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In order to stave off the worst of the accelerating climate crisis, we need to rapidly reduce carbon emissions. To do so, energy systems around the world must transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Lithium batteries play a key role in this transition: they power electric vehicles and store energy on renewable grids, helping to cut emissions from transportation and energy sectors. Underneath the Atacama salt flat lies most of the world’s lithium reserves; Chile currently supplies almost a quarter of the global market. But extracting lithium from this unique landscape comes at a grave environmental and social cost.

The entire process uses enormous quantities of water in an already parched environment. As a result, freshwater is less accessible to the 18 indigenous Atacameño communities that live on the flat’s perimeter, and the habitats of species such as Andean flamingoes have been disrupted.

does fighting the climate crisis mean sacrificing communities and ecosystems?

Tens of millions of dollars in State Department funding to non-profit and humanitarian organizations were not delivered in time, current and former officials say. “They used an administrative process to create a choke in the system … They wanted to muck up and slow down the process with this type of an outcome in sight,” said one official familiar with the matter. “It’s the worst way to cut funding. It’s not surgical, it’s not smart, and it’ll have major ripple effects.”

Some current and former officials saw the restrictions as a way for the White House budget office to surreptitiously slash foreign aid funds, even as proposals to do so have drawn widespread and bipartisan Congressional backlash. Since first coming into office, President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly sought to hollow out U.S. foreign assistance budgets through budget cut plans and rescission proposals. Senior officials said it was an administration priority to review foreign aid programs to ensure they did not waste or misuse taxpayer money. Congress has repeatedly rebuffed the administration’s rescission plans. The move comes nearly two months after the Trump administration floated plans to slash nearly $4 billion in foreign aid funding for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development in a process known as rescission.

Because of the inability to use all the money, programs that support human rights in China and civil society in Iraq, among other programs, are in jeopardy and at risk of shutting down. At least four non-profit organizations and humanitarian organizations that operate in China are at risk of shutting down without the funds, according to two sources familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the NGOs’ work in China. Roughly $1 million to support programming in Ethiopia through the non-profit group Freedom House, and $1.5 million to support programming on religious freedom—one of the Trump administration’s top foreign policy priorities—were also impacted. 

In Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell, American force is one of many foreign policy tools that can and should be bent toward civilian protection and atrocity prevention globally; for many of her critics from the left, American force is to be dismantled; for many of her critics from the right, American force should serve core national security interests and nothing more.

In A Problem from Hell, Power argues that US policymakers did not act to stop genocide because they did not want to; in her memoir, she relates how a room full of civil servants whose thinking had been shaped by her first book found themselves in a years-long limbo over complex human disasters in Syria and Libya. Together, these cases constitute a real-time test of the “toolbox” of interventions Power first proposed at the end of A Problem from Hell; together, they reveal both the problem at the heart of her theory of foreign policy, and the still all-too-slender slate of effective policy alternatives to force across the political spectrum.

Libya and Syria serve as parallel cases through which questions about the US’s role in the world are refracted. The standard narrative is as follows: the US intervened in Libya under the guise of preventing mass atrocities, this intervention ended first in regime change and then in a failed state, and Libyans now live in enduring danger; the US did not intervene to protect civilians during the Syrian Civil War, war snarled the full region into conflict, and today Syrian civilians continue to die in unspeakable ways and uncounted numbers. At each stage, the narrative is in fact more complicated, particularly if we begin by asking whether the US did in fact prevent mass atrocity in Libya and end by noting the U.S. did in fact intervene in Syria in multiple ways, but the broad lines are still instructive for understanding public debate. Would Libyans have been better off in the absence of an American-led intervention, or would they have been worse off? Would Syrians have been better off for U.S. intervention, or would they have been worse off for it?

the core issues are the capacity of political leaders and their inner team, and the capacity of the institutions of governance—agencies, departments, and ministries—to be able to process information in a timely way and to be able to harness expert advice and evidence in a timely way. We live in a complicated world. If you try to wing it, as Trump does, you end up with more than forty thousand deaths. If you want to solve a problem, you have to be systematic about it, and know whom to turn to and how to listen and amass evidence. For politicians, that doesn’t necessarily come naturally, and for our President it doesn’t come at all.

Trump is the worst political leader I have experienced in all of my professional life, which is forty years of working with governments at a high level. I’ve never seen anything like the narcissism of this man, and here we are, a country so rich in expertise, in resources, in capacities, and yet we’re watching a complete failure of a political response—with a massive loss of life—in real time. It’s quite shocking, because Trump not only does not know how to approach this issue but he blocks those who do.

