Latest Archive

While Americans debate when and where the United States should use drones to strike at insurgents and terrorists who cannot be reached by other means, they may be overlooking an important trend: the move to supply a targeted killing capability to allied nations. This began when the Bush administration decided to provide technology and advice to help the government of Colombia kill the leaders of its narco-insurgency. Today, the U.S. military is also helping the armed forces of Yemen field systems for the targeted killing of anti-government extremists associated with al-Qaida. This is the beginning of a trend, as more […]

On March 19, students occupied Taiwan’s legislature to protest President Ma Ying-jeou and his Kuomintang (KMT) government’s handling of the services trade agreement with China (CSSTA). With strong public backing, the protest swelled into what is now known as the Sunflower Movement. The movement won the support of major KMT figures for a compromise that would see the services pact, and any future agreements with China, undergo more thorough—and public—scrutiny. The protest leaders have now announced that they will vacate the legislature on Thursday evening. These dramatic events are forcing a rethink about the very nature of the China-Taiwan relationship. […]

Australia has provided ships to the international search effort for missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 which is taking place in part in Australia’s vast maritime domain. In an email interview, Sam Bateman, professorial research fellow at the Australian National Center for Ocean Resources at the University of Wollongong in Australia and senior fellow in the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, explained how Australia secures these waters. WPR: What are the key goals of Australia’s maritime security strategy? Sam Bateman: The key goals of Australia’s maritime security […]

Since the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women and the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, many governments and international development institutions have expressed their commitment toward gender equality goals. Most development actors and policymakers, however, remain focused on a narrow interpretation of women’s empowerment and often argue for “investing in women and girls” as a means to achieve poverty reduction and GDP growth, rather than as an end in itself and as a matter of social justice. For example, the main argument behind the slogan “gender equality is smart economics” coined by the World Bank […]

Advocates working to end a sad chapter in American history were given new hope last year when President Barack Obama renewed his push to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The substantive challenges to closing the prison remain, though events have shifted the risk calculus to favor closure. And even though the president is in a far weaker position politically than he was when he took office, different public attitudes on national security issues should make it easier to close Guantanamo. What seemed a hopeless and nearly forgotten project for Obama a year ago—closing Guantanamo by the end of his […]

This weekend’s first round of Afghanistan’s presidential election saw the country’s political institutions perform much better than during the 2009 ballot, while the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) provided a relatively safe and secure electoral environment. The winners may not be clear and certified until May. It seems likely that no candidate received more than half the votes, meaning that a runoff between the two leading candidates will probably occur in June. But already the results offer hope for Afghanistan’s status as a functioning democracy in which multiple candidates compete for the highest offices in elections whose outcome cannot be […]

The original and most immediate rationale for redistributive land reform is that, at low levels of capital intensity, large farms operated by wage labor will be less efficient than small owner-operated ones. This has given rise to an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity that continues to be widely observed in the literature. In fact, colonial powers had often tried to restrict access to land by the local population to ensure a continued supply of cheap and relatively uneducated labor, despite the associated economic cost. In a sense, land reform is an effort to rectify this historical injustice and […]

It is now very much old news that economic inequality has risen dramatically in the United States and many other developed democracies over the past 30 years. This dramatic increase has produced a flurry of discussion over how severe the increase has been, how much of a problem inequality really is and what can and should be done about it. While inequality is resurgent as an issue in U.S. politics, it has a much longer and more prominent history in middle- and low-income countries. This is likely due to the fact that inequality in developing countries has historically been much […]

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel hosted defense ministers from 10 ASEAN members last week. The informal meeting in Hawaii was the first of its kind, and it came at a time when the United States is trying to build the partnerships necessary for its Asia rebalance strategy. Ian Storey of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore explains in an email that while ASEAN defense ministers have previously met with their U.S. and Chinese counterparts, last week’s meeting was “the first time they have done so outside the region.” A meeting between ASEAN defense ministers and the Chinese defense […]

