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despite the fervent hopes of remainers, nothing that happened last week makes an “exit from Brexit” more likely. Instead, Brexit compromises conceivably capable of bridging the country’s divides, such as the “Norway plus” option proposed by moderate Conservative MP Nick Boles, are now harder than ever to reach

Britain is teetering more wildly than ever on the edge of an outright constitutional crisis

the strength of the Scottish National Party has made working majorities a thing of the past

incident in Syria two years ago involving the transport of an Iranian port-a-potty nearly led to a confrontation between American and Iranian forces, underscoring just how quickly even minor events could escalate there

the Trump administration signals it might leave behind a small force in both Syria and Iraq to monitor Iranian activities

Some analysts and U.S. officials believe that the change of mission for those forces could raise the chances of a war between the United States and Iran—and that it may even be illegal under the U.S. Constitution

That’s not to predict an end-of-the-world scenario for either disaster, just to remind people that, at the extreme end of these uncontrolled events, there are horrendous logical risks that our leaders are amiably accepting (or urging) on behalf of the rest of us. And they seem to expect our gratitude for their efforts in Ukraine or their lack of efforts in Fukushima, more or less equally.

By stark contrast, the history of Crimea’s integration with Ukraine is all but non-existent in history. In the mid-1400s, Crimea was a Tatar state founded by a descendant of Genghis Khan. In 1478, Crimea became a tributary of the Ottoman Empire until 1774, when it became an independent state, essentially liberated by Russia (until Russia annexed it in 1783). Crimea remained part of Russia until 1917, when it declared its independence again (which lasted about a year before it was occupied by the Soviet Union, then the Germans, then the Soviet Union again). In 1921, Crimea was granted “autonomy,” which was interrupted by the German occupation (1941-1943), then stripped by the Soviet Union in 1945. Still part of the Soviet Union in 1954, Crimea was organizationally transferred to Ukraine, also part of the Soviet Union. In 1991, Crimea became the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, within the Soviet Union, followed by a power struggle with the Kiev government in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s break-up. In early 1992, the Crimean Parliament proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Crimea and adopted its first constitution (which it amended the same day to say Crimea was part of Ukraine); within weeks, Crimea dropped its proclamation of self-government in an apparent trade-off for greater autonomy from Kiev, but the dispute over the status of Crimea continued to feed political turmoil until Ukraine executed a constitutional coup. On March 17, 1995, the Kiev government scrapped the Crimean constitution, sacked the Crimean president and eventually established, with obvious irony, the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea” – which still had periodic anti-Kiev eruptions and now (as of March 16) has voted to join the Russian Federation.

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?

In the dying days of the U.S.S.R., Palmer had watched as his old adversaries in Soviet intelligence shoveled billions from the state treasury into private accounts across Europe and the U.S. It was one of history’s greatest heists.

Western banks waved Russian loot into their vaults. Palmer’s anger was intended to provoke a bout of introspection—and to fuel anxiety about the risk that rising kleptocracy posed to the West itself. After all, the Russians would have a strong interest in protecting their relocated assets. They would want to shield this wealth from moralizing American politicians who might clamor to seize it. Eighteen years before Special Counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation into foreign interference in a U.S. election, Palmer warned Congress about Russian “political donations to U.S. politicians and political parties to obtain influence.” What was at stake could well be systemic contagion: Russian values might infect and then weaken the moral defense systems of American politics and business.

Officials around the world have always looted their countries’ coffers and accumulated bribes. But the globalization of banking made the export of their ill-gotten money far more convenient than it had been—which, of course, inspired more theft. By one estimate, more than $1 trillion now exits the world’s developing countries each year in the forms of laundered money and evaded taxes.

the growing sense that the international order sits at an inflection point, driven by the conspicuous lack of leadership by the Trump administration; China’s aggressive efforts to showcase its domestic political model and its status as a provider of international club and private goods; and the possibility that the pandemic may fuel a growing populist backlash against political, economic, and cultural liberalism.

