Foreign Affairs

For the last six months, Afghanistan has felt the stirring of something rare: if not peace, then the promise of its pursuit. President Ashraf Ghani invited the Taliban into negotiations without preconditions in February. Islamic scholars and Afghanistan’s neighbors rallied behind that offer in the subsequent months, while sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations broke out across Afghanistan, calling for an end to the country’s chronic conflict. For the first time in 40 years, the warring parties observed a nationwide cease-fire over three jubilant days in June. The vital question throughout this period has been whether the Taliban insurgency is actually open to making peace. The group has sent mixed signals this summer—agreeing, on one hand, to the June cease-fire, as well as restarting direct talks with the United States, but all the while continuing its years-long refusal to negotiate...

European development aid is unlikely to stem the flow of people crossing the Mediterranean. Instead, it will deepen authoritarian patterns of governance across North Africa and the Sahel. 

In foreign policy, progressives are adrift, caught between dated paradigms that have not yet come to terms with the current geopolitical moment.

The Gene-Editing Revolution

The late U.S. Senator John McCain's life was one marked by courage, empathy, pride, and determination.

The “land question” in South Africa is a powerful symbol of the failures of post-apartheid democracy to adequately address the structural roots of poverty and racialized inequality.

While countries such as China, India, and Turkey rapidly expand their economic engagement with African countries, the United States is lagging behind. 

The liberal order is largely a myth.

El 4 de agosto, dos drones explotaron en el aire durante un discurso del presidente venezolano Nicolás Maduro en Caracas, en lo que luego fue calificado por el gobierno como un intento fallido de asesinato. A pesar de que la mayoría de las fuerzas opositoras rechazaron el ataque, el gobierno lo usó como excusa para arremeter contra la disidencia, ordenando 34 arrestos, incluyendo el del diputado Juan Requesens. Inquietantes videos circularon poco después por las redes sociales que sugieren que el gobierno drogó forzosamente y humilló al parlamentario para tratar de que confesara su participación en el complot. [Read the English version of this article here.] Para muchos, el ataque de Maduro a las libertades democráticas y la violación sistemática de los derechos humanos en el país significan que no existe otra opción distinta del uso de la fuerza para sacarlo del poder. Pero la...

Over the past four months, the Nicaraguan government, much as it did under Somoza, has declared war on its people.

When the main belligerents in South Sudan’s five-year-long civil war signed a new peace agreement on August 5 in Khartoum, the international response was circumspect at best. This reaction reflects a new attitude on the part of the international community -- especially the United States, which for years failed to sufficiently pressure Kiir’s government even as his forces massacred civilians, carried out widespread sexual abuse, and tortured prisoners as part of a civil war that has displaced more than four million people since it began in 2013. To understand draw lessons for preventing future atrocities, I recently interviewed more than 30 former and current U.S. government officials and policy experts, analysts, and civil society leaders who have worked on issues involving South Sudan for many years. 

In October, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan will turn 17. The human and material costs of what has become the United States’ longest-ever war are colossal. More than 2,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed and over 20,000 have been injured. The UN estimates that nearly 20,000 Afghan civilians have been killed and another 50,000 injured since 2009 alone. The United States has spent some $877 billion on the war. The Trump administration’s recent initiative to seek direct peace talks with the Taliban—a first since the start of the war in 2001—highlights that Washington is actively looking for new ways to wind down its involvement in the conflict. But why has the U.S.

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Public anger at home pulled the United States out of Vietnam, but the public's indifference about the intervention in Afghanistan has allowed the United States' longest war to drag on.

Is Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary's presidential candidacy a harbinger for Congo’s much-awaited democratic transition or merely a lifeline to a beleaguered strongman?

Policymakers within democracies need to grapple with the challenge of repelling outside influence while upholding essential democratic values.

In the last few months, rising public frustrations over domestic policy and a government proposal to weaken the social safety net have led to a sharp decline in Vladimir Putin’s popularity. 

It's Robert Gilpin's world; everyone else is just living in it.

Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sayyid Qutb are usually remembered as bitter enemies and representatives of two sides of Egypt's most intractable political divide. But in his book Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East, Fawaz Gerges shows that the two titans of Egyptian history overlapped ideologically and personally more than is generally realized.

The U.S government needs to play a more assertive role in protecting the public from digital threats, just as it protects it from conventional ones.   

Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. Unless liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict.