Global Archive

Editor’s note: Guest columnists Megan Gleason-Roberts and Alischa Kugel are filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on vacation this week. June will be the start of a new phase of United Nations engagement in Somalia, when the new U.N. Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) will replace the long-standing U.N. Political Office in Somalia (UNPOS), in place since 1995. In late-April, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon tapped Nicholas Kay, a former British ambassador and Africa director at the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as the secretary-general’s new special representative in Somalia. When Kay takes up his duties as the head of […]

The government’s decision to charge surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with the use of a weapon of mass destruction struck many Americans as peculiar. At first glance, the Tsarnaev brothers’ bombs do not seem to match the definition or popular perception of a WMD. For decades, that term has been interpreted as referring to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which uniquely possess the ability to kill people in numbers large enough to be considered massive. Two factors, among others, help explain the government’s decision: The charge is seen by prosecutors as relatively easy to level—and prove—compared to other possible […]

To be living in Europe and working on development at the moment is something of a schizophrenic existence. On the one hand, European countries are facing austerity, cuts and recession. On the other, supposedly less “developed” countries are experiencing growth, expansion and improvement. It’s a context that makes the discussions about the next set of global development goals very interesting indeed. Where exactly are the problems in the world that our new goals should fix, and what exactly are they? Twenty years ago, when the last set of development goals was agreed upon in the form of the U.N. Millennium […]

Does international trade liberalization reduce poverty? The question is an important and relevant one. It was high on the agenda in the late-1990s—think of the Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999—and after a decade or so of quiescence it is starting to worry policymakers again. Fortunately, it permits a fairly definite answer, one that surprises many people. While there clearly are exceptions, the answer is “in the long run and on average, almost always, yes, trade liberalization reduces poverty.” The terms “long run” and “average” are not weasel words, but they do mask a lot of […]

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the U.S. military assumed it would no longer be involved in counterinsurgency. The subject was dropped from the curriculum of the military’s professional educational system. None of the armed services wrote new doctrine or developed new operational concepts. The only lingering attention was a handful of war games with sideshow insurgency scenarios. Then the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan forced the U.S. military and other government agencies to relearn counterinsurgency. The military wrote new doctrine and rebuilt its educational curriculum. Intelligence agencies refined their insurgency-focused analytical tools. Even the State Department and U.S. […]