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President Biden next week will announce U.S. support for the African Union to become a permanent member of the Group of 20 nations, a step that would give African nations a long-sought prize and could make it easier for Biden to secure their cooperation on issues like Ukraine and climate change.

Biden will make the announcement during next week’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, said Judd Devermont, the White House National Security Council’s senior director for African Affairs

Biden’s push comes as African countries and other countries in the global south have borne the brunt of the economic impact from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those countries have been hit especially hard by a global food crisis as well as rising fertilizer and fuel prices, making it difficult for the United States to secure their support during United Nations votes that have condemned Russia for the invasion and for its annexation of Ukrainian territories.

Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition

this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.

that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation

the future of European integration and the European Union is more contingent than most integration theories allow

the role of domestic politics

he extent to which Europe’s uniquely high level of political integration depends on the engagement and support of the region’s economically most powerful ‘semi-hegemonic’ state, Germany

Three main themes of his victory speech - a) a new national unity under his leadership, b) delegitimizing his opposition, c) the conflict with Syria - displayed Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ability to refine and redefine goals for Turkey’s future.

a brand of tolerance that approves and welcomes diversity as long as prior loyalty to the supremacy of the state is firmly established.  His call for unity is one that avoids political disagreements, branding them as attacks on the national interest as defined by himself.

Erdogan’s success as a widely supported majoritarian leader at least spells the end of the CHP-MHP-Gulen style and method of opposition, overwhelmingly based on the periodic release of the ‘taped’ private conversations of the Prime Minister, members of his family and cabinet exposing wide and deep channels of corruption and money laundering. To be fair, Erdogan’s electoral success reveals the ineptitude of his main opposition which seems to be a dubious coalition between left-nationalist, right-nationalist and the Gulen movement.

Those who demand that the U.S. Government take people's lives with no oversight or due process as though they're advocating changes in tax policy or mid-level personnel moves -- eradicate him!, they bellow from their seats in the Colosseum -- are just morally deranged barbarians.  There's just no other accurate way to put it.  These are usually the same people, of course, who brand themselves "pro-life" and Crusaders for the Sanctity of Human Life and/or who deride Islamic extremists for their disregard for human life.  And the fact that this mindset is so widespread and mainstream is quite a reflection of how degraded America's political culture is.

Most political journalists rely on their relationships with government officials and come to like them and both identify and empathize with them.  By contrast, WikiLeaks is truly adversarial to those powerful factions in exactly the way that these media figures are not:  hence, the widespread media hatred and contempt for what WikiLeaks does.  Just look at how important it was for Bill Keller to emphasize that the Government is criticizing WikiLeaks but not The New York Times; having the Government pleased with his behavior is his metric for assessing how good his "journalism" is.  If the Government is patting him on the head, then it's proof that he acted "responsibly."  That servile-to-power mentality is what gets exposed by the contrast Wikileaks provides.

our government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat.  And few organizations besides WikiLeaks are doing anything to subvert that regime of secrecy, and none is close to its efficacy.  It's staggering to watch anyone walk around acting as though the real threat is from excessive disclosures when the impenetrable, always-growing Wall of Secrecy is what has enabled virtually every abuse and transgression of the U.S. government over the last two decades at least. 

Poor countries considered vulnerable to climate change have pledged to embark on moves to a low-carbon future, and challenge richer states to match them.The declaration from the first meeting of a new 11-nation forum calls on rich countries to give 1.5% of their GDP for climate action in the developing world.

The declaration contends that man-made climate change poses an "existential threat to our nations, our cultures and to our way of life, and thereby undermines the internationally protected human rights of our people".

