China’s Belt and Road Initiative is best known as a massive set of infrastructure projects stretching from Asia to Europe. But more than that, it is a sweeping foreign policy vision that provides China with opportunities for deep engagement with virtually every aspect of state and society in its partner countries. Many developing countries welcome the investments and opportunities for trade linked to the initiative, but some of the projects have sparked local resistance over fears of unfair terms or potential opportunities for Chinese intelligence penetration.

“Data-driven governance assumes the need for constant adaptation to change.” Fourth in a series on ways of governing .

Rather than assuming that host communities must serve the industry, expectations should be adjusted so that tourism genuinely aligns with those communities' own priorities.

The consequences of this missed opportunity are serious and will be felt in the not-so-distant future when the oil deposits have drained away.

The lack of planning can be understood as an art of governing, for it ensures the operation of informality.

[T]urning the page on decades of conflict and underdevelopment in the Horn of Africa will require … democratization and the institutionalization of transparent, accountable governance.

Ideally, the free movement of goods and services should coexist with the free movement of people.

Few big countries … have had their fortunes so profoundly shaped by a weak position in the global system.

Hurricane Maria laid bare the painful reality that Puerto Rico is an inconsequential American territory inhabited by second-class US citizens.

“The AKP's neoliberal regime created the ideology and conditions for transformative change in Turkey's new upper-middle-class culture, which trickled down to both the laic and Islamic middle-class factions.” Fourth in a series on social mobility around the world .

Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative is modernizing ancient patterns of commerce across the region, but small-scale traders may be left behind.

What used to be viewed as relatively self-defined polities in a previous era … are now being reconfigured by competing centripetal and centrifugal tensions.

[S]tudies have revealed a high level of intergenerational transfer of class and social status, privileged and otherwise.

Clearly, Nepalis have to adapt to climate change. It is less clear what precisely the challenges are and who is best positioned to lead the response.

[T]he plan aims for massive urbanization through the extension of formal permanent residency to current and future migrants in small cities and towns rather than large urban centers.

[O]ne-size-fits-all adaptation will not work, given the wide variety of regional impacts in Vietnam.

The Morales administration sought to give indigenous peoples more rights and greater influence in government, effectively breaking down traditional patterns of exclusion.

NGOs and other foreign entities took control of the humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake, creating parallel structures that contributed to the very duplication and state weaknesses that NGOs were supposed to solve.

[W]hat sort of country is going to emerge from this revolutionary reshaping of society?

Saudi Arabia must place its citizens firmly in the center of its transformation, so that employment, productivity, and local demand determine the direction of the economy.