The SAIS Review of International Affairs
Lauren Kahn is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military forces have flouted international norms and international humanitarian law. Russian forces in Ukraine have looted, mistreated prisoners of war, forcibly moved Ukrainians to Russia, and targeted civilians. It is no surprise, […]
Stefan Vladisavljev is a program coordinator for Foundation BFPE for a Responsible Society. The last chapter of the former Yugoslavia’s dissolution into separate countries, which began in the 1990s, was marked by the separation of Kosovo from Serbia. In 1998, Serbia responded to separatist pressure from Kosovo by launching a brutal crackdown on the Albanian […]
Andre Pagliarini is an assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College, a columnist at Brazilian Report, and a faculty fellow at the Washington Brazil Office. There is not much in common between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the center-left former president of Brazil and leading challenger in the upcoming presidential election, and the radically right-wing […]
Review of: Neil Shenai, Escaping the Governance Trap:Economic Reform in the Northern Triangle, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2022). David F. Varela Sr. is a second-year Doctor of International Affairs (DIA) student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Escaping the Governance Trap by Neil Shenai arrives at a perfect time to enrich a […]
Burkina Faso’s rich history has been marked by violent fluctuations between military juntas and pushback from civil society, resulting in a state that lies somewhere in between. Modern Burkina Faso’s leadership nominally supports civil liberties and political freedoms but has repeatedly attempted to undermine civil society organizations’ (CSOs) political activities. The growing role of the […]
Review of: Aid imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia by Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. University of Michigan Press, 2021. How does foreign aid affect recipient nations’ human rights conditions? What determines whether foreign aid will strengthen or undermine civil liberties? In his book Aid imperium: United States […]
Introduction In April of 2022, a Colombian general and ten other servicemembers admitted that they had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.[1] It was the first time that senior Colombian military officials admitted to wrongdoing since the systemic killing of innocents began almost two decades prior in what became known as the “false positives” […]
During his maiden trip to Asia as president in late May 2022, Joe Biden implied that the United States would take stronger military action to defend Taiwan against China than his administration has taken to support Ukraine to fight against Russia.[1] While meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio in Tokyo, Biden’s robust declaration evidently […]
Of all the myths and fabrications that exist in political discourse, few are more stubbornly persistent than the scarcity of resources and the policies supposedly needed to control them. Today, that discourse has converged around one definitive commodity: oil. The omnipresence of oil in the modern economy is eclipsed only by the persistent belief in […]
Key Judgments Growing ties between Moscow and Beijing threaten US national security. American strategic planners should consider undermining these ties as a strategic imperative. This goal remains achievable if pursued with vigor because Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has exposed differences in worldviews between Moscow and Beijing. While these differences are not necessarily chasmic, […]