Column Archive

In the past few years, public awareness has grown about the race currently underway among states and corporations to dominate the development and deployment of new technologies. This isn’t only a race, however, to lock in the trade advantages that come with tech dominance. It is also a race to shape our societies and the values by which we live. And it is being run on many different tracks, some of them well-known by now—5G telecom networks and artificial intelligence—but others more obscure and unexpected. For example, in late 2019, the Chinese government proposed a change to the deep structure […]

Two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, I argued that a United Nations peacekeeping mission should be considered as part of, or complementary to, a strengthened mandate for the U.N.’s existing political mission in the country, UNAMA. Since then, a group of over 20 scholars has been working with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Human Security Lab to game out scenarios, consolidate the supporting evidence and make some research-backed guesses about whether peacekeeping should be on the table in Afghanistan today. The emerging consensus in this group is that there are reasons to think it should, based on peacekeeping’s record of success […]

Brazil’s next presidential election is 13 months away, but already President Jair Bolsonaro has set out on a path that puts him on a collision course with democracy. With every passing day and every new dismal opinion poll, Bolsonaro sounds more like a man who, in the mold of his idol, former U.S. President Donald Trump, is prepared to put his personal political fortune ahead of the country’s democracy and stability. Last weekend, in a meeting with Brazilian evangelical leaders, Bolsonaro melodramatically remarked that he sees three possibilities for his future: “being arrested, killed or victory.” He then added that the first, […]

The topic of my column last week, the first in an occasional series of a Q&As with interesting thinkers, was ostensibly the rapidly changing nature of cities in Africa. But an important subtext of the piece, present throughout the conversation, was African performance or, perhaps better stated, underperformance on a range of issues. My interlocutor last week, George Kankou Denkey, noted, for example, that Africa, a continent that is presently urbanizing on a scale never experienced anywhere before, generally lacks urban planners; even its universities seem unengaged with the topic. Elsewhere, he pointed out that although one of the largest megalopolises […]