Despite important regional, cultural, and political differences, many contemporary populists embrace multipolarity—an international system composed of multiple great powers rather than one or two superpowers. They do so as a rhetorical aspiration, a vision of a global order that privileges national sovereignty over liberal rights and values, and as a tool to increase their freedom of action by playing alternative suppliers of international club and private goods against one another. Indeed, this multipolar populism is fast becoming a core part of the contemporary populist playbook.

Populist rhetoric and policies thus constitute a rejection of important aspects of the post-Cold War liberal order, driven by a mix of ideological and instrumental concerns.

a rare public glimpse of how Israel and its American allies harness Israel’s influential tech sector and tech diaspora to run cover for the Jewish state as it endures scrutiny over the humanitarian impact of its invasion of Gaza.

reveal the degree to which, in the tech-oriented hasbara world, the lines between government, the private sector, and the nonprofit world are blurry at best. And the tactics that these wealthy individuals, advocates, and groups use -- hounding Israel critics on social media; firing pro-Palestine employees and canceling speaking engagements; smearing Palestinian journalists; and attempting to ship military-grade equipment to the IDF -- are often heavy-handed and controversial.

"President Biden seems incapable of using the one policy tool that may actually produce a change in Israel's actions that might limit civilian deaths, which would be to condition military aid that the United States provides to Israel,” Clifton added. He partially attributed the inability of the U.S. government to rein in Israel’s war actions to the “lobbying and advocacy efforts underway.”

United States President Joe Biden’s administration as well as many bipartisan US legislators and advocates have said they want the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq (AUMF) repealed. The authorisation was signed by former President George W Bush in 2002, enabling the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as the US’s two-decade “war on terror” went into full swing. It has increasingly been condemned by critics for giving the US executive branch broad and menacingly vague military powers.

The repeal of the 2002 AUMF – along with reformation of the geographically broader and more politically fraught 2001 AUMF, which allows the US executive to pursue military action against individuals or groups deemed connected to the 9/11 attacks – have been at the centre of efforts to restructure the legal architecture that has guided US military action abroad in recent decades.

The US Congress, which has the sole constitutional power to declare war, has not done so since 1941 when it approved declarations against Japan in the wake of the Pearl Harbour attacks and, days later, against Nazi-controlled Germany and axis-allied Italy.

In the final hours of negotiations, the United States, as well as Russia and China, all large weapons exporters, said more time was needed.

Fifty-one senators had urged the administration not to sign it in a letter sent Thursday. That letter sent an important signal of defeat because ratification requires 67 Senate votes. “As defenders of the right of Americans to keep and bear arms, we write to express our grave concern about the dangers posed by the United Nations’ arms trade treaty,” the senators said in the letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Our country’s sovereignty and the constitutional protection of these individual freedoms must not be infringed.”

Galen Carey, vice president of government relations at the National Association of Evangelicals, criticized gun lobby members for disparaging the treaty, saying, “Those spreading misinformation about alleged links between this treaty and the Second Amendment should stop doing so.”

Water scarcity, and the potential for a catastrophe, spurred upheaval and anxiety. During that time, a local government pushed a water-conservation agenda more ambitious than just about anything the world had seen. Cape Town faced political fallout and experienced widespread protests. Divisions between the haves and the have-nots in one of the most unequal cities on Earth became the center of discourse. The racial wounds of a post-apartheid country opened once more.

“The way the city has managed it is by forcing middle-class South Africans—dominantly white, but not exclusively—to massively cut back on their water use,” says Neil Armitage, a civil engineer who is a lead researcher within the institute. “They struggled for a while until they came up with this Day Zero concept, which was really a warning that if we carried on behaving like we were, then the water was going to run out. That had the desired effect of making people a lot more serious about water, but it also had a horrible political backlash as well.”

As they stand now, the Level 6B restrictions created by the city of Cape Town in January 2018 are supposed to limit residents to 50 liters per day, slash agricultural use by 60 percent below last year’s usage, aggressively push water-management devices and fines, and encourage the use of new fittings and other devices to minimize water waste.

