Global Archive

It may take years to unravel the tangled web surrounding “Project Opus,” the bungled 2019 mercenary operation to prop up Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar, which allegedly included efforts to deploy a special hit squad to Libya. Few observers tracking the burgeoning global market for privatized armies, however, were likely surprised by reports last week that U.N. investigators suspect the involvement of former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince. The recently leaked U.N. report makes only glancing mention of Prince’s alleged ties to the operation, but it marks the second time since the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that Prince’s company, Hong Kong-based Frontier […]

This is shaping up to be a make-or-break year for international cooperation on biodiversity, though you might not know it. American news outlets have focused most if not all of their recent environmental reporting on climate change. On one level, of course, this makes sense. Climate change is the most daunting collective challenge that humanity has ever faced, and nations have fallen far behind the emissions reduction targets they set in Paris in 2015. Given these stakes, it’s certainly front-page news that President Joe Biden has called climate change a top-tier U.S. national security threat. What’s more, he has also […]

Among the images that circulated in the aftermath of last month’s Capitol insurrection, one video stood apart, an almost iconic representation of the mob unleashed. In it, an enraged supporter of Donald Trump wields a pole flying the American flag to repeatedly strike a police officer who, having been dragged down the stone steps of the Capitol, lies at the crowd’s feet. The video requires no deep analysis to identify the violence it portrays as a threat to liberal democracy. A very different video that began to go viral in late September is of another register altogether. In it, a […]

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, studies have found that women and girls in lower- and middle-income countries are being hit hardest by the crisis. According to Megan O’Donnell, a senior analyst at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., appropriate policy responses to COVID-19 can help not just to address this disparity, but also to close the gender gap that existed in many societies prior to the pandemic. She joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to discuss her work leading a new initiative to study the gendered impacts of COVID-19. Listen to […]

Around the world, the coronavirus pandemic has taken an especially high toll on women and girls. From public health to education to jobs and livelihoods, studies have revealed a gender disparity in the impact of COVID-19 that is particularly wide in lower- and middle-income countries. Yet for all the work that’s been done, experts say there’s still a lot they don’t know about how these impacts are being felt across different communities. To help address this problem, the Center for Global Development recently launched a new initiative to analyze the gendered impacts of the pandemic and study policy responses around […]

Last Wednesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in December, unveiled the latest installment of its famous “Doomsday Clock,” which purports to measure how close the world is catastrophe. When it first appeared in 1947, at the dawn of the nuclear age, its hands were set at 7 minutes to midnight. In the intervening years, it’s moved both closer to and farther from that witching hour. The most comforting installment appeared in 1991, amid the sudden end of the Cold War, when the Clock was reset to a sanguine 17 minutes to midnight. That optimism […]