Diplomacy & Politics Archive

On Sunday, Peruvians will head to the polls to elect a new president and 130 members of Congress. But in a campaign season that has been fraught with controversy, few are likely to be satisfied with the results. Peru’s presidential campaign season began with a field of 19 candidates. By last Sunday evening’s debates, it had narrowed to 10. Among them were the daughter of a former president now in jail; two former presidents-one of whom was involved in a drug-trafficking scandal; and a candidate that’s running from a jail cell. Described as “crazy” and “chaotic” by some in the […]

A specter is haunting American politics—the specter of terrorism. As the self-styled Islamic State added transnational terrorism to its repertoire, it inspired or directed terrorist attacks in both Europe and the United States. There will almost certainly be more attacks to come. The fear of those attacks is adding to the turmoil that already characterizes American politics and, combined with intense political partisanship, pushing the political system in some very dark directions. This is by design: The architects of terrorism deliberately stoke fear, using it to attain psychological effects that far exceed their actual ability to kill or destroy. They […]

With just days to go before presidential elections in Chad on Sunday, civil society groups are continuing to call for people to take to the streets despite a ban on demonstrations. On April 5, a small number of protesters, including members of two citizen groups—Ca Suffit, or That’s Enough, and Trop C’est trop, Enough is Enough—succeeded in holding a brief demonstration on Rue Felix Eboue in the center of Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, despite a strong police presence. The protesters were calling for an end to the country’s political stagnation ahead of the election, as well as for the release of […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and host Peter Dörrie discuss the upcoming elections in Peru and Chad as well as the varying reactions to the Panama Papers around the globe. For the Report, Steven Metz joins us to talk about the concept of “limited war” and the differences in the U.S. and Russian approach to it. Listen: Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant articles on WPR: In Peru’s ‘Chaotic’ Presidential Elections, It’s a Race for Second Place Deby Set to Keep Power in Chad Election, but Discontent Is Growing Reaction to the ‘Panama Papers’ Reveals […]

Last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the Czech Republic, where he signed more than 30 deals worth nearly $4 billion. In an email interview, Richard Turcsanyi, the deputy director of the Institute for Asian Studies, Bratislava, discussed Chinese investment in Central and Eastern Europe. WPR: How extensive is Chinese investment in Central and Eastern Europe, and what factors are driving China’s investment strategy there? Richard Turcsanyi: To begin with, it is extremely difficult to establish unequivocally the amount of investments from one country in another’s economy. Various statistical sources notoriously show differences. Putting together the numbers from a range […]

Last month, authorities arrested Zambian opposition leader Erick Chanda after he accused President Edgar Lungu of using public funds on a vacation. In an email interview, Nick Branson, a senior researcher at Africa Research Institute in London, discussed politics and the state of the opposition in Zambia. WPR: What is President Edgar Lungu’s record so far in office, and how popular are he and the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) ahead of August presidential and parliamentary elections? Nick Branson: Lungu has admittedly only been in power for a little over 14 months, having been elected in January 2015 to serve the […]

AMSTERDAM—In the hours that followed the explosive revelations known as the Panama Papers, reverberations from the giant data drop were felt around the globe. After all, the 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, leaked anonymously to International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, implicate rich and powerful people from practically every country on Earth as holders of offshore shell companies that are often used for tax evasion purposes. But while the power from the leaks to discredit prominent individuals extended across practically every nation and every system of government, reaction to the revelations was far from uniform. The differences […]

Large street protests across France in the past week against proposed labor reforms are the latest sign of the trouble President Francois Hollande finds himself in at home. The demonstrations came on the heels of Hollande’s retreat from another controversial and unpopular measure, pushed after the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, to strip dual nationals convicted of terrorism of their French citizenship. As he enters the final year of his term, Hollande is in the weakest position by far of any president in the history of France’s Fifth Republic. His poll numbers for job approval have been negative since […]