Sri Lanka is an odd place for Muslim-Christian tension, which was virtually unknown before the Easter bombings. An island southeast of India, the population is 70 percent Buddhist and 12 percent Hindu. Muslims constitute roughly 10 percent, and Christians 8 percent—predominantly Catholic but with a sizable Protestant majority. Islam came in the eighth century, spread peacefully by Muslim traders. Christianity came in 1505 with the Portuguese, furthered by later colonial empires. Both religions have increasingly suffered at the hands of nationalists within local Buddhist and Hindu communities, striking at Sri Lanka’s multi-religious heritage.

there is a growing tension between Muslims and Catholics, said Heshan de Silva, chairman of the National Christian Council of Sri Lanka. But there is also an ecumenical outpouring. The local Muslim Council lamented “extremist and violent elements, who wish to create divides between religious and ethnic groups.” Many Muslims have joined Christians in funerals and protests, de Silva said. Buddhist monks have issued statements in support. And the coming weekend will see a joint Catholic-Protestant prayer vigil in the public square.

He stressed that Muslims in Sri Lanka are friendly, and pillars of the business community. But he told CT he is not optimistic. “Certainly there will be antagonism against Muslims by all other communities [Christians included], and people might start to look at them suspiciously,” said Senanayake. “The situation might get worse.”

One area in which the Trump administration is normal, after all, is in its approach to Irish relations. Appointing a wealthy Irish American donor to be ambassador? Check. Mumbling vaguely about what, exactly, the two leaders talked about in their substantive discussions? Check. (“We’re having some good talks about trade and about military and about cyber,” Trump said of his 2018 bilateral meeting with Varadkar.) Tired reliance on tropes about Irish tribalism? Also check. (“You don’t want to fight with the Irish. It’s too tough”; “The Irish are confident, fierce, faithful, tough, and true.”) Those sorts of gestures, even for the Trump White House, show a lack of seriousness and preparation that one wouldn’t expect in most other relations with a wealthy democracy. But they’re all too typical of the way U.S. politicians have treated Ireland—always with an eye toward the sizable percentage of American voters who claim Irish ancestry.

U.S. politicians soon paid Catholic Irish Americans the compliment they pay any important group: They pandered to them

As Ireland became secular and wealthy, the successful conclusion of talks between governments and militants in Northern Ireland—brokered largely by the United States—meant that it also became far more peaceful

No new phone, tablet, car, or satellite transferring your data at lightning speed can be made without certain minerals and metals that are buried in a surprisingly small number of countries, and for which few commonly found substitutes are available. Operating in niche markets with limited transparency and often in politically unstable countries, Chinese firms have locked up supplies of these minerals and metals with a combination of state-directed investment and state-backed capital, making long-term strategic plays, sometimes at a loss

unprecedented concentration of market power

“Made in China 2025,” aims to build strategic industries in national defense, science, and technology. To meet these objectives, in October 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced an action plan for its metals industry to achieve world-power status: By deploying state-owned enterprises and private firms to resource-rich hot spots around the globe, China would develop and secure other countries’ mineral reserves—including minerals in which China already holds a dominant position

Should the mass adoption of electric vehicles occur, access to reliable and affordable sources of minerals like cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese, and nickel, which are used in modern electric-vehicle batteries, will come to occupy a larger share of energy security concerns, especially since one country has already gained control over much of the world’s production and processing of those minerals

oil has remained abundant and affordable, despite major production disruptions during the Arab Spring from 2010-2012, in Libya from 2013-2016, and in Venezuela after 2017. In fact, oil prices had dropped 60 percent from their 2008 highs by early 2020, even before the COVID-19 pandemic had made a dent in the global economy.

falling oil prices throughout the 2010s may have lulled Western policymakers into believing that the Russian Federation, whose economy is heavily reliant on oil and natural gas exports, would become more docile. It did not; instead, it continued to modernize its military and intimidate its neighbors

Today, according to a report by the British Overseas Development Institute, China’s blue-water fishing fleet is by far the world’s largest, and includes 12,490 unique vessels that were observed to have been fishing outside China’s internationally recognized EEZ in 2017 and 2018. That’s many times more than previous estimates, and very different from China’s own claim of having only 3,000 ships fishing international or other countries’ waters—but that’s only because China doesn’t recognize the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty’s demarcation of maritime borders.

