Global Archive

When hundreds of thousands of Darfuri refugees flooded across the Chad-Sudan border in 2003, fleeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the Sudanese government and its militia proxies, the U.N. and various aid groups raced to help. Humanitarian workers built a vast and sophisticated network of refugee camps to house as many as 300,000 people. The European Union and, later, the U.N. deployed peacekeepers to protect the camps. By 2008, the refugee camps in eastern Chad had become a self-contained society, one of the biggest and seemingly most permanent in all the world. It was also a major reason […]

Since late last year, members of the U.S. Congress have introduced no less than 34 different bills dealing with information security and Internet policy. Many of these bills are well-meaning, such as the House resolution calling upon Vietnam to “release imprisoned bloggers and respect Internet freedom” — even if the bill applies no penalties and, more importantly, appropriates no money. But the more significant “cyber” bills are the ones dealing with the security of the Internet. Since April 1, 2008, when Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe introduced a particularly mammoth piece of cyber legislation, Congress has worked diligently in […]

I had the pleasure of participating on France 24’s discussion panel, The World This Week, on Friday to recap the stories of the week: the G-20 summit, the McChrystal firing, the elections in Guinea, and the politicization of soccer. The other guests were Matthew Saltmarsh of the IHT, Célestine Bohlen, and Michael Kirtley. Part one can be found here. Part two can be found here. This was one of the rare times I’ve participated on this program where, upon leaving the set, I wasn’t immediately struck by everything I should have said, or how I might have expressed what I […]

Apparently I wasn’t the only person who, in watching the North Korean soccer team’s World Cup matches, flinched every time one of their players screwed up, wondering what awaited them when they returned home. It turns out I should have been more concerned with the fate of the French national team, whose World Cup implosion has triggered the kind of absolute unity of opinion one rarely encounters here. But the popular outrage has become a political pile-on, with Thierry Henry scheduled to consult with President Nicolas Sarkozy at Elysée Palace today, and an Estates General of the country’s soccer federation […]

Last week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan held their first conversation on a newly installed prime-ministerial hotline intended to diffuse tensions between the two countries. In an e-mail interview, Haraldur Þór Egilsson, Professor at the University of Akureyri and author of “The Origins, Use and Development of Hot Line Diplomacy” (.pdf), explains the history and current use of diplomatic hotlines. WPR: When were diplomatic hotlines first introduced, and how has their use expanded and evolved? Haraldur Þór Egilsson: The need for reliable and swift communications between governments has always been essential. Such a need was […]

As the senior managing director of a technology firm that employs algorithms in their most complex forms, I spend a lot of time trying to explain, via nature-centric analogies, how these formulae work. The most cutting-edge algorithms are known as “genetic algorithms,” because they self-adapt their “recipes” through interactions with a wider environment of stimuli, thereby approximating evolutionary responses found in nature. The hardest part about explaining that to people comes from overcoming their bias toward unnatural silicon solutions, as opposed to the carbon-based pathways of discovery and adaptation through failure that define our human existence. Oddly enough, people tend […]

Around the world, governments have largely made progress in the battle against human trafficking over the last year, according to the U.S. State Department’s latest “Trafficking in Persons Report,” which for the first time included an analysis of American efforts. Human trafficking remains a massive worldwide problem, and efforts to address the scourge will never fully succeed until the root causes behind the trade are removed. According to the report, more than 12 million men, women and children around the world have been trapped by traffickers into forced labor, debt bondage or prostitution. U.S. efforts placed it among countries doing […]

The new space craft’s launch occurred without much fanfare. On April 22, the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B prototype roared into orbit atop a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Some 15 years in development, the X-37’s technology, performance and purpose all are cloaked in mystery. Two months after the unmanned vehicle’s launch, it is still in orbit, performing its unspecified tasks behind the military’s veil of silence and ambiguity. That has caused concern among potential rivals of the U.S. The X-37, which looks like a quarter-scale Space Shuttle, is just 29 feet long from nose to tail and boasts […]

After half a century, the revolution in computer technology continues to rapidly transform the world about us. For reasons that are fundamentally economic, the atomic building blocks on which that revolution is based are semiconductor electronic components — chips. It has been estimated that technological improvements in semiconductors accounted for 40 percent to 60 percent of the price-performance improvement in computers in the late 1990s. Those rapid declines in computer prices in turn led to much wider usage of computers and significant improvement in U.S. productivity growth during the same period. The first electronic digital computers used during World War […]

A lot of national security experts would like a lot more fire — and firepower — from our president. Op-ed columnists across America worry that our friends no longer trust us and that our enemies no longer fear us. President Barack Obama’s quest for more-equitable burden-sharing among great powers seems to be getting us nowhere, so why bother with more-equitable benefit-sharing? But before attacking the Obama administration’s coolly rational — dare I say “lawyerly” — take on great-power politics, let’s first remember what got us to this point. Bush-Cheney’s “It’s better to be feared than respected” tear nearly tore up […]

Freedom House’s annual review of the world’s most-repressive societies is a fixture among human rights advocates as a gauge of where the most work needs to be done. This year’s list features a set of countries that also represents major engagement challenges. Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan all ranked as the world’s most-restrictive countries on political and civil liberties in Freedom House’s report (.pdf), “The Worst of the Worst of 2010: The World’s Most Repressive Societies.” Belarus, Chad, China, Cuba, Guinea, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Syria fared only slightly better. “In this report, […]

Now that the G-20 multilateral format has taken the lead in managing the world economy, many commentators are eager to do away with its predecessor in that role, the Group of Eight (G-8). Such a focus, however, neglects the G-8’s important security functions. Since the 1980s, the group has given birth to major initiatives promoting global peace and security. The G-20 lacks the unique assets that have made the G-8 so effective in this area. The G-8 now includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The absence of some of the […]

Despite my reputation as a fierce defender of globalization’s many benefits, I have always been of two minds on the human desire for connectivity in all its recently emergent possibilities. After all, my narrative on globalization began as the “Pentagon’s New Map” — not Google’s or Goldman’s. Even there, I was never under the impression that connectivity was an instant fix regarding human conflict — quite the reverse. And I knew instinctively that the primary motive for increased connectivity throughout history has been individual greed for resources, opportunities, influence and — most importantly — an improved standard of living. I’ve […]

Efforts to expand the scope of the International Criminal Court during a review conference taking place this week in Kampala enjoy broad support among rights advocates, but many governments have expressed reservations. The imbalance between the desire to protect human rights and the judicial means to do so at the international level remains one of the largest gaping holes in the global human rights effort. “Relying on national infrastructures battered by conflict or controlled by the very perpetrators of these crimes is not enough. If we expect to achieve a world without genocide, a world free of horrific war crimes […]

Last week, President Barack Obama released his first National Security Strategy. Analysts and observers have focused much of their attention so far on how the new NSS breaks from the one formulated by the Bush administration. By this argument, Obama’s NSS represents a new direction both by “counting more on U.S. allies” than former President George W. Bush did, and by repudiating Bush’s unilateralism. In reality, the document does neither of these things. To be precise, it uses words like “diplomacy” and “allies” at statistically the same rate as Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy and still claims that America “reserve[s] […]

The international crisis resulting from Israel’s interdiction yesterday of a humanitarian aid flotilla heading toward the blockaded Gaza Strip could have several consequences, few of them good for the United States, the Middle Eastern peace process, and many other parties. First, the crisis could disrupt the indirect peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians that only just resumed a few weeks ago, after roughly 17 months of false starts and frustrated expectations. Many observers have noted that the Gaza flotilla confronted the Israeli government with a no-win situation. The same could be said for the choices now facing the Obama White […]