In late March, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan both deployed military forces to the undemarcated Chalasart area of their border after Kyrgyz authorities refused Uzbek workers access to a water reservoir located in Kyrgyz territory. In an email interview, Józef Lang, research fellow at the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw, Poland, discusses Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan relations. WPR: What is the recent trajectory of Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan relations, and what are the major drivers of tension? Józef Lang: Relations between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have traditionally been hostile, and the level of distrust between Tashkent and Bishkek remains high despite their common participation in various initiatives and […]

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, is no fan of NATO. In recent weeks, he’s suggested that U.S. involvement in the alliance may need to be reduced. “NATO is costing us a fortune,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Post, “and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.” At a town hall event sponsored by MSNBC, Trump went even further, declaring, “We don’t really need NATO in its current form. . . . [Y]ou have countries that are getting a free ride.” Now on one level, Trump is correct: […]

BEIRUT—Syria’s nationwide cessation of hostilities has made clear the growing rift between the country’s mainstream opposition and the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate. But just as the cease-fire has highlighted these maybe irreconcilable differences, it has also shown the extent to which the Nusra Front is tangled up in and ultimately dependent on the rest of the Syrian opposition. The Nusra Front often sells itself as the beginning and end of the fight against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. But Nusra cannot win single-handedly. It is a symbiote—it can only succeed when it is attached to a Syrian opposition […]

Slovakia’s coalition government, made up of Prime Minister Robert Fico’s center-left Smer-Social Democracy party, the nationalist Slovak National Party and two other parties, was sworn in late last month following parliamentary elections that left Fico without an outright majority. In an email interview, Sean Hanley, senior lecturer in comparative Central and East European politics at the University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, discusses Slovakia’s elections and prospects for the coalition government. WPR: What explains the electoral shifts in the latest election, including declining support for Prime Minister Robert Fico’s center-left Smer-Social Democracy Party and increased support […]

Since assuming power in 1999, Russian President Vladimir Putin has used rising income from gas and oil exports not only to rebuild the Russian military from its post-Soviet nadir, but also to spur the evolution of new tactics and capabilities blending cyberwar, support to proxy forces, special operations and conventional operations. Like Washington, Moscow recognized that the primary security threat in the opening decades of the 21st century was not major conventional war but a complex web of state weakness, political extremism, terrorism, insurgency and transnational crime. Russia’s military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere demonstrate that Putin has […]

Colombia is inching closer to a future free of armed guerrilla groups. Talks with the 52-year-old, 7,000-person Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are far along, even though they missed a March 23 deadline for a final accord. Government and FARC negotiators in Havana have reached agreements on most of the negotiating agenda, and they are probably weeks away from a bilateral cease-fire with U.N. verification. The FARC, though, isn’t the only guerrilla organization in Colombia whose origins date back to 1964. The National Liberation Army, or ELN, has about 1,800 fighters plus a larger support network and is […]

Drones have captured the imagination of popular culture and the attention of international law experts. Amazing access to real-time intelligence enables precision weaponry, but the same information can inhibit decision-makers from acting by raising the ethical and political costs of doing so. Legal scholars concede that international law has not yet caught up with this reality. The anguish that drones cause among decision-makers is the subject of the new movie “Eye in the Sky.” It focuses in particular on how the same data that make drones such potent weapons can paradoxically inhibit, even paralyze authorities who make life-and-death decisions. The […]

Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision, which he articulated in recent interviews with The New York Times and The Washington Post, has been greeted by many international affairs pundits with horror, derision and disdain. One thing it should not be, however, is dismissed. To be sure, Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, expresses his views in a provocative and confrontational manner. The views themselves certainly stand in stark contrast to current U.S. foreign policy orthodoxy, a product of more than 70 years of evolution since World War II. Nevertheless, though iconoclastic, they are not quite as unprecedented as many […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Jim Della-Giacoma is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on leave until early April. Peace and the United Nations go together; at least that’s what its founders intended. But in the meeting rooms of the organization’s New York headquarters, diplomats often argue over the buzzword vocabulary of compound words and phrases for advancing the U.N.’s peace mandate. They parse whether an operation is a special political mission or a peacekeeping mission. They worry that calling something a “peace operation” is too imprecise. When they cannot agree whether something should be peace building or “sustaining the […]