Governance

In the first comprehensive post-mortem analysis of the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project (NKMCAP), Reine Rambert and Amanda Sardonis examine how NKMCAP failed to live up to its potential, by focusing on three different dimensions of partnership effectiveness: 1) the sustainability of the partnership, 2) the effectiveness of the collaboration process itself, and 3) the achievement of the planned objectives. Rambert and Sardonis extract several transferable lessons from the challenges faced by NKMCAP that are highly consequential to partnership effectiveness.

Joseph Nye argues that in the face of the threats posed by China, Russia, and North Korea, Japan's self-defense depends more than ever on the strength of its alliances. By significantly increasing its own defense spending and pursuing closer military cooperation with the United States, the current government is moving in the right direction.

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.

Juliette Kayyem writes that due to the sheer prevalence of police brutality in America, public officials have gotten better at managing the shock.

Fredrik Logevall describes the legacy of the Paris Peace Accords, which effectively put an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, as the 50th anniversary of the accords nears.

The economist and HKS professor is passionate about solving what may be humanity's most important and perplexing problem: How to untangle fossil fuels from the global economy.

Stephen Walt analyzes why China's foreign-policy reset will—or won't—work out.

Stephen Walt offers some brief foreign-policy advice for the newest members of the U.S. legislature.

While the Paris Agreement provides the framework for the nations of the world to slow the growth of CO2 emissions, additional policy and technological tools will have to be deployed to meet the challenge of climate change. That’s the perspective expressed by Daniel Bodansky, the Regents’ Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, during the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” a podcast produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

Many accounts of the formation of American and British grand strategy during World War II between the fall of France and the Pearl Harbor attacks stress the differences between the two sides’ strategic thinking. These accounts argue that while the Americans favored a 'direct' Germany-first approach to defeating the Axis powers, the British preferred the 'indirect' or 'peripheral' method. However, a review of Anglo-American strategic planning in this period shows that before official U.S. wartime entry, both sides largely agreed the British 'peripheral' approach was the wisest grand strategy for winning the war.