Infrastructure Archive

After a lull, violence in Ukraine escalated once again this week, as Russian-backed rebels launched offensives both in the besieged eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk and on a new front, against the southeastern port of Mariupol. Peace talks in Minsk were canceled today in response to civilian casualties in Donetsk. According to the Financial Times, Western intelligence officials are increasingly concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not just trying to keep Ukraine destabilized, but actively working to carve out a viable Russian puppet state, to be called “Novorossiya” (New Russia), in southeastern Ukraine. While Putin’s ultimate ambition remains […]

In late December, nearly 100 years to the day after the Panama Canal first opened for business, Nicaragua broke ground on Central America’s second mega-canal project, the aptly named Nicaragua Grand Canal. Billed as the world’s largest engineering project, it will snake 173 miles across Nicaragua upon its projected completion in 2019, providing a wider, deeper alternate route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for ships too large to transit the Panama Canal, several hundreds of miles to the southeast. The new canal, which will stretch three times the length of the Panama Canal, promises to not only alter the […]

Leaders from across the Caribbean are meeting in Washington this week for the first-ever Caribbean Energy Summit, hosted by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. In an email interview, Johanna Mendelson Forman, senior adviser at the Stimson Center, scholar-in-residence at American University and founder of the Latin American and Caribbean Council on Renewable Energy, discussed renewable energy in Latin America. WPR: How extensive is renewable energy infrastructure in Latin America, and what countries have been most active in pursuing renewable energy? Johanna Mendelson Forman: With the greenest energy matrix in the world, mainly due to the extensive use of hydropower, South […]

BETHLEHEM, West Bank—Shivering at his desk inside a dilapidated office building housing the Bethlehem branch of the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s Interior Ministry, Ayman al-Azza feels trapped. More than 20 years ago, al-Azza, now 48, returned from the U.S. to the refugee camp he grew up in ready to build the promised Palestinian state. Drawn by the optimism surrounding the signing of the 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, more commonly known as the Oslo Accords, tens of thousands of Palestinians living abroad did the same. Two frustrating decades later, al-Azza is ready to call it quits. He’s not […]

Yesterday, the Belarusian ruble rebounded slightly in international currency markets for the first time since the Russian ruble plummeted in value in December. The gain follows emergency steps taken earlier this month by Belarus’ central bank to devalue the ruble by 7 percent, increase the main refinancing rate and add a new export tax on potash, all in an attempt to manage the fallout from Russia’s sudden economic crisis. This in turn followed a move in late December to replace Belarus’ prime minister and the head of the central bank in order to aggressively respond to the currency drop. The […]

In the months before former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was ousted by the military in the summer of 2013, Cairo was full of rumors. That wasn’t particularly new; Egyptian politics have always thrived on rumor. But the latest in a string of anti-Morsi hearsay at that time, which grew louder as the summer neared, went something like this: To appease his Palestinian brethren in Hamas, Morsi planned to give the group—an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—a foothold in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian prosecutors went even further, after Morsi was in military custody later that year, accusing him of plotting both […]