International Security & Defense

542 Items

A worker wearing a mask a performing work

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Combatting Forced Labor in Global Supply Chains

    Authors:
  • Sarah Bishop
  • Tom Plotkin
  • Emanuel Ghebregergis
| January 2023

In recent years, the U.S. government has accelerated its efforts to eradicate forced labor from global supply chains. Those efforts have been led primarily by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has been actively enforcing a long-standing statutory prohibition on the importation of goods made with forced labor, bolstered by recent legislation that has provided it with more substantial regulatory authority. CBP’s evolving enforcement regime suffers, however, from certain shortcomings, including a lack of adequate incentives and legal protections for importers and their suppliers to work collaboratively with the government to craft remediation programs that address the root causes of forced labor.

This photo taken from night video provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows a smuggler dropping children from the top of border barrier in Santa Teresa, N.M.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection via AP

Policy Brief - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Dismantling Migrant Smuggling Networks in the Americas

    Author:
  • Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
| June 27, 2022

This paper proposes the dismantling of migrant smuggling networks through intelligence and targeted actions as important elements both of border security and enforcement and humanitarian migration management. In addition to these policies, the U.S. government should collaborate closely with other governments to cooperatively redesign asylum systems.

Trucks drive through floodwaters at the U.S.-Canada border crossing in Sumas, Washington. 

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Policy Brief - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Toward an Integrated North American Emergency Response System

| June 23, 2022

Establishing a North American approach is a key component to more comprehensive and effective emergency management structured to meet current and emerging threats. This paper briefly examines the history of emergency response coordination among the United States, Mexico, and Canada, highlighting some of the major bilateral, regional and non-governmental agreements.

A U.S. flag is unfurled at the Pentagon

AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Analysis & Opinions - Military Times

The US is Safer from Jihadi Terrorism 20 Years after 9/11

| Jan. 13, 2022

Jacqueline L. Hazelton  details why the international jihadi terrorist threat to the United States is down since the al-Qaida attacks of 20 years ago. Not through war or other uses of organized violence, but through cooperation, use of legal and financial tools, and strengthening homeland defense and resilience.

Les Droits de l’Homme, 1947 - a surrealist painting showing an anthropomorphic chess piece standing on a bridge next to a flaming tuba.

Rene Magritte

Report

Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition)

    Author:
  • Rebecca Williams
| August 2021

This report is an urgent warning of where we are headed if we maintain our current trajectory of augmenting our public space with trackers of all kinds. In this report, I outline how current “smart city” technologies can watch you. I argue that all “smart city” technology trends toward corporate and state surveillance and that if we don’t stop and blunt these trends now that totalitarianism, panopticonism, discrimination, privatization, and solutionism will challenge our democratic possibilities. This report examines these harms through cautionary trends supported by examples from this last year and provides 10 calls to action for advocates, legislatures, and technology companies to prevent these harms. If we act now, we can ensure the technology in our public spaces protect and promote democracy and that we do not continue down this path of an elite few tracking the many.