Since the end of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war in 2009, the government has clearly been focusing on expansion, with new investments in infrastructure and the private sector that are helping to spur growth and contributing to an increase in disposable income and rising consumerism. While this growth is largely positive, there has also been […]
The ailing former president has been squarely on South Africa’s mind the last few months. At 94, he is frail and fading fast. Housebound and bedridden in his Johannesburg estate, he is rumored to be senile; some claim he no longer speaks at all. One especially devastating newspaper report, quoting his former wife, said that his “sparkle was fading.” Read […]
If this week’s BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, passed you by, we don’t blame you. The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa met, as they do once a year, to advance their common interests. They found, as they do once a year, that they don’t have many, so not much happened. […]
Put simply, then, China won the battle by choosing not to fight it. But this isn’t quite the whole story. In addition to avoiding the grave costs of the war, China capitalized by offering developing countries an attractive alternative to the United States: ideologically-blind economic engagement. And, as a result, Beijing was able to expand […]
While the Obama White House attempts to spin the president’s recent Middle East trip as a diplomatic success, in reality it provided more evidence of how irrelevant the United States has become to the byzantine politics of the region. The White House claims that President Obama orchestrated a rapprochement between Turkey and Israel after a […]
Booming cities are driving global economic growth in many parts of the world. We live in an age of extraordinarily rapid urbanization: The number of people living in cities is predicted to grow by more than 2.5 billion over the next 40 years — mostly in emerging countries such as China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, […]
With predictions about climate change growing direr every week, geoengineering (which includes everything from fertilizing the oceans in an attempt to cajole great blooms of carbon-sucking phytoplankton to spraying particles into the upper atmosphere to make the earth more reflective) is starting to look more attractive. But the science still lags behind the ambitions. To […]
March 10th, the anniversary of the uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet in 1959, has come and gone. While it is not as infamous in the West as the Ides of March, it is a day of great symbolic import in Tibet and has become a focal point for the expression […]
One of the more remarkable (though largely unremarked) developments in recent Indian politics has been the startling shift in the country’s discourse about capitalism. As in many developing countries, “self-reliance” and economic self-sufficiency were India’s national mantras after independence – and, in India’s case, remained so for more than four decades. Whereas most Westerners axiomatically […]
The five countries known as the BRICS have 43 percent of the world’s population, $4.4 trillion in currency reserves, and generally healthier economic growth than Europe and the U.S. Yet to their frustration, Americans and Europeans still dominate policymaking at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Should the five—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and […]
