. war crimes investigators and prosecuted in war crimes courts.

Kelly Greenhill argues that by exploiting political divisions that exist within targeted states, the threatened or actual deployment of engineered flows of migrants has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail, its use.

Joseph Nye argues that persuasion and attraction still matter even in a contest of hard power.

On Point interviews Anne Wingenter and Erica Chenoweth about the following questions: Does the attack on women's rights in the past have any relevance to the rapid spread of anti-abortion laws in the United States today? And are women's rights an early indicator of the health of a democracy overall?