Though China isn’t alone in its destructive fishing practices, it stands apart by virtue of its sheer size and the extent to which it pushes its highly subsidized fleet across the world’s oceans. It’s also the only country whose fishing fleet has a geopolitical mission, taking over weaker countries’ waters and expanding Beijing’s maritime territorial ambitions. One of the malicious consequences of all this is that China’s monster fishing fleet robs poorer nations—from North Korea to the countries of West Africa—of desperately needed protein.

Chinese authorities don’t enforce many rules either, so very few Chinese ships opt to fly flags of convenience. “They are their own flag of convenience,” Schvartzman said. “And they effectively created a port of convenience—a pirate port—in Montevideo.”

even as the new Biden Administration announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, to “end” the twenty-year war, it will continue airstrikes and raids to tackle the ever-looming threat of terrorism.

As the persistence of far-right nationalism suggests, ideologies cannot so easily be destroyed — even those we thought we had bombed out of existence seventy years ago. Yet, the world refracted through this war (the “only one” of the 21st century, Bush hoped) has left us not just morally inept, but also woefully misguided about what is to come next

ISIS has taken control over parts of regime territory in the deserts of central Syria, and slices of S.D.F.-controlled Deir ez-Zor province are witnessing a full-blown ISIS insurgency, underscoring just how central the question of governance is to the group’s appeal. But the U.S. and its allies’ focus on ideology risks ignoring why ISIS gained support in the first place. Raids and detentions, torture and execution, and governance that politically marginalizes certain groups and offers few options for justice or accountability will only build anger. It is these layers of political and social contexts that are lost in most coverage, even if they will shape Iraq and Syria for a long time to come. 

in a 232-square-mile area claimed by China since the early 1980s but internationally understood as part of Lhuntse district in northern Bhutan. The Chinese officials were visiting to celebrate their success, unnoticed by the world, in planting settlers, security personnel, and military infrastructure within territory internationally and historically understood to be Bhutanese.

part of a major drive by Chinese President Xi Jinping since 2017 to fortify the Tibetan borderlands, a dramatic escalation in China’s long-running efforts to outmaneuver India and its neighbors along their Himalayan frontiers

Its aim is to force the Bhutanese government to cede territory that China wants elsewhere in Bhutan to give Beijing a military advantage in its struggle with New Delhi

On the 20th anniversary of the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), evidence of its harm to workers, healthcare, farmers, and the environment – and particularly to developing countries – has proven its critics right.

At the time of the protests, the WTO was less than five years old. But critics had already seen how the largest corporations in the world had succeeded in using its founding – and the good name of trade in promoting prosperity – to achieve a new set of agreements covering not just trade in goods but also trade-related investment measures, trade-related intellectual property (IP) rules, agriculture and services. These new agreements, far from the original goals of multilateralism, gave new rights to trade (which are exercised by corporations) and constrained government regulation in the public interest. 

corporate elites hijacked “trade” and rigged the rules to distribute income upwards, while reducing protections for people who work. Highly paid professionals (like doctors) are protected (by being able to regulate their own licensing) and businesses are given market access rights and predictability. Meanwhile, workers are forced into unfair competition without a minimum floor for protections, and developing country workers have been kept at the lowest levels of the global value chains

Beginning with its creation as an academic discipline, mainstream IR has not been entirely honest about its ideological or geographic origins. It has largely erased non-Western history and thought from its canon and has failed to address the central role of colonialism and decolonization in creating the contemporary international order.

the international processes through which race and racial differences have also been produced.

The history of the modern state system, as it is often taught, focuses on the impact of the American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century. However, this is precisely the period of colonial expansion and settlement that saw some European states consolidate their domination over other parts of the world and over their populations, who came to be represented in racialized terms.

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade.

Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over.

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South