Asia

This policy paper explores how China’s economic development model—rooted in pragmatism, long-term planning, and civilizational renewal—has become its most compelling soft power asset, particularly in the eyes of the Global South. While critically engaging with Joseph Nye’s original conception of soft power as a primarily cultural and normative force, the paper argues that China’s ability to transform itself from an impoverished postimperial state into the world’s largest trading nat ...

This Opinion was originally published in Project Syndicate Data from a period in which both China and India pursued deliberate industrial policies show that neither country's development route is accessible to other countries. At best, their experience can alert policymakers to structural limitations and coordination problems that will require their own homegrown solutions.RABAT—What is the most reliable development path for an increasingly fragmented global economy? China ...

Avec la capitale Pékin comme acteur principal de la politique étrangère chinoise, l’engagement de la Chine en Afrique ne peut plus être appréhendé à travers le seul prisme de l’État central. Suite aux réformes de décentralisation engagées en 1978, les gouvernements provinciaux de l’Empire du Milieu jouent un rôle de plus en plus visible et structurant, en s’affirmant en tant qu’acteurs à part entière de la coopération internationale. Ils interviennent, entre autres domaines, dans le ...

This paper provides a structural assessment of India’s services-led development trajectory, and its integration into global value chains (GVCs) between 2012 and 2022. Applying an analytical framework that categorizes services into knowledge (KS), enabling (ES), and local (LS) sectors, the study utilizes sixteen OECD indicators to move beyond the narrative of India as a ‘services champion’ and reveal a more complex economic reality. The analysis identifies three central structur ...

On “marinetraffic.com”, thousands of triangles fill a map of the world’s ports and oceans, each representing the active location and destination of a ship, reported the “McGill International Review” (April 16, 2026) adding,” suspicious tankers are plentiful among them.” One of these vessels, marked by a red triangle, appears, zoomed, as “Monique”, a twenty-year-old vessel, aka Tokyo, Phuket and Elysia. Its old age and the frequent name change, suspects reporter Julnar Alzuki, “indic ...

This paper examines the evolution of China’s services sector between 2012 and 2022, analyzing the country’s structural transformation based on a novel three-tier taxonomy: knowledge services (KS), enabling services (ES), and local services (LS). Using sixteen quantitative indicators from OECD databases, the study evaluates China’s transition in comparison to the EU15 benchmark, highlighting three core challenges: manufacturing rebalancing, labor absorption, and global integration.Th ...

For much of the post-war period, the Global South was framed as an object of history, defined by dependency, constrained by structural asymmetries, and confined to the margins of global decision-making. That narrative, once empirically grounded, is now no longer adequate. A profound yet uneven transformation is underway. The Global South is no longer only reacting; it is increasingly shaping rules, institutions, and narratives.This Policy Brief argues that the Global South is thus t ...

History devotes considerable attention to the rise and fall of great powers. Scholars have spent centuries analyzing why empires collapse, why nations decline, and why dominant states eventually lose their position. By comparison, relatively little attention has been devoted to a different question: what happens when a country succeeds beyond its own expectations? ...

Global imbalances are back—and this time the risks look different. The 2008 financial crisis showed how persistent current-account deficits and surpluses between major economies can fuel financial instability and trigger sudden, severe reversals of capital flows. After almost two decades, many thought that episode had been resolved. It had not. New imbalances have built up, with a familiar cast: China, Germany, Japan, and oil exporters running large surpluses, and the United States ...

The meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing this week goes far beyond the traditional framework of a bilateral encounter between the world’s two largest economies. In many respects, it is a symbolic moment in the transition toward a new international order—one increasingly shaped not only by great-power competition but also by the Global South’s growing political consciousness and strategic relevance. ...

Trump’s Strategy of Overriding Constitutional SafeguardsPerhaps bearing in mind that only a minority of voters in the United States support U.S. military action against Iran, President Donald Trump has called the war a “short term excursion” and a “little journey” that may be over “pretty quickly”. The war is thus not a war, although Trump has said the U.S. will take Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong”, and the U.S. military has admitted to attacks on 14,000 Irania ...

This Opinion was originally published on policyedge.in The weakening of global institutions creates both risk and opportunity, placing India at the center of debates on reform and renewal.The global order is not collapsing outright but is gradually hollowing out, as institutions lose normative coherence and great power contestation reshapes rules from within. This moment of transition creates both risks of fragmentation and opportunities for redesign. For India, rising economic ...

The commercial and geopolitical interdependence between China and Latin America makes any U.S. claim to promote a "decoupling" between them impractical. Digital technologies and critical minerals will be in the crosshairs of the North American National Security Strategy  ...

