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When companies or individuals make investments in a business in another country, experts call this “foreign direct investment.” Today, China is the fastest growing source of such investments. From the early 1990s to 2015, Chinese and Hong Kong’s foreign direct investments increased from a few hundred million to $2.5 trillion...

International law is in a rough period. Since 2016 institutions as varied as the European Court of Human Rights, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal Court have been harshly criticized by politicians chafing at their strictures. The reasons for growing dissatisfaction vary. Africans unhappy with human rights prosecutions...

The German national election held in September of 2017 may have consolidated Angela Merkel’s power, but a larger story was the success of Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigration party that won nearly 13 percent of the vote. A central plank in that party’s platform promises to reverse the German nationality...

Many citizens in Europe and the United States believe that the quality of democracy has declined over the last few decades. Political cartelization and patronage-oriented styles of governance can help explain how parties collude to survive as public debates narrow and the grassroots bases of parties wither. Global development ties...

Starting in late April of 2018, the small Central American country Nicaragua entered the media spotlight as massive street protests rocked the decade-long authoritarian regime of President Daniel Ortega. Brutal government repression has killed over 200 and led to intensified calls for Ortega to step down. Although nobody could have...

Sex and gender identities are becoming increasingly complex in America, creating new challenges for public administrative agencies. So far, the vast majority of U.S. federal agencies lack comprehensive transgender employee policies – which are currently in place for only nine of approximately 235 federal agencies (including sub-agencies). Yet as the...

From the U.S. travel ban to the rise of anti-immigrant populists in Europe, politicians often decry migration in times of moral and economic crisis. Controversies can easily preclude a balanced understanding of what migration means – not only for immigrants and their new societies, but also for the places migrants...

Few ties are as essential to the United States and Canada as the relationship they enjoy with one another. John F. Kennedy’s words to the Parliament in Ottawa on May 17, 1961 still ring true. “Geography has made us neighbors,” he said. “History has made us friends. Economics has made...

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans – two-thirds of them U.S.-born full citizens – were forcibly removed from their West Coast homes and sent to prison work camps across the country. The government called this process “internment” or “relocation” and labeled the prison...

In September 2017, Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, rescinded previous guidance from the administration of President Barack Obama on how institutions of higher education should address campus sexual misconduct. The Obama guidance issued in 2011 by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights was meant to deal with troubling...