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emerge85 Lab
The emerge85 Lab focuses on the rapid urbanization, growing middle classes, and unprecedented physical and technological connectivity transforming Latin America, Africa, and Asia and changing the geo-economic landscape.
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The Emerging Global Governance Project is a joint initiative of the Foreign Policy Institute and Global Policy Journal.
Economists Justin Lin and Wang Yan are the authors of the first commentary in this new series.
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An Islamic State defector who claimed in news interviews to have refused to commit violence for the group has been charged by German authorities with murder and war crimes for his role in a mass execution in Syria in 2015.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will make for very strange bedfellows. This is contrary to conventional wisdom, spurred on by complimentary statements—or should I say tweets—The Donald and Vlad have transmitted through the internet about each other over the last several months. It is widely believed—at least for now—that although they are certainly the ‘Odd Couple’, there is a bromance brewing that will blossom following President-Elect Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
The Soviet Union was based on a radical rejection of common sense and this lent to everyday life a certain surrealism. During the years that I worked in the Soviet Union as the correspondent of the Financial Times, I often had the feeling that I had a front row seat in a giant theater of the absurd. The Soviet Union was based on an ideology and when life discredited the ideology it was the ideology that was true. Soviet citizens were told that they were building a perfect society. Reality was not allowed to interfere. As a result, Soviet people became slaves.
BERLIN — Police in Germany and across Europe intensified the manhunt Thursday for the prime suspect in this week’s Berlin Christmas market attack, as Europeans faced the prospect of a holiday season with the “violent and armed” Tunisian still at large.
German authorities found a fingerprint of the 24-year-old suspect, Anis Amri, inside the cabin of the truck that crashed Monday into the market, providing further evidence linking him to the terrorist attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens, German interior minister Thomas de Maizière told reporters in Berlin.
BERLIN — The German capital was on high alert Tuesday with one or more attackers still at large in a deadly truck assault on a Christmas market, an act claimed by the Islamic State that struck at the heart of Europe’s Christian traditions.
Chancellor Angela Merkel decried Monday’s assault — in which a truck carrying a payload of steel plowed into festive stalls and fairgoers in Berlin, leaving 12 dead and dozens injured — as a presumed “terror attack,” even as German police scrambled to find the culprit. The only suspect so far — a Pakistani asylum seeker taken into custody shortly after the bloodshed — was released by police Tuesday because of insufficient evidence.
One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a ‘post-fact’ world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.
BERLIN — A massive black truck plowed into a Christmas market teeming with revelers in west Berlin on Monday, killing at least 12 people, wounding dozens more and leaving Germans mourning a national tragedy during the holiday season.
The incident, described by the White House as an apparent “terrorist attack,” had echoes of the deadly truck assault in the French city of Nice in July, which killed 86 people and was claimed by the Islamic State. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière told Germany’s ARD national broadcaster: “I don’t want to use the word attack yet, although a lot points to one.”
WASHINGTON — With the announcement that he will nominate the Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, President-elect Donald J. Trump has rounded out a foreign policy team that is, to put it mildly, profoundly different from that of any of his six Republican predecessors since World War II. It’s also unlikely to last particularly long.
The fight for Aleppo is over. Bombardment by Syrian and Russian jets and deadly ground operations brought an end to the siege; thousands of civilians are fleeing amid reports of mass killings by government forces and allies. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports and Hari Sreenivasan talks to the Middle East Institute’s Randa Slim and University of Oklahoma’s Josh Landis.
Donald Trump’s evolution from a buffoonish fringe candidate taken seriously by no one to the President-Elect of the United States is one of the most unexpected and traumatic events in recent US history. The effects are uncertain, but—in the worst case—they could lead to the US giving up entirely on global leadership, and the unravelling of the liberal world order the it has done much to build since the 1950s.
The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University hosted a master class in economic diplomacy on December 9, 2016 which offered a select group of students the opportunity to participate in an Asian Development Bank (ADB) board meeting simulation, led by FPI Senior Fellow Cinnamon Dornsife.
After a very bitter debate, Iraqi Parliament passed a law to officially regulate the current and future role of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMFs), a group of supportive fighters who helped save Iraq from a complete political and security disaster in the wake of ISIS invasion of Mosul on 10 June 2014. Like everything Iraqi, the law was criticized inside the country and in some international circles as well. Paradoxically, some of the critics spent much time in the past criticizing Iraq for allowing many fighting groups to operate outside the law.
In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process.
For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature, human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our ancestors and traditions. So it should not be surprising that in today’s globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if they are better off materially.
Turkey has been no stranger to drama, the past year alone witnessing an attempted coup on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (followed by a fierce government crackdown), a rising Daesh threat, explosive tensions in Kurdish regions of the country, and the geopolitical storm of the nearby Syrian civil war. However, for an increasingly large number of people across the world, a different sort of Turkish drama has grabbed their attention: The soap opera.
BERLIN — Two weeks ago, German intelligence agents noticed an unusual user in a chat room known as a digital hideout for Islamic militants. The man claimed to be one of them — and said he was a German spy. He was offering to help Islamists infiltrate his agency’s defenses to stage a strike.
The Trump Organization will soon morph into the Trump Administration, one that appears to be on track to establish a leadership and public policy apparatus on global economic issues that may well be the most naïve in modern U.S. history. Given the increasingly complex and volatile dynamics shaping world markets today, this could not come at a worse time, not only for the U.S. but for the rest of the planet.