Last month, Serbia held parliamentary elections in which the conservative and pro-EU Progressive party won a decisive majority in the legislature. In an email interview, Marlene Spoerri, U.N. officer at Independent Diplomat who has done research on democracy promotion and post-conflict statebuilding in the Western Balkans, explained what led to the victory and what comes next. WPR: What factors led to the Progressive party’s decisive victory in Serbia’s parliamentary elections? Marlene Spoerri: A number of factors contributed to the Progressive party’s victory in the March 2014 parliamentary elections. The first is the party’s pro-EU, center-right platform. Since it was formed […]

Having just spent several days in Israel and Palestine for the launch of Molad, a new Israeli think tank, I had hoped to devote this column to some of the takeaways of my trip. However, I was reminded this week that the first thing a stay in Israel and Palestine teaches, or ought to teach, is that a 1,000-word column is not the easiest format for nuanced exploration of whatever one has learned. So instead of a trip report, I’m going to turn a regional lens on another source of full employment for foreign policy pundits these days: the twin […]

With Chad’s announcement in early April that it was pulling its peacekeeping troops out of the Central African Republic (CAR), the country finally seemed to be bending to widespread criticism of the actions of its soldiers. Things had gone from bad to worse for Chad’s armed forces, the ANT, from a high point last year when its role in support of France’s Operation Serval in Mali was widely praised. The ANT’s achievement in Mali has been overshadowed by recent events in the CAR, including reports from the African Union’s MISCA peacekeeping force in Bangui that Chadian soldiers in a suburb […]

KIGALI, Rwanda—For a milestone year in Rwanda’s post-genocide history, 2014 began with an ugly start. In the early morning hours of Jan. 1, as revelers flooded Kigali’s nightspots, Patrick Karegeya lay half a continent away, dead in a Johannesburg hotel room. Once among Rwanda’s most powerful men, Karegeya had served for a decade as Rwanda’s head of external intelligence before falling out with the regime of President Paul Kagame. After spending time in prison, in 2007 he fled to South Africa, where he was granted asylum and put under state protection. But sometime on New Years Eve, in the upscale […]

It was no surprise when last Sunday’s emergency meeting in Paris between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov ended inconclusively. The United States is not prepared to cut a 19th-century-style deal with Moscow to resolve the Crimea crisis, but neither has it articulated a 21st-century response that would change Russia’s calculus. The Kremlin remains puzzled as to why Washington is not more responsive to its pitch for a settlement for Ukraine that would result in the decentralization, federalization and neutralization of the country. After all, similar arrangements were made as late as the mid-20th […]

On Saturday, Afghans will go to the polls in the first round of an election that, if all goes well, will result in the first democratic transfer of presidential power in Afghanistan’s history. While the country has held two presidential and two parliamentary elections since the U.S. invasion in 2001, Saturday’s will be the first of the post-Taliban era to be secured entirely by Afghan forces. The campaign period has posed a major test for the Afghan National Security Forces, which formally assumed responsibility for Afghanistan’s security from international troops last summer. The Taliban have targeted poll workers, candidates and […]

Russia’s annexation of Crimea has rekindled discussion in Sweden about raising military spending and, potentially, pushing for NATO membership. In an email interview, Jan Joel Andersson, senior research fellow and head of the North America Program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, explained Sweden’s defense posture and how it may change after the Ukraine crisis. WPR: What is the current size and strength of Sweden’s military, in terms of both hardware and personnel? Jan Joel Andersson: The Swedish armed forces have undergone a dramatic transformation since the end of the Cold War. Never a member of NATO, Sweden based […]

The South Korean Ministry of Defense recently made the official announcement that it will purchase the F-35 fighter jet as part of an ambitious plan to modernize the country’s air defenses. Japan also plans to purchase the F-35, meaning that the two countries most central to the Obama administration’s Asia rebalance will be using the same platform. This is good news for a fighter that has become the most expensive defense acquisition program in history. Although the U.S. Air Force has consistently maintained the importance of the F-35—and continues to robustly fund it under the recent fiscal year 2015 budget […]