Recent Posts

Will Taiwan’s Dongsha Islands Be the Next Crimea?

Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine prompted much international outrage but little meaningful action. President Vladimir Putin was able to forcefully redraw his country’s borders, shrugging off the international sanctions that the United States and European Union imposed in response. Putin’s success augmented “the belief among some …

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Turkey and Egypt Open the Door to a Diplomatic Thaw

In mid-March, Turkey and Egypt confirmed they’d had their first diplomatic contact since breaking off relations in 2013. Though the talks were described by Egyptian sources as preliminary, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying, “Contacts at the diplomatic level have started.” The thaw comes after a decade …

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The Persistence of Borders in a Globalized World

Back in 1990, when the Soviet bloc was crumbling into new nations, Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese organizational theorist and management consultant, had the audacity to suggest that humankind was on the cusp of a new “borderless world,” in a book of the same name. Ohmae’s goal was mainly to sketch …

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