Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder
A clear-eyed look from Michael McFaul at how the rise of autocratic China and Russia are compelling some to think that we have entered a new Cold War—and why we must reject that thinking in order to prevail.
Gi-Wook Shin explores how Japan, Australia, China, and India achieved economic power and sustained momentum by responding to risks and challenges such as demographic crises, brain drain, and geopolitical tensions.
Journal of Political Science Education,
January 26, 2021
The policy memo is particularly suited for introducing basic methodological concepts to upper-division undergraduate students of political science, argues Oriana Skylar Mastro.
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment,
January 19, 2021
The increasing availability of satellite data at higher spatial, temporal and spectral resolutions is enabling new applications in agriculture and economic development, including agricultural insurance. Yet, effectively using satellite data in this context requires blending technical knowledge about their capabilities and limitations with an understanding of their influence on the value of risk-reduction programmes. In this Review, we discuss how approaches to estimate agricultural losses for index insurance have evolved from costly field-sampling-based campaigns towards lower-cost techniques using weather and satellite data. We identify advances in remote sensing and crop modelling for assessing agricultural conditions, but reliably and cheaply assessing production losses remains challenging in complex landscapes. We illustrate how an economic framework can be used to gauge and enhance the value of insurance based on earth-observation data, emphasizing that even as yield-estimation techniques improve, the value of an index insurance contract for the insured depends largely on how well it captures the losses when people suffer most. Strategically improving the collection and accessibility of reliable ground-reference data on crop types and production would facilitate this task. Audits to account for inevitable misestimation complement efforts to detect and protect against large losses.
Rose Gottemoeller, the US chief negotiator of the New START treaty—and the first woman to lead a major nuclear arms negotiation—delivers in this book an invaluable insider’s account of the negotiations between the US and Russian delegations in Geneva in 2009 and 2010.
We measure the effects of a network of heroes in legitimizing and diffusing extreme political behaviors. Exploiting newly-declassified intelligence files, novel voting data and regimental histories, we show the home municipalities of French line regiments arbitrarily rotated through Philippe Petain's command during the heroic WWI battle of Verdun, though similar before WWI, increasingly espouse Petain's authoritarian political views thereafter, raising 7% more active Nazi collaborators per capita during the Petain-led Vichy regime (1940-44). The effects are similar across joining Fascist parties, German forces, paramilitaries hunting Jews and the Resistance, and collaborating economically.
The United States and its likeminded partners, particularly India — if four constraints are more realistically accounted for — and other members of the Quad, can more effectively mitigate the risks of Chinese military expansion by building “strategic leverage” along these four lines of effort in the Indian Ocean region.
In February 2020, French president Emmanuel Macron invited all interested European states to a “strategic dialogue” on the supposed contribution of France’s nuclear arsenal to European collective security.