BERLIN — German prosecutors have launched a murder and war crimes investigation of an Islamic State fighter who claimed in interviews that he had refused to engage in violence in Syria but was caught on video taking part in a public execution, a German official said.
Fukuyama describes this election as a watershed moment for our country, saying that Trump marks a break from the postwar consensus both in economic and foreign policy terms. He also looks at how these latest election results were informed by the political decay he described in his most recent book, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, before discussing what he sees as an ongoing—and global—backlash against globalization.
After decades of global stability, anxiety and unpredictability are now ubiquitous. A vacuum of American leadership is eroding long-standing alliances and emboldening challengers to the international order. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the Middle East. The region’s conflagrations, its array of power-brokers, old alliances, and new coalitions, will test Donald Trump, and demand that his administration clearly define America’s priorities and interests there. Europe and Asia will be watching.
President-elect Donald Trump's outreach to Russia could create backlash, but at the same time, Russia is "no longer a communist state" and the United States could help the country transition into a "significant member of the global community," former National Security Advisor Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski said Wednesday.
The Emerge85 Lab is different in that it examines global rather region-specific issues, but with co-headquarters located in Abu Dhabi and Washington, it is physically linked with the Gulf and takes the concept of equitable, two-way interaction between Washington and the Middle East to a new level. Launched in October, it is a partnership between the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington and the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi. “I didn’t want this to be seen as someone from Washington telling the rest of the world what’s happening in their world. We have an intellectual content partnership in which both parties are driving the intellectual content of the Emerge85 Lab. It will be richer as a result,” said Afshin Molavi, the Lab’s Washington-based co-director.
“The risks of engaging with economies as fragile as Venezuela’s, as unpredictable as Brazil’s, or as insular as Colombia’s need to be mitigated,” Creutzfeldt said. “In this spirit, Xi’s tour of Ecuador, Peru and Chile, is purposeful and promising. Ecuador has succeeded in turning China’s massive loans since 2009 into very real advances in physical infrastructure, strategic investments in science and education, and reaching almost complete renewable energy coverage.” Creutzfeldt said the success of such development would only grow if other big players in the hemisphere recognised its potential and “recognise that bridges and open borders make the world a better place”.
"Sunday, 20 November 2016, was a normal day at Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a well-financed daily newspaper supervised by the Royal family of Saudi Arabia. Like every new issue, the constant topics were a heavy dose of propaganda polishing the image of the despotic Saudi regime and an equal amount of attacks on countries and governments Saudi considers as enemies, particularly Iraq. But the Sunday issue was different in a very particular way. The leading story was a false statement deliberately attributed to a very respectable international organization, the World Health Organization (WHO)."
CCTV interviews Harry Broadman about the Fed's announcement that interest rates may rise in a Trump presidency.
During the 2016 presidential election campaign, one thing that both Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump agreed on was that the United States needed to renew its infrastructure. The former has proposed a $275 billion initiative to achieve just that; the latter has staked much of his claim to competence on his ability to build things. Clearly, the new President will have to do something starting in January 2017 given promises that have been made to date.
The assumption in international policy circles has long been that the rules and the institutional arrangements that have held largely since the end of the Second World War were “the” global norms. In the scholarly world, the most influential scholarship in International Relations, International Organization and International Political Economy has largely reflected the proposition that “exogenous conditions” can be assumed to be stable and largely unchanging, and the chief intellectual goal has been mapping how the actors in the system would adapt to, and internalize, the established norms and rules. There was really no need to debate fundamentals or first principles. Or so it was thought. But as the world has entered a period of dynamic change, it is increasingly apparent that another perspective is required – one that can grapple seriously with both change and continuity.
After a hiatus of two and a half years, Lebanon has a new president. The Lebanese parliament has elected Michel Aoun, a former army chief, as the country's 17th president. Michel Aoun owes the presidency to three men: Samir Geagea, the leader of the Christian Lebanese forces, Saad Hariri, the former Sunni prime minister, and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shiite Hezbollah.
In advanced countries, government policy has tended to play a significant role in the development of new technologies. Governments in these countries have invested heavily in basic research and development, especially in defense spending. Yet “spillovers” from such investment has led to the creation of commercial (or civilian) products and services, which has driven overall economic growth.
Afshin Molavi talks about the US presidential election, Iceland's private party, the battle for Mosul, and the Philippines' President Duterte's new stance on US-Filipino relations on CCTV's Journalists' Roundtable show, "The Heat."
At the yearly gathering of the world’s top economic officials--the Annual Meeting of the IMF and World Bank—which took place earlier in October here in Washington DC, there was little optimism about the growth of the world economy. Indeed, the forecast unveiled by the IMF at the Annual Meeting punctuated the malaise. The IMF revealed they actually have downgraded the growth prospects at the global level for both 2016 and 2017.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, American business executives and political leaders of both parties repeatedly put forward what I label the “China fantasy”: the view that trade, foreign investment and increasing prosperity would lead to political liberalization in the world’s most populous country.
As friction between Washington and Beijing ratchet up over a growing array of issues, the Paris climate change agreement stands out as a powerful example of what can be achieved when the U.S. and China cooperate. However, many hurdles stand in the way of the world’s two largest emitters’ respective abilities to meet the climate commitments to which they have agreed. To overcome these challenges, which are principally political but also include important economic and institutional dimensions, sustaining cooperation between the United States and China will be crucial.
