Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and U.S.-Russia Relations after the Cold War
Rose Gottemoeller uses lessons learned from U.S.-Russia relations during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations to offer insights into how Russia today may be convinced to end its war against Ukraine and resume cooperation for the sake of global security.
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.
The National College Entrance Examination shapes the future of millions of students in China each year, but Hongbin Li and Ruixue Jia illuminate how this test of all tests is also shaping education, labor markets, political legitimacy, and social values beyond the PRC.
Climate change and human activities exert a wide range of stressors on urban coastal areas. Synthetical assessment of coastal vulnerability is crucial for effective interventions and long-term planning. However, there have been few studies based on integrative analyses of ecological and physical characteristics and socioeconomic conditions in urban coastal areas. This study developed a holistic framework for assessing coastal vulnerability from three dimensions - biophysical exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity - and applied it to the coast of Bohai Economic Rim, an extensive and important development zone in China. A composite vulnerability index (CVI) was developed for every 1 km2 segment of the total 5627 km coastline and the areas that most prone to coastal hazards were identified by mapping the distribution patterns of the CVIs in the present and under future climate change scenarios. The CVIs show a spatial heterogeneity, with higher values concentrated along the southwestern and northeastern coasts and lower values concentrated along the southern coasts. Currently, 20% of the coastlines with approximately 350,000 people are highly vulnerable to coastal hazards. With sea-level rises under the future scenarios of the year 2100, more coastlines will be highly vulnerable, and the amount of highly-threatened population was estimated to increase by 13–24%. Among the coastal cities, Dongying was categorized as having the highest vulnerability, mainly due to poor transportation and medical services and low GDP per capita, which contribute to low adaptive capacity. Our results can benefit decision-makers by highlighting prioritized areas and identifying the most important determinants of priority, facilitating location-specific interventions for climate-change adaptation and sustainable coastal management.
This chapter reconnects modes of futures-making with the requirements of democracy by focusing on the naturalization of nuclear weapons and their removal from the realm of democratic choice at a particular point in time.
National Bureau of Economic Research,
February 1, 2021
A burgeoning literature has documented the importance of elite colleges. Yet, little is known about access to elite education and its labor market implications in China, a country that produces one in every five college graduates in the world. College admission in China is governed by a single exam—the national college entrance exam, and the government sets admission cutoff scores for elite colleges. We examine the impacts of scoring above the elite-tier cutoff on a student's access to elite colleges and wage outcomes after graduation, using the discontinuity around the cutoff score. By employing hand-collected survey data, we find that scoring above the cutoff not only increases the chance of entering an elite college but also raises a young person's first-job wages after graduation. We also find that those just above the cutoff have peers with higher scores and better social networks than those below the cutoff, but it is less clear whether the two groups use their time differently in college.
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.
