Latest Archive

The military’s seizure of power in Myanmar this week unfolded in the squalid manner of coups everywhere. Senior politicians, including the country’s popular de-facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, were arrested along with civil society leaders in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 1, just before the newly elected parliament was set to convene its first session. Meanwhile, tanks and soldiers took up positions at key intersections of major population centers, including the capital, Naypyidaw. The nation, and the world, were left stunned. A coup had been telegraphed and feared, yet deemed improbable by many close observers of Myanmar’s vexed transition […]

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, studies have found that women and girls in lower- and middle-income countries are being hit hardest by the crisis. According to Megan O’Donnell, a senior analyst at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., appropriate policy responses to COVID-19 can help not just to address this disparity, but also to close the gender gap that existed in many societies prior to the pandemic. She joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to discuss her work leading a new initiative to study the gendered impacts of COVID-19. Listen to […]

When news started filtering out of Myanmar that the internet was dropping, troops were patrolling the streets of major cities, and Aung San Suu Kyi—the country’s civilian leader, who was once viewed in the West as a hero of democracy—had been taken into custody, the situation posed a quandary. Burma, as the country is also known, was in the midst of a coup. But how should the world respond? A decade ago, Suu Kyi was a shining star. But today, she is known as a defender of ethnic cleansing and perhaps even genocide. Should democracies forcefully demand her release, or […]

As Tunisia marked the 10th anniversary of the removal of dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali on Jan. 14, people poured into the streets, defying a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown. While every January brings some form of popular protest around the revolution’s anniversary, things are different this year. Last month’s milestone serves as a grim reminder of what democracy has not brought: jobs, social justice and an end to endemic corruption. And this year, the country is in the midst of twin crises: an economy ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic and a deep political divide due to increasing polarization. Tunisians, often […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Rachel Cheung and Assistant Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. After months of bureaucratic delays and two weeks of quarantine in China, international investigators from the World Health Organization finally started their probe into the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan. The mission began last Thursday amid political tensions and controversy. Less than a week into the trip, the scant information released so far under the watch of Chinese authorities offers little assurance that […]

Around the world, the coronavirus pandemic has taken an especially high toll on women and girls. From public health to education to jobs and livelihoods, studies have revealed a gender disparity in the impact of COVID-19 that is particularly wide in lower- and middle-income countries. Yet for all the work that’s been done, experts say there’s still a lot they don’t know about how these impacts are being felt across different communities. To help address this problem, the Center for Global Development recently launched a new initiative to analyze the gendered impacts of the pandemic and study policy responses around […]

When an agitated mob of extremist supporters of President Donald Trump sacked the U.S. Capitol last month, egged on by Trump and other Republican politicians, they struck at the bedrock principles in the oath that members of the U.S. armed forces swear to protect and defend the Constitution. Nonetheless, America’s uniformed military leadership waited a full week to issue a public statement directly addressing that riotous invasion of the seat of the American republic. The statement, in the form of a memorandum to service members from the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, was appropriately strong and concise, even if the […]

For anyone looking out on the world from the new Biden White House, America’s challenges can only seem extraordinarily daunting. Even if it could be taken in isolation, the public health crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic would gravely test any administration. But, of course, the coronavirus challenge cannot be resolved in isolation. Beyond its immediate public health dimensions, the pandemic has created an enormous economic crisis for a United States whose status as a global leader has never looked so compromised in the postwar period. For Washington, the pandemic has also spawned a fiscal crisis, with the Treasury […]

The nightmarish scenes last spring from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city and economic capital, exposed what has arguably been the Western Hemisphere’s worst COVID-19 outbreak. Many of the Pacific port city’s affluent residents had been visiting Europe during a school break last January and February; a few weeks later, its hospitals and morgues were quickly overwhelmed. Dantean images of the dead abandoned on sidewalks by grieving family members, who feared they would also lose their lives to this alien new disease, flashed around the world. But things had already been rough in the small Andean nation before those horrors. In October […]

In the four decades since Iran’s Islamic Revolution, relations between Tehran and Washington have seen deep enmity offset by brief periods of rapprochement and tactical cooperation. As a new U.S. administration settles into office and asserts its intent to, in President Joe Biden’s words, “offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy,” one of those periods may be on the horizon again. The Obama administration pursued diplomatic engagement with the Islamic Republic, holding direct as well as multilateral talks that culminated in the 2015 deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Under […]

GRANADA, Spain—In the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco, the coronavirus pandemic isn’t the only crisis that 2020 will be known for. Over the course of the year, more than 23,000 migrants arrived in the Spanish archipelago by boat from Africa—8,000 of them in November alone—while some 500 died attempting the journey. The images of thousands of migrants stranded on beaches with no place to go evoked inevitable comparisons to another crisis, in 2006, when a total of 34,000 people landed on the archipelago in small wooden boats known as cayucos. African migrants are being pushed toward this dangerous […]

President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team arrived in Washington amid a mounting humanitarian emergency in the Horn of Africa, as the Ethiopian government continues its monthslong military campaign against the northern Tigray region. The crisis is an early test of the Biden administration’s ability to balance its global advocacy for democracy, human rights and the rule of law against its strategic interests in a vital yet unstable region. A once-promising liberal reformer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military offensive on his political opponents in Tigray last November in response to reported attacks on […]

Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Managing Editor Frederick Deknatel highlights a major unfolding story in the Middle East, while curating some of the best news and analysis from the region. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. It hasn’t taken long for President Joe Biden to make a clean break with Donald Trump’s agenda in the Middle East. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given Biden’s campaign message that got him elected, and the executive orders and other actions he has quickly taken since the inauguration to undo Trump’s legacy, both in domestic and […]

Last Wednesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in December, unveiled the latest installment of its famous “Doomsday Clock,” which purports to measure how close the world is catastrophe. When it first appeared in 1947, at the dawn of the nuclear age, its hands were set at 7 minutes to midnight. In the intervening years, it’s moved both closer to and farther from that witching hour. The most comforting installment appeared in 1991, amid the sudden end of the Cold War, when the Clock was reset to a sanguine 17 minutes to midnight. That optimism […]