Science & Technology

NPR's Ari Shapiro speak with political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who studies civil resistance movements, about the protests China and Iran.

The powerful effects of artificial intelligence are already being felt in business, politics, medicine, war, and almost every other domain of twenty-first century life. For all of its positive potential, the technology presents significant risks that are best addressed sooner rather than later.

Amy Ertan and Tarah Wheeler describe how the World Health Organization is uniquely positioned to help secure all facets of vaccine information.

Joseph Nye writes that with less preponderance and facing a more complex world, the United States must exercise power with as well as over others and use its soft power to attract their cooperation. To do that, the United States will have to rediscover the importance of the institutions Donald Trump's administration abandoned.

Stephen Walt writes that political institutions are not permanent phenomena: they are artificial human creations and only as enduring, adaptive, and effective as people make them. He hopes for a serious and sustained process of democratic change, one that respects the nobler features of the U.S. constitutional order yet addresses all the ways in which The United States has failed to live up to its own professed ideals. The alternative, he fears, will be something much more dangerous. 

Unipolarity is over, and with it the illusion that other nations would simply take their assigned place in a U.S.-led international order. For the United States, that will require accepting the reality that there are spheres of influence in the world today—and that not all of them are American spheres.

Joseph Nye writes that the institutional costs of using a wrecking ball approach may reduce American power in the long run.

At last month's Paris Peace Forum, the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GSCS) issued its report on how to provide an overarching cyber stability framework. Combined with norms, principles, and confidence-building measures suggested by others, the GCSC's conclusions are an important step forward.

Nathaniel Moir writes that Revolutionary Warfare is not insurgency or guerrilla warfare: It is driven by ideology and commitment, not technology. Revolutionary Warfare's foundation is the perceived legitimacy of its political rationale among the population in which it is propagated. No matter how expertly or technologically advanced contemporary conflict is fought, it will not compensate for lack of political rationale.