American politics has become deeply corrupt over decades, and it became so corrupt that normal governance already collapsed many years ago. And people with resources and knowledge know it, but they haven’t cared, because things have more or less gone on O.K., and the stock market has been booming

the impacts of hardening European Union border policy, which forces refugees back to a dangerous country where they live at the mercy of Libyan militias

UNHCR said it had heard allegations of detainees being used as forced labor in the Gathering and Departure Facility, but it could not verify them.) In the months afterward, Alex returned to detention only for his meetings with UNHCR staff. He was interviewed and fingerprinted, and finally given good news: He would be evacuated to Rwanda.

Over the past three years, the EU has allocated nearly 100 million euros, around $100 million, to spend on the Libyan coast guard, with the aim of intercepting and stopping boats of migrants and refugees who are trying to reach Europe. Tens of thousands of people who could have their asylum claims assessed if they managed to reach European soil have instead been returned to Libya to spend months or years in for-profit detention centers where sexual violence, labor exploitation, torture, and trafficking have been repeatedly documented. They wait, in the unlikely hope of being selected for a legal route to safety.

mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship denies race as essential to understanding the world, to the cost of the field’s integrity.

Core concepts, like anarchy and hierarchy, are raced: They are rooted in discourses that center and favor Europe and the West. These concepts implicitly and explicitly pit “developed” against “undeveloped,” “modern” against “primitive,” “civilized” against “uncivilized.” And their use is racist: These invented binaries are used to explain subjugation and exploitation around the globe

Constructivism, which rounds out the “big three” approaches, is perhaps best positioned to tackle race and racism. Constructivists reject the as-given condition of anarchy and maintain that anarchy, security, and other concerns are socially constructed based on shared ideas, histories, and experiences. Yet with few notable exceptions, constructivists rarely acknowledge how race shapes what is shared.

African visions of an integrated continent with political solidarity and interlinked prosperity are as old as decolonization, but until recently there were few indicators that it was heading in the right direction. The Organization of African Unity, founded in 1963, was widely regarded a mere dictators’ club and was succeeded in 2002 by the African Union, whose reputation fares marginally better. Modeled to a fault on European Union institutions, the AU remains both overly centralized and lacking in capacity and accountability. But in the last three years, the AU has begun to emerge as a globally relevant actor because it overcame a major hurdle to pan-African progress.

In 2018, the African Union adopted the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest trade agreement concluded since the World Trade Organization in 1995. At more than $2.5 trillion, the economy of the African Union is nearly the size of the British and French economies, which rank sixth and seventh in the world.

Developing in parallel to this trade liberalization and harmonization is a treaty on continentwide freedom of movement, which together paves the way for a customs union and gives political momentum to the African Union passport project, which would allow visa-free travel among the AU’s 55 member states

There are more than 2 million migrant workers in Qatar—a significant number given that the country’s overall population is just 2.6 million. In recent years the foreign laborer population in Qatar has swelled as the country has undergone a construction boom ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which is set to be held there.

as the coronavirus pandemic edges its way across Qatar, which now has more than 2,000 confirmed cases, the migrant workers’ cramped living quarters and lack of access to health care, proper sanitation, and nutritious food imperils an already highly vulnerable group of people.

abuse—which at times has amounted to forced labor and human trafficking—has been exacerbated by South Asian governments’ inability to successfully lobby for strong protections. (Critics contend there has been scant political will given the huge portion of GDP now made up by remittances from overseas workers.

In place of stability, what we have today is a ramshackle, largely deregulated system, widely known as “globalisation”. Effectively lobbied for by economic cowboys with no interest in economic justice or environmental sustainability, the result of this system where “the world is governed by market forces”

the international financial and monetary system is both hard to know of and understand, as it is so intangible and detached from regulatory democracy.

It is this very idea of self-sufficiency in steady state economies that I argue for in my book, The Case for the Green New Deal,

the first time the group has written about the US domestic situation in such terms.

The United States “never adequately come to terms with the horrific legacy of two and a half centuries of chattel slavery. Nor has it healed or conquered the institutionalised violence and racism toward African Americans that followed their emancipation in the 1860s.”

The report implores Donald Trump, as well as prominent elected and security officials, to stop courting conflict with incendiary language and threats to deploy the military to quell civil unrest. 

Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments

Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.