Governance

Kaveri Iychettira provides a critique of India's electricity sector and also of a provision on competitive bidding in a proposed amendment to the Electricity Act of 2003.

The case of the vanished and apparently murdered Saudi activist and writer Jamal Khashoggi is a tale with a victim and villains, but no heroes.

I count myself among the skeptics concerning John Brennan’s organizational changes at the CIA, but such concerns have no bearing on the revocation of his clearances of other prominent national security officials. I signed the letter by former CIA officials repudiating the president’s actions because I am convinced that our nation is in a crisis. 

A failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Saturday was mounted with explosive-armed drones, according to news reports. Nine days earlier, and on the other side of the world, terrorists claimed to have sent an armed drone to attack the international airport in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. No one was killed in either case, and the circumstances of both remain murky. But a new and dangerous era in non-state-sponsored terrorism clearly has begun, and no one is adequately prepared to counter it.

Two conditions are clear as the U.S. and Russian Presidents prepare meet in Helsinki. First, U.S.-Russian relations are arguably at their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Second, both presidents have domestic realities that constrain their flexibility to achieve compromise in the many areas that have caused relations to falter.

The Harvard Gazette's Christina Pazzanese interviews Belfer Center Senior Fellow James Clapper his new book, and the state of U.S. intelligence. 

Lt. Gen. Clapper (ret.) James Clapper discusses his experiences in Korea, and how to change the narrative on the peninsula. 

"The power shortage is a symptom of the inability or refusal of key actors to govern the territory."

When it comes to cyberweapons, America is an elephant and Iran is a flea. Still, a flea can be a persistent nuisance, especially for the unprotected.

"Since the debates over whether intelligence on Iraqi WMD was manipulated in the run-up to the invasion in 2003, academic researchers have made great progress in understanding how intelligence becomes politicized. They have found that politicization can happen from the top down, when politicians pressure intelligence agencies to produce analysis supportive of their policies. Intelligence officers themselves can also manipulate information for political ends in a bottom-up process."