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Editor’s Note: WPR has agreed to publish this article anonymously due to the hostile environment in Kashmir toward independent reporting. SRINAGAR, India—In July, I joined a group of young men plodding glumly through verdant paddy fields in Bijbehara, a picturesque town tucked inside a network of lofty mountains in the Kashmir Valley. It was the middle of the monsoon season. One of the men was recounting a midnight raid conducted by the Indian Army in a nearby village, Arwani, in August last year. “They were bloodthirsty,” he said, in a wobbling voice. “We live in the shadow of violence,” another […]

The Mediterranean Sea is still the principal corridor for migrants trying to enter the European Union, and Italy is in effect its front door. Hundreds of thousands of people have attempted this risky maritime route, often paying a deadly toll, including well before the migrant and refugee crisis of 2015. Between 1993 and 2018, around 27,000 people drowned at sea in the Mediterranean. But war, desperation and the hope for a better future keep pushing migrants and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, and further afield, to embark on this perilous voyage. The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t deterred them, […]

The Middle East is “a place that is both remarkably impervious to change…and at the same time always sort of on the verge of an explosion, where you always think that something quite catastrophic could happen,” says Robert Malley, president and CEO of International Crisis Group and a former special adviser on the region to former President Barack Obama. This volatility grows out of the tension between popular demands for greater responsiveness and accountability from governments, especially since the 2011 uprisings, and the “sclerotic nature…of the Middle East system,” Malley explains. “On the one hand, it’s the stagnation that leads […]

Documenting the demise of the liberal international order has become a growth industry in the foreign policy sector. In a terrific new book, “A World Safe for Democracy,” G. John Ikenberry, the premier analyst of liberal internationalism, contends that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. The rules-based, international system may be in crisis, but its strategic and normative logic is as compelling as ever. Ikenberry, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, has written extensively on this topic before, but his new book is his most impressive work to date. He refutes the critiques of both […]

Latin America and Japan are often thought of as only loosely connected, through a patchwork of free trade agreements and people-to-people ties. But this summer, Chile finalized a deal that indicates a significant convergence of geostrategic interests between Japan and the Americas. After much deliberation, Chile chose an undersea route, backed by Japan, for the first direct fiber-optic cable link between South America and the Asia-Pacific. The Japanese proposal traverses 13,000 kilometers from Chile across the Pacific Ocean—more than 8,000 miles—eventually connecting with existing undersea cables between Japan and Oceania. The new trans-Pacific route would utilize a link between Japan […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Three African countries are gearing up for fraught presidential elections this month that have raised fears of violence and disrupted democratic norms. In Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea, incumbents are seeking constitutionally questionable third terms, while in Tanzania, the government appears to be restricting the opposition’s ability to even compete. In Guinea, where rallies against a third term for President Alpha Conde have been ongoing since last year, Amnesty International reported this week that security forces killed at least 50 protesters between October […]

This week, the United Kingdom recorded more than 7,000 new coronavirus cases and 71 fatalities. That’s the country’s highest single-day increase in new cases yet, and its biggest one-day death toll since July. It’s all part of an ongoing COVID-19 resurgence that Britain has been experiencing since early September. In response, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has tightened lockdown measures in the country’s coronavirus hot spots. The U.K. has been one of the hardest-hit countries, with the fifth-largest death toll from COVID-19 in the world. Tom McTague, a London-based staff writer for The Atlantic, recently wrote that Britain’s key institutions […]

If Donald Trump had his way, you might not be reading these words and I might not be writing them. Unless I and the other 40 percent of Americans who are not white accept the ludicrous notion that we are less deserving of our Constitutional rights than the white supremacist Proud Boys who Trump told to “stand back and stand by” during Tuesday’s presidential debate, then hell hath no fury like an American racist scorned. Intimidation, fear, violence, chaos—we all better get ready, the so-called leader of the free world has warned. What Trump and his followers don’t seem to […]

The recent bombshell report from The New York Times—which obtained more than two decades’ worth of President Donald Trump’s tax returns, including from the first two years of his presidency—offered a number of remarkable details, from how little Trump has paid in income taxes to the staggering $421 million in debt that he has personally guaranteed. Yet perhaps the most concerning revelations from the Times’ report centered on a topic long central to Trump’s rise, and to his presidency: foreign money. The tax returns didn’t reveal any new information about potential financing from Russia, a question that has long stalked […]

Did anyone really believe that the catastrophic explosion at Beirut’s port in August that devastated large sections of the city would compel Lebanon’s politicians to end their disastrous political stalemate? French President Emmanuel Macron apparently did, as he made it his personal project to help pull Lebanon out of its tragedy. He has now come face to face with the intrigue and venality that brought Lebanon to its knees. On Sunday, Macron lashed out with barely contained anger at Lebanon’s ruling class. But he reserved his most scathing attack for Hezbollah, the Iran-allied militant group and political party. “Hezbollah can’t […]

The historically close relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia hit a snag recently over differences in how to address India’s decision last year to revoke the special autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state that is also claimed by Pakistan. Pakistani officials had repeatedly urged Saudi Arabia to convene a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC, to discuss Kashmir, to no avail. Finally, in early August, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing Riyadh. Appearing on a TV talk show, he threatened to “call a meeting of the Islamic countries […]

Political scientist Ian Bremmer remarked in a Twitter post in July that the relationship between the United States and China has “way too much (mostly economic) interdependence” for there to be a new Cold War. Instead, he posited, “It’s a failed marriage with the family still living together. How the kids turn out is an open question.” The “kids” in this analogy are the small and mid-sized open economies of the Asia-Pacific—countries that depend as much on the U.S. for technology and national security as they do on China to buy their exports. A prime example is New Zealand, which […]