Briefing Archive

The Dominican Republic has quietly become one of Latin America’s overlooked success stories. Continued success is by no means ensured.

With little funding available for national-scale climate adaptation, Malawi has become a laboratory for low-cost community-led climate resilience projects.

The European Council reached a landmark agreement to reform the reception of migrants and asylum seekers. The pact contains loopholes that could endanger migrants.

It’s become fashionable to say women in power would result in more ethical and humane politics. This assumption does more harm than good.

The Solomon Islands’ new government isn’t a complete break from the past. But it is an opportunity for the U.S. to boost bilateral ties.

German leaders have maintained their ironclad support for Israel. It’s increasingly putting them at odds with their constituents.

Europeans increasingly care about climate change policy. It isn’t translating into votes for Europe’s Green parties.

The outpouring of support for Senegal’s new government has overshadowed one of its major shortcomings: women’s rights and gender equality.

Last year’s election could have led to solutions to Thailand’s many ills. Instead, Thai politics are once again in chaos.

Something unfamiliar is spreading in Argentina: optimism. The impact of President Javier Milei’s dramatic economic reforms has exceeded expectations, even as Milei has maintained popular support. But there is now so much enthusiasm that it raises the risk of irrational exuberance, especially given the scale of the challenge ahead.

Negotiators of an international legally binding treaty on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment, just concluded their fourth session in Ottawa, Canada. With four rounds of talks now down and just one to go, negotiators left Ottawa with no agreement on the scope of the future treaty nor any narrowing of options.

An international effort to create a rail and maritime transport corridor to connect Asia to Europe while avoiding Russian territory has gained momentum in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The success or failure of the trade route, known as the Middle Corridor, depends on solid relations between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

An insurgency allied with the Islamic State has been waging a bloody campaign in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province for almost a decade. After a lull in fighting that lasted most of last year, militants spread southward through the isolated province in late 2023 and early 2024, burning houses, schools and churches as they went.

The U.N. often seems powerless, especially amid today’s polycrisis. Yet the organization did seem poised to take a leading role in one emerging global challenge: governing AI, at least until the growing trend of AI nationalism became an obstacle. Ideally, however, the U.N. should still play a leading role in AI governance.

Cambodia’s government can’t get to grips with the cyber-slavery compounds run by Chinese mafia gangs on its territory, as the government’s official response has veered between minimization of the problem and denial. This failure is putting pressure on foreign governments to protect their nationals from falling victim to the scams.

The movement seeking reparations for slavery and colonialism has so far been met with minimal buy-in from the former colonial powers that benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But engaging with calls for reparations could be a powerful diplomatic gesture that those nations could offer to the Global South.

China’s distant-water fishing fleet, the world’s largest, is engaging in human rights abuses and systematic illegal fishing on an unprecedented scale. Urgent action is needed now to rein in the Chinese fleet and end these abuses, which have global security and geopolitical ramifications, as well as real human costs.