Interconnected vectors across security, economic, cultural, and rhetorical fault-lines are keeping the African Great Lakes states in a state of perpetual conflict and instability — creating a vicious cycle that threatens to boil over throughout the region.
China is leading the global transition to clean energy, but the government’s rapid advancements within the energy sector—which have been developing for the past two decades—are masking the country’s underlying global ambitions.
Dr. James Lindsay — an expert on the domestic politics and process of U.S. foreign policymaking — joined ITS’ Liam Kraft and Melissa Ballard to discuss U.S. diplomatic strategy and the domestic politics shaping America’s foreign policy and international position at the 7-month mark — just over 200 days — into the Biden administration.
Russia’s April military build-up betrays its designs on European partners in Ukraine, and demonstrates a determination to continue its asymmetric assault on Ukraine and Eastern Europe at large. The time is now or never for European policymakers to decide how to respond to Russia’s continued expansionism.
The United States urgently needs dispassionate, wholesale reappraisals of its foreign policy to prepare itself for the long-term in an increasingly competitive, multipolar world order.
The military coup in Myanmar was more than just the result of flaws in its nascent democracy. Successive governments — military and civil alike — swept societal, ethnic, and economic challenges and inequalities under the rug for decades, crippling the growth of civil society and democratic safeguards.
Ten years after anti-government protests rocked the Middle East, instability continues to plague Yemen — yet even while the will of the Yemeni people remains largely forgotten, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
European leaders and heads of state are willfully ignoring the plight of refugees and migrants suffering at the border between Croatia and Bosnia to avoid the domestic political fallout that undertaking real migration reform would cause.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the ineffectiveness of traditional multilateralism in addressing transnational challenges — where multilateral strategies fail, however, minilateralist policies may succeed.
Global military consumption and destruction of natural resources and habitats not only runs counter to global efforts at combatting climate change, but has become a grave international security threat.
Trump's recognition of Moroccan control over Western Sahara in exchange for Moroccan recognition of Israel was an unnecessary U.S. concession and a loss for the Sahrawi’s independence movement — but could prove an opportunity for the Biden administration.
Russia’s latest round of youth-driven protests are as much about the Russian economy as they are about Navalny and political freedoms. Putin’s social contract with the Russian public is fraying.
Pakistan’s uneven distribution of development funding from CPEC in Balochistan and heavy-handed response to extremists is fueling the very ethnonationalist conflict it seeks to avert.
Bhutan’s reputation as the happiest country in the world is stained by its mistreatment and mass expulsion of the Lhotshampas — a sharp contrast to the jocund paradise it claims to be.
The success of 21st-century American statecraft will be defined by its ability to meet transnational challenges with a sustainable playbook that breaches the gap between domestic governance and foreign policy.
International Law must immediately and proactively address questions surrounding extraterrestrial commercial activity — or risk the unraveling of the legal neutrality of space and the launch of a new militarized space race fueled by resurging great power competition.
An immoral and unresolved legacy of the past military dictatorship, the bear bile industry in South Korea should have ended with the establishment of the post-dictatorship democratic government and transitional justice brought to the captive bears — animal victims of the former autocratic state.
The resulting victory of Andrzej Duda is a harbinger for greater discord between Warsaw and Brussels, as the policy positions of the Law and Order Party under whose name he ran are likely to run afoul of Poland’s commitments to the respect for the rule of law, tolerance, and non-discrimination as enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union.
Ali Wyne — an expert in the field of geopolitics and a rising voice in U.S. Foreign Policy circles — joined ITS’ Liam Kraft (Director, U.S. Foreign Policy Programme) to discuss U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, rising great power competition, and the U.S. debate over democratic values.
The top-down approach to peacebuilding and development is the most widely-used and accepted format for an operation, involving a broad, readily-adopted diplomatic framework for operating in-country. Yet, it’s precisely this 60,000-foot view that causes these operations to fail so often.