Sergei Magnitsky was a thirty-seven year old Russian lawyer and auditor who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a firm founded in 1996 by Bill Browder, the grandson of the famous leader of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder (1891-1973). Hermitage made tens of millions of dollars in the rush to buy up and sell state assets in the chaotic economic circumstances of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Browder’s efforts in the early 2000s to use the emerging Russian legal system to protect his investments and encourage large companies to operate transparently led him to cross swords with the financial and business elite of Putin’s Russia.

What type of common asylum regime would Europeans support? We conducted a survey asking 18,000 citizens of 15 European countries about their preferences regarding different mechanisms for allocating asylum seekers across countries. A large majority supports an allocation that is proportional to each country’s capacity over the status quo policy of allocation based on the country of first entry. This majority support is weakened but persists even among a randomly assigned subset of respondents who were made aware that moving to proportional allocation would increase the number of asylum seekers allocated to their own country. These results suggest that citizens care deeply about the fairness of the responsibility-sharing mechanism, rather than only the consequences of the asylum policy. The findings also highlight a potential pathway towards reform of the Common European Asylum System.

As the World Trade Organization (WTO) begins its third decade, its future is uncertain. The initial expectation that the WTO would be the fulcrum for future international trade agreements has not been met. At best, its tenure has had mixed results. This review addresses the political consequences of WTO membership, focusing on the rules and norms of the regime and why they have become less functional over time; looks at the effectiveness of the WTO and the dispute settlement system in encouraging trade and compliance with agreements; and offers some general thoughts on the impact of shifting mass opinion on the virtue of trade agreements and other stumbling blocks the WTO faces.

On January 27, true to his campaign promise to suspend Muslim immigration, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting all immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and indefinitely barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States. By doing so, the Trump administration has taken a definite stance on what it holds as the threat posed by immigrants and refugees to U.S. security. As we argued in April 2016, however, democracies like the United States “are not opening their doors to terrorism when they let in Muslim immigrants.”

The most dangerous impact of North Korea’s long-range missile test this past week may not have been the one in the Sea of Japan, felt in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo. It was in Moscow where Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin locked arms in a united front on how to respond to the growing North Korea crisis. The target of this front was not, however, North Korea. It was the United States, who the Sino-Russian axis accused of pursuing a military “buildup” in the region.

The future of ASEAN is necessarily unknown. Its futures, however, can be guessed with less risk of being wrong. My purpose here is not to predict with confidence but to “pandict” with reticence—not to choose one assured future but to scan several that could conceivably occur. Also, what follows is merely a range, not the range.  The five different ASEANs of the future all too briefly sketched below are meant to be suggestive, but they are neither fully exclusive nor jointly exhaustive. Potentiality outruns imagination. My hope is that by doing the easy thing—opening a few doors on paper—I may tempt analysts more knowledgeable than I to do the hard thing. That truly difficult challenge is to pick the one doorway through which ASEAN is most likely to walk or be pushed through—and to warrant that choice with the comprehensive evidence and thorough reasoning that, for lack of space and expertise, are not found here. That said, this pandiction does start with a prediction, and thereafter as well the line between speculation and expectation—the possible and the probable—will occasionally be crossed. In addition, by way of self-critique: my guessings and imaginings may overestimate the importance of China in ASEAN’s futures.

In the days leading up to the Washington summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump, the tension in Seoul was hard to escape. Fears of an open clash between the two leaders, of a handshake that went on too long, or of a hostile early morning tweet directed at Moon were widespread. But when a senior national security advisor to Moon met a group of American visitors after the first day of talks, he was visibly relieved. The dinner between Moon and U.S. President Donald Trump went so well, he recounted with a slight smile, that it was extended 35 minutes.