For over a quarter century, there have been dire and continued predictions for East Asia. Yet in reality, over the past twenty-five years, the proportion of the economy devoted to defense spending in East Asia has steadily declined.

Chinese foreign policy in 2016 reveals sharp contradictions between Beijing’s aspirations for a heightened role in global governance and repeated evidence of maladroit, alienating behavior toward states along its periphery.

After near forty years of economic, technological and military modernization and increased Chinese defense spending, the rise of Chinese military capabilities has reached a critical stage for the U.S.-China power transition and the prospects for peace

On January 16, 2016, China officially opened the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) for business, representing what might be a seismic shift in economic power from the United States to China and the culmination of what had been a diplomatic disaster for the United States. The AIIB creates a challenge to the U.S. dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), two venerable international financial institutions created at the end of the Second World War.

The World Bank lends money to developing countries to promote infrastructure and economic development, but these loans come with conditions called the Washington Consensus. The United States uses the Washington Consensus to promote its policies throughout the developing world. These policies are designed to promote the use of private markets, protect the environment, protect human and workers’ rights, and foster non-corruption in government, among other values. While the United States dominates both the World Bank and IMF, the United States also limits China to a minor role in these institutions, even though China has the world’s second largest economy.

Efforts to increase China’s role in the IMF were blocked by the United States, which has also excluded China from the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a vast free trade agreement covering most of Asia. Faced with this shoddy treatment by the United States, China created the AIIB as an alternative bank in which China will play a dominant role in international lending to developing countries.

The AIIB represents not only a rival to the World Bank and IMF but a challenge to the way the United States has conducted international trade for the past seventy years. Unlike the United States, which imposes a set of western style policies as a condition for receiving loans from the World Bank, China believes in a doctrine of non-interference with the internal affairs of other countries. China’s doctrine of non-interference is a direct challenge to the United States’ doctrine of conditionality.

China’s stance led the United States to argue that the AIIB would place few restrictions on its loans and would not tie its loans to responsible policies concerning the environment, workers’ rights, and corruption. Not only did the United States refuse to join the AIIB, the United States also attempted to dissuade its closest allies from joining. Despite U.S. entreaties, all of the United States’ closest allies (except Japan) jointed the AIIB, even Britain, causing a political embarrassment for the United States.

The battle over the AIIB represents a challenge by China to the leading role of the United States in writing the rules for international trade. Loans by the AIIB will likely have fewer conditions and will promote the policies of the Chinese Communist Party. While the United States has been the underwriter of the world financial system for at least the past seven decades, the rise of the AIIB, could be the first indication that China will succeed in its quest to displace the United States as the final arbiter of the rules of international trade in the twenty first century.

Although the United States had global trading interests before World War II, American foreign policy was largely provincial before 1937 – driven by protectionist and particularist impulses. President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Quarantine speech” in response to fascist threats marked the beginning of sea change in American thinking about global engagement and international security. The change emerged most immediately in the rise of security studies as an academic discipline and an influence on strategic planning. This presentation will trace that transformation and assess its implications for the next 70 years of American global engagement in the Cold War and post-Cold War worlds. The presentation will close with a discussion of how security studies as a discipline might influence the next generation of American thinkers, citizens, students, and policy-makers.

Over the past 20 years, social scientists have displayed growing interest in the political economy of financial reform. Virtually all of these studies have focused on explaining policy changes resulting in the liberalization of the financial sector without addressing the extent to which the adopted financial reforms have actually been implemented.

In this presentation, I will assess the factors contributing to both de jure financial reform and the implementation of such liberalization. We find that de jure reform tends to be conducted by poorer countries and participants in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Standby Arrangement and its Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF).

We also find that the political economy of de jure reforms that are not implemented differs substantially from the political economy of de facto reforms that are implemented. Implementation is inhibited by economic crises, a democratic regime type, an advanced industrial economy, a large financial sector, and participation in the IMF’s PRGF. Implementation is promoted by economic recessions and involvement in an IMF Standby Arrangement. Our findings therefore confirm the importance of societal interests, political institutions, domestic economic conditions, and international institutions, each of which has been linked to financial reform in prior research. But these results break new ground by revealing important differences in how these factors influence policy reforms and the implementation of such reforms.

The symposium will address the complex issues related to extremist jihadi groups in the Middle East. The panelists will introduce the topic by providing detailed background information on these groups as well as the on area itself.

How do states pursue nuclear weapons? The literature on nuclear proliferation has focused on the question of why states might pursue nuclear weapons, while more recent work examines how efficiently states achieve their nuclear ambitions. Yet the question of how states think about pursuing nuclear weapons, or their strategies of proliferation, has been ignored.

This paper explores the strategies of proliferation available to states — hedging, sprinting, sheltered pursuit, and hiding — and develops a theory for which strategies are likely to be chosen at a given time by a given state. I present evidence and codings on the universe of nuclear pursuers suggesting that disaggregating nuclear acquisition strategies is analytically useful.

Although a definitive test of the theory is beyond the scope of this paper, I provide evidence from the Indian case that establishes the plausibility of the theory. I conclude with implications for nonproliferation objectives and policies, suggesting why different strategies of proliferation matters to international security.

During the first half of the Cold War, the superpowers endeavored mightily to “win hearts and minds” abroad through what came to be called public diplomacy. Many of the target audiences were on the Cold War front-lines in Europe. However, other, larger ones resided in areas outside Europe then in the throes of decolonization.

Among the latter, for all the blood and drama of war, intervention, crisis, and revolution, the vast majority experienced the Cold War as public diplomacy; as, essentially, a media war for their allegiance rather than as a violent war for their lives. In these areas, superpower public diplomacy encountered a set of challenges around the issues of race, empire, poverty, and decolonization– all of which were in volatile flux, as they intersected with the dynamics of the Cold War, and with anti-imperialist currents long coursing.

The challenge to U.S. public diplomacy was acute. At a time when the image of the United States abroad was inseparable from Jim Crow and from Washington’s European-imperial alliances, the cresting of these issues put U.S. outreach unavoidably on the defensive.

Yet the greater consequence of these Cold War campaigns was not for U.S. foreign policy, but rather for postwar international history– when the non-European world responded to this media war by joining it. Newly independent voices in India, Egypt, Ghana, and elsewhere launched public-diplomacy campaigns of their own, making for a crowded field by the 1960s. In addition to offering a roundabout validation of the strategic importance of public diplomacy, this proliferation of voices articulated a different vision of the postwar world.

Reappropriating the geopolitical and intellectual space left between the poles of the superpower conflict, this global conversation formulated what Vijay Prashad calls the Third World project, around a nucleus of nonalignment, post-imperial economic development, and anti-colonial racial solidarity. The global-South response to the injection of the Cold War into their environs thereby helped to coalesce the “Third World” as a transnational imagined community on the postwar global landscape.

What explains surges in migration? Dominant theories emphasize conditions of violence or poverty in sending countries. However, these factors alone are unable to explain sudden migration waves. Sharp spikes in migration, like the current refugee crisis in Europe or last summer’s flow of Central American children across the U.S. border, contrast with often long-standing problems of violence and poverty. Moreover, migrants from nonviolent regions are attracted to join these flows when violence spikes elsewhere.

This project seeks to advance our understanding of migration by explaining the onset of waves, as well as the informational or social dynamics that magnify and perpetuate a migration wave once it emerges, through a new survey of Syrian refugees and other migrants in Jordan, Turkey, and Greece.