Foreign Policy Blogs

The Global Affairs Blog Network

Foreign Policy Blogs is the largest network of global affairs blogs. Staffed by professional contributors from the worlds of journalism, academia, business, non-profits and think tanks, the FPB network tracks global developments from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and everywhere in between, daily. The FPB network is a production of the Foreign Policy Association.





Feature: Negotiating with the Taliban: The Road Ahead

Afghanistan

Afghan soldiers are killing American contractors and British troops. The recent news from the field is causing no less than rushed panic in strategy and policy circles: How can we draw down when the team we're supposed to be handing off to in 2014 is infiltrated through with the enemy? It's no surprise then that President Obama is losing his patience. He's sent in every available stake holder to wrench his Afghanistan policy back on track.  Not a day goes by when some talking head doesn't try to parse out what Vice President Joe Biden meant when he told Jonathan Alterf that the U.S would be drawing down in 2011, "Bet on it", he said. So, yes, President Obama is looking for a robustly engineered, settled peace....

Indio da Costa: Da Instigator

This year’s Presidential candidates are increasingly appealing to fear and competing claims of victimization to win...

Violence in the hinterlands

As I highlighted in my last post, violent crime is peaking in Brazil’s interior. A disturbing corollary to this trend is...

The power of new technology

There is a muted but ongoing debate about whether a country can be democratic and fight corruption at the same time (see...

What Obama Means for Africa: From my Africa...

Ok, I know I suppose to be posting about news-driven materials, but after revisiting my Africa travel notebook, I couldn’t...

U.S. Slowdown Could Risk Global Economic...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday that the outlook for the economy remains "unusually uncertain"...

Extreme summer heat wilts crops in Russia

As Russia fights to protect land sown with wheat, barley and other crops from record high temperatures, seventeen regions...

A Tale of Two Seasons, by C. Change

A vicious cold spell has gripped a large swath of South America, including parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay,...

Burundi's Election Tri(imper)fecta

The incomparable FiveThirtyEight, which looks at politics with a particular emphasis on polling data, has increasingly taken...

Negotiating with the Taliban: The Road Ahead

Afghan soldiers are killing American contractors and British troops. The recent news from the field is causing no less than...

BRICs: Aid and Investment and Impressions...

Emerging economies such as Brazil, China and India have always been recipients of foreign aid from Europe and North America...

Transformational Change

In talking about the limitless potential for renewables last week, I mentioned the letter from three key ministers from France,...

Greeks Bearing Gifts?

Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad to start a two-day visit aimed at improving U.S./Pakistan...

Other WTO News

Indonesia is brining a case against the United States over the ban on clove cigarettes. The Americans claim the ban is meant...

WTO: Boeing vs. Airbus

Last month the WTO ruled against Airbus, stating that they had illegally received loans from European governments, giving...

Foreign Anti-Libel Bill Passes Senate

Bipartisan legislation that would protect journalists from libel suits filed abroad, authored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)...

Our Schlieffen Plan

At Informed Comment yesterday,  Tom Engelhardt ripped counterinsurgency (COIN) a new one.  He writes that we should "start...

Malnutrition in Bangladesh: Hope and Blight...

Consider for more than a breath that about 50% of children under 5 years of age in Bangladesh are malnourished.  That hard...