Global Politics

My seventeen-year-old brother doesn’t remember 9/11 – but it’s a day my country can’t forget. Nor should it. Many “millennials,” myself included, will only have vague memories of the day itself and the outpouring of patriotism that followed. Every year, we are reminded of the men and women that died so needlessly and so courageously […]

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Last March, the African-American website Grio ran a tongue-in-cheek article listing the five best places for black Americans to move if Donald J. Trump won the presidency. First on the list was Ghana, which the article identified as “one of the more stable democracies” in Africa. That’s true. But as Ghana prepares for its own presidential elections […]

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In trying to puzzle through the populism animating the right and left after the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2015 European migrant crisis, we can draw a worrying parallel between the UK referenda and social and economic populism in the US. As in the US presidential race, the UK’s Remain/Leave debate is complex: it […]

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There are few people who can lay claim to having shaped how the world’s only superpower uses modern technology, but Alec Ross is one of those few. Having played a critical role in developing then Senator Barack Obama’s technology and innovation plan during the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross went on to serve as senior innovation advisor to […]

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As a very active supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, I have for the past nine months lived in fear of the day when the strong economy, and the Democratic Party machine’s systematic opposition would finally see off our campaign. The fear was never so much that we wouldn’t get Mr. Sanders, although I am a […]

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I sat down with the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.K., Minister Elizabeth Dibble, to discuss the Obama visit, the Middle East and the complex Iran-Saudi relationship. The Obama Visit to the U.K. D.M.: You touched on President Obama’s visit in your talk and what he said about the EU referendum. What for […]

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The Atlantic explores President Obama’s decision not to bomb Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s army killed more than 1,400 people with sarin gas. It offers a new and insightful evaluation of Obama and his legacy.

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QZ reports that “Confessions of a Republican” has been making a comeback online. Watching this, one can possibly feel sympathy for the memory of Senator Barry Goldwater, who was an intellectual titan compared to Trump. Nevertheless, this Johnson campaign video will doubtless hit home with many Republicans  today in the same way. A great piece of American political […]

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  War will never again be the same. Autonomous weapons have nearly arrived, and so far nothing has been able to stop them. At the 2015 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, an open letter—signed by over three thousand of the world’s most relevant robotics experts, and endorsed by luminaries including Stephen Hawking, Nobel Laureate […]

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Introduction At the time of India’s independence in 1947 the world had just witnessed the end of the Second World War and was slowly being engulfed in a new power struggle with the Cold War. The brewing trend of the time was that of alliance forming with either of the blocs led by the United States (US) […]

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One of the most striking trends of modern times, the concentration of global wealth in hands of the very few, has been popularized by Thomas Piketty in his hugely influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty argues that the rate of return on capital consistently exceeds the rate of economic growth. In the absence of […]

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The small coastal country of Djibouti made headlines last month as it was revealed that three-term President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh was scheduled to appear before the British High Court, which would have made him the first ever acting African head of state to do so. While pro-democracy activists in Djibouti and abroad heralded the development […]

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Since D17 (17th December 2014), when President Obama announced sweeping change in U.S. policy toward Cuba, news about the country has been exciting. Headlines such as ‘Obama making history’, ‘Diplomatic Relations Restored’, ‘Cuba off the Terrorist List’,‘Cuba Reopen D.C. Embassy’, ‘The American Flag being raised outside the U.S. Embassy in Havana’ and ‘American businesses preparing to […]

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In the opening hours of Tuesday, April 27th, 1965, a small team of United States marines landed ashore on the western outskirts of Santo Domingo. They were en route to the Hotel Embajador, a makeshift sanctuary for thousands of foreign nationals caught in the middle of the Dominican Republic’s civil war. Just three nights earlier, […]

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Kurdistan is a nation that encompasses parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, but it is not a state. In post-Saddam Iraq the Kurds have had success in forming a new autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) with their own military. In July last year, KRG President Masoud Barzani asked his parliament to prepare for an independence referendum. The Kurds have a […]

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The shooting of journalist Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward live on breakfast television in Virginia was unimaginably horrific. Sadly, even the harrowing screams of Ms Parker in her last seconds are unlikely to change the U.S. debate about guns, but they should. These TV journalists were not operating in certain parts of Syria, Iraq, or Libya where they […]

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At the stakeholder briefing during the ninth round of negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), U.S. chief negotiator Dan Mullaney quipped that everyone was discussing Investor to State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) systems except the negotiators. The latter have not discussed the issue since January 2014, when the European Commission launched a public consultation, […]

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Tensions in the South China Sea were raised once again on the 21st of May when a U.S. P8-A Poseidon surveillance plane was identified by Chinese early warning radar gathering reconnaissance above the Spratly archipelago. The crew of the P8 were warned at least eight times to abort their flight over the contested waters, yet […]

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‘When whales fight, the shrimp’s back is broken.’ The South Korean government has long viewed itself in terms of this proverb when it comes to its relations with the People’s Republic of China and the United States. The two great powers, in their battle for influence over the Asia-Pacific region, often require that South Korea […]

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A brave 12-year-old girl named Zeynab Daghastani recently attempted to escape the grim living conditions of a besieged Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Starving and bone-tired, she did not make it very far before being shot and killed by an ISIS sniper. Welcome to Yarmouk. On April 1st, a group of ISIS’s mask-wearing jihadists swept through the […]

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