Mostrando resultados por Editor "Foreign Affairs" en Todas las categorías

The World Bank's president talks to Foreign Affairs about fighting inequality, his reform program, and who should succeed him.

Xi Jinping’s reforms are designed to produce a corruption-free, politically cohesive, and economically powerful one-party state with global reach: a Singapore on steroids. But there is no guarantee the reforms will be as transformative as the Chinese leader hopes.

Brazil's failure to create accountability surrounding the military dictatorship that ruled the country for 15 years from 1964-85 may help explain how Jair Bolsonaro, an apologist for torture and dictatorship was able to rise to power.

Populism is gaining ground. Around the world, economic hardship and growing unease with globalization, immigration, and the established elite have propelled such movements into power, leading to a groundswell of public support for parties and leaders viewed as capable of holding the forces of cultural and social change at bay. In Europe, populist parties dominate parliaments in Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland.

As surprising as the recent financial crisis and recession were, the behavior of the world’s industrialized economies and financial markets during the recovery has been even more so. 
Most observers expected the unusually deep recession to be followed by an unusually rapid recovery, with output and employment returning to trend levels relatively quickly.

Ever since 9/11, the United States has provided Pakistan with a steady supply of security and nonsecurity assistance.

As China asserts itself in its nearby seas and Russia wages war in Syria and Ukraine, it is easy to assume that Eurasia’s two great land powers are showing signs of newfound strength. But the opposite is true: increasingly, China and Russia flex their muscles not because they are powerful but because they are weak. Unlike Nazi Germany, whose power at home in the 1930s fueled its military aggression abroad, today’s revisionist powers are experiencing the reverse phenomenon.

As growth slows in mature economies across the developed world, economic inequality has reached new heights. Defined in terms of the shares of disposable income of households across the economic spectrum, adjusted for varying needs, inequality to-day in the United States is significantly higher than it was a generation ago. The same is true in the United Kingdom, and even less laissez-faire countries, such as Germany and Sweden, have seen inequality increase dramatically.

For the first time in recent memory, large numbers of Americans are openly questioning their country’s grand strategy. An April 2016 Pew poll found that 57 percent of Americans agree that the United States should “deal with its own problems and let others deal with theirs the best they can.” On the campaign trail, both the Democrat Bernie Sanders and the Republican Donald Trump found receptive audiences whenever they questioned the United States’ penchant for promoting democracy.

Ó Gráda argues that some very poor economies are especially vulnerable to famines. In places where the level of food consumption is already low, even small shocks - a shortfall in food production, for example, or a disruption in the supply chain - can lead to a full-scale crisis.


We spent two weeks in Iraqi Kurdistan in order to gain a better understanding of ISIS and the war against it. Our research involved interviewing Kurdish security officials, peshmerga commanders, intelligence officers, and Kurdish prisoners who had joined ISIS. We learned more about the conditions that take someone away from his or her home, family, and friends to the so-called caliphate.

Donald Trump’s admirers and critics would probably agree on one thing: he is different. One of his chief Republican supporters, Newt Gingrich, describes him as a "unique, extraordinary experience." And of course, in some ways - his celebrity, his flexibility with the facts - Trump is unusual. But in an important sense, he is not: Trump is part of a broad populist upsurge running through the Western world. It can be seen in countries of widely varying circumstances, from prosperous Sweden to crisis-ridden Greece.

The problem with Washington's planning obsession.

World history is at least as old as Herodotus and Thucydides, but self-conscious "global history" is a recent development in the academy. More than a hundred books with those words in the title have been published this century, up from a handful in the prior two decades and zero before that. At their best, such studies are able to see past the limits of national histories, exploring the interconnections and flows of people, goods, ideas, and events across time and space.

Almost seven years after the Great Recession officially ended, the U.S. economy continues to grow at a sluggish rate. Real wages are stagnant. The real median wage earned by men in the United States is lower today than it was in 1969. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 1999 and has barely risen in the past several years despite the formal end of the recession in 2009.

We are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself. This is a bad thing. If trust in experts dissipates, expertise will serve not the public interest, but the interest of whatever clique is paying its bills. And such an outcome is already perilously near.

In the decade following the Cold War, democracy flourished around the world as never be-fore. In recent years, however, much of this progress has steadily eroded. Between 2000 and 2015, democracy broke down in 27 countries, among them Kenya, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey. Around the same time, several other global “swing states” - countries that, thanks to their large populations and economies, could have an outsize impact on the future of global democracy - also took a turn for the worse.

The international order must find ways to survive illiberal assaults from Russia, China, and, increasingly, populist revolutions among its leading members. Doubling down on U.S. dominance would be the wrong approach. It would be better to build a less hegemonic, more diverse system.

On November 15, 2012, the day he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping stood onstage at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, to reflect back on his country’s 5,000 years of history. After citing China’s “indelible contribution” to world civilization, Xi called for “the great revival of the Chinese nation.” And he acknowledged that others had “failed one time after another” to realize that goal. Implicit in Xi’s remarks was a promise: unlike his predecessors, he would not fall short.

As Xi begins his second five-year term as CCP general secretary and (soon) president.