"The key message to rich countries is that what seems like them to be a domestic political difficulty is for the vulnerable nations an existential problem," said Saleemul Huq, senior fellow in climate change at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which gave technical support to the Maldives meeting. "They're saying 'getting a good deal for us means survival, but you seem to be coming to the table only with what's feasible domestically' - and there is another reality that trumps domestic political realities,"

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

Charles Kenny is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. This article is adapted from his new book Close the Pentagon: Rethinking National Security for a Positive Sum World.

the Pentagon a potent symbol of America’s foreign-policy infrastructure in general, which is dominated by a massive, increasingly inefficient military machine better suited to the challenges of the mid-20th century than the early 21st. It is a machine that carries considerable direct economic costs but, more important, overshadows other foreign-policy tools more effective in confronting the global problems that the United States faces today. And just as the Pentagon is no longer fit for its backup purpose of records storage center in an age of cloud computing, nor is the Department of Defense well-placed to readjust to new roles, such as anti-terror or cybersecurity, let alone responding to climate change, pandemic threats or global financial crises.

interstate conflicts are going away. The last great power war began eight decades ago, and battlefield conflict has been on a declining trend since 1945. Battle deaths per 1 million people worldwide since World War II peaked at above 200 during the Korean War, reached about 100 at the height of the Vietnam War and plateaued at about 50 during the Cold War conflicts of the 1980s. In 2018, the number of deaths was around seven per 1 million people. Journalist Gregg Easterbrook reports that the last major naval engagement was in 1944, the last large air battle was in 1972 and the last major tank engagement was in the early 1990s.

although many on the continent have tended to equate decolonisation with the dawn of independence in the 1960s, independence, in fact, turned out to be a bit of a hoax. While it undoubtedly improved life for some on the continent, for the most part, it did not mean freedom. Rather, it marked the internationalisation and indigenisation of colonialism. It was to become a tool to transform Africans from being the objects of colonial subjugation into partners in their own exploitation.

"the EU (or the European Economic Community, EEC, as it was called at its foundation) was from the outset designed, among other things, to enable a rational, co-European colonial management of the African continent".

As the Chinese do today, in the years following the end of World War II, many in Europe saw in Africa the resources and markets they required to rebuild their shattered economies and to join the United States and the USSR as a third superpower

has also illustrated that national governments remain the primary actors

the world is likely to see a different, more limited version of global integration than the one we have known over the past three decades

Before the pandemic, global goods trade was still rising, but relative to the total output of the global economy, the share of trade is lower today than it was before the financial crisis.

the Global Protection Cluster—the independent network of over 1,000 international nongovernmental organizations, headed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and focused on supporting vulnerable groups in times of crisis

For anyone familiar with the mechanisms and methods that drive trafficking, it’s obvious why rates of exploitation spike during international crises. Whether it takes the form of recruiting, transporting, or harboring individuals through the use of force, coercion, or fraud (or all of the above), trafficking is predatory behavior, and people who are vulnerable—such as child brides or refugees—are invariably the ones most at risk. But in times of emergency—be it a flood, a drought, or a famine, a declaration of war or a recession—support structures shift and collapse. Communities that were once strong become suddenly weak as people grapple with losing their families, their homes, and their jobs. For traffickers around the world, each disaster signals a sudden availability of potential prey.

few in the humanitarian sector appear to have anticipated the domino effect of exploitation that top-level experts assert the coronavirus has already kicked off—and that trafficking specialists are now scrambling to prevent across the globe

This club of three—as a new C-3 grouping of Canada, Australia, and Britain—has legs. But the idea must be reclaimed from the nationalist right: Not only is deepening foreign-policy coordination among Ottawa, Canberra, and London increasingly attractive amid the accelerating decay of the American-led world order, but this grouping has shown itself over Hong Kong to be far more meaningful in world affairs than seemed possible

Canada, Australia, and Britain are all facing a moment of crisis in their foreign policies. Canada’s humiliating failure to make it onto the United Nations Security Council reflects that it can now be picked on by China, or even Saudi Arabia, as the United States weakens. Australia is faced with cyberattacks and growing Chinese pressure. Britain, now outside the European Union, has been repeatedly threatened by China over Hong Kong, Huawei, HSBC, and nuclear power plants. All three are struggling to make their voices heard in international politics, in the various G-groups, in global bodies, and in President Donald Trump’s Washington.

Sadly, for all three, Germany and France are in a very different place from them on the authoritarian powers. Berlin, constrained by huge exports to China, wants to find a middle way between Washington and Beijing and is not ready to throw the EU into greater competition that could jeopardize critical trade for the sake of the interests of either Canada, Australia, or Britain. Paris, similarly, thinks differently on Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron’s emerging vision for a European Security Council or “Eurogroup”-style body including Russia, Turkey, and Britain is well outside the anti-authoritarian frame than Ottawa, Canberra, and London share.

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.

An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.

the data the world is relying on is inaccurate

The gap comprises vast amounts of missing carbon dioxide and methane emissions as well as smaller amounts of powerful synthetic gases. It is the result of questionably drawn rules, incomplete reporting in some countries and apparently willful mistakes in others — and the fact that in some cases, humanity’s full impacts on the planet are not even required to be reported.

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.

The world will only take meaningful action on the climate crisis once people in rich countries start dying in greater numbers from its effects, Gabon’s environment minister has said, while warning that broken promises on billions of dollars of adaptation finance have left a “sense of betrayal” before Cop27.

The UN has framed Cop27, which begins next week in Sharm el-Sheikh, as “the Africa climate conference”, and loss and damage finance for countries experiencing the worst consequences of global heating will be a key issue.

“It’s a horrible thing to say but until more people in developed nations are dying because of the climate crisis, it’s not going to change,”

“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”

Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”

It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Rather than usher in a new era of Chinese influence, Beijing's missteps have shown why it is unlikely to become the world's leading power. Even if it overtakes the United States to have the biggest economy in the world, which many economists believe could happen over the next decade, China will not dislodge Washington from its central position in global affairs for decades to come.

China's assertiveness is generating intense suspicion, if not outright enmity, among its neighbors. Its "peaceful rise" is not taking place in isolation. There may be echoes in today's Asia of the late-nineteenth century in Europe and North America, but this is the one critical difference. The United States came into its own as a great power without any major challenge from its neighbors, while Germany's ascent was aided by the collapsing Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and Russian monarchy on its frontiers. China, on the other hand, is surrounded by vibrant countries with fast-growing economies, from South Korea to India to Vietnam, who all believe that this is their time, as well. Even Japan, after two decades of stagnation, still has one of the most formidable navies in the world, as well as the world's third largest economy. China's strategic misfortune is to be bordered by robust and proud nation-states which expect their own stake in the modern world.

On the economic front, Beijing is taking aim at another pillar of U.S. power: the dominance of the dollar. China is putting in place an ambitious long-term plan to turn the renminbi into one of the main international currencies. Chinese leaders often discuss the project in technical terms, about reducing currency risk for their companies, but they also do little to hide their frustration with the dollar's privileged status. One Chinese academic even likens the importance of the project to turn the renminbi into a major reserve currency to China's acquisition of a nuclear weapon in the 1960s. The politics of the currency plan are themselves an interesting sidebar to the over-hyping of Chinese influence. While American politicians have been worrying loudly about the risk of China owning so many Treasury bonds ("How do you deal toughly with your banker?" Hillary Clinton asked at a private lunch with then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in March 2009) China has been fretting about how little leverage its U.S. bond holdings give it. The desire to dethrone the dollar is partly rooted in China's frustration that it has absolutely no influence over the Federal Reserve. And yet it has few options other than buying American debt, because the U.S. Treasury bond market is the largest and most liquid in the world.

“More global trade is a good thing if we get a piece of the cake,” Mr. Duijzers said. “But that’s the problem. We’re not getting our piece of the cake.”

For generations, libraries full of economics textbooks have rightly promised that global trade expands national wealth by lowering the price of goods, lifting wages and amplifying growth. The powers that emerged victorious from World War II championed globalization as the antidote to future conflicts. From Asia to Europe to North America, governments of every ideological persuasion have focused on trade as their guiding economic force. Advertisement Continue reading the main story But trade comes with no assurances that the spoils will be shared equitably. Across much of the industrialized world, an outsize share of the winnings have been harvested by people with advanced degrees, stock options and the need for accountants. Ordinary laborers have borne the costs, suffering joblessness and deepening economic anxiety

When millions of workers lost paychecks to foreign competition, they lacked government supports to cushion the blow. As a result, seething anger is upending politics from Europe to North America.