Le premier sommet des BRICS, tenu à l’initiative de la Russie en 2009, sera suivi de 16 autres, le dernier étant celui de Rio dont les travaux se sont déroulés les 6 et 7 juillet 2025. Jusqu’en 2022, un seul élargissement est intervenu, celui accueillant l’Afrique du Sud, transformant les BRIC en BRICS. À partir de 2023, en revanche, trois sommets, ceux de 2023, 2024 et 2025, vont se solder par la transformation des BRICS en BRICS+5, accueillant 5 nouveaux pays membres, en ...

The first BRICS summit, convened at Russia's initiative in 2009, would be followed by sixteen more, the most recent being the Rio summit held on July 6 and 7, 2025. Until 2022, only one enlargement had taken place — the admission of South Africa, which turned BRIC into BRICS. From 2023 onward, however, three consecutive summits — 2023, 2024 and 2025 — transformed BRICS into BRICS+5, admitting five new member countries and introducing a new “partner country” status that now groups ni ...

Divergent regulatory regimes for data, driven by different motivations, ranging from privacy protection in the European Union to information control in China, could eventually produce distinctively different, and possibly contradictory, bodies of data. Artificial-intelligence models trained on those datasets could produce differing and possibly even conflicting outputs. To the extent that AI outputs start to shape human perception and to influence decisions, in governments and ...

The U.S.–China technological rivalry has become a central axis of global economic and geopolitical competition. While the United States continues to lead in frontier innovation—most notably in advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI)—China has consolidated strengths in large-scale implementation, manufacturing capacity, and control over critical segments of global supply chains. These advantages are especially visible in clean energy technologies and in the processin ...

An unusual gesture indeed—the dictator, more often than not a recluse, withdrawn behind his fortress and protected by 1.2 million armed soldiers, finally admitted what had long been seen on the battlefield in Ukraine and by spy satellites far above. North Korean soldiers—possibly 12,000 of them—are fighting on front lines alongside Russian troops, and they are falling or being wounded; some 4,000 men so far, by current estimates.  ...

The meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, was more than an exercise in diplomacy. It was an emblematic performance of a world in transformation. Behind the formalities, the cameras, and the studied smiles lay an unspoken recognition: the world is no longer unipolar. The era of American supremacy, sustained for decades through its economic reach, military presence, and ideological projection, is giving way to a more diffuse, multipolar reality. ...

On 1 October, China marked the 76th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Few nations in modern history have experienced such a remarkable transformation in so short a time. In just over seven decades, China has ascended from poverty and fragmentation to become a technological, economic, and diplomatic powerhouse of global significance. This trajectory—driven by strategic planning, institutional stability, and a steadfast belief in the state as a catalyst for develop ...

Cementing the Position of a Global PowerNo doubt the news was unwelcome for Pentagon planners in Washington, who had long pressured the Venezuelan government. In August, the United States placed a $50 million bounty on the Venezuelan leader’s arrest. By late September 2025, multiple Chinese vessels, including a naval hospital ship, were detected in the Caribbean. These ships appear to be part of a broader Chinese diplomatic and military strategy in Latin America, heightening tension ...

This article analyzes the role played by Türkiye as an emerging “middle power”[1], in Africa over the last two decades. It argues that a certain discontinuity can be identified in Türkiye’s foreign policy approach in Africa. The approach has shifted from short-term involvement with African nations to more focused, constructive, vision-oriented partnerships. In addition, Türkiye’s gradual rapprochement with Africa began with a soft-power approach through a humanitarian, cultural, and ...

The international monetary system has been dominated by the U.S. dollar since the Second World War. The hegemony of the greenback cut across the end of the dollar exchange standard established by the Bretton Woods Agreement, and came out from the global financial crisis—and the euro crisis—even stronger than before. The euro area and China are taking steps to strengthen the international role of their currencies, but surmounting the inner strength of the dollar-based monetary system ...

China's ascent to the position of the world's most prominent energy consumer has altered global energy markets and fundamentally reshaped the geopolitics of energy security. As China navigates the complexities of sustaining its economic momentum, ensuring access to reliable, affordable, and diversified energy sources has become an existential imperative, intricately woven into its foreign policy strategy. In parallel, Africa's immense wealth of both conventional and renewable resour ...

The author of this opinion, Imane Lahlou, is a 2014 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.Seeing the Script“What if you heard the same idea, delivered in the same words by two people, one from Sweden, the other from Senegal. Would it land the same? Whose room do you think would fill up first if both spoke on the same topic, for the same ticket price?”These were the opening questions of a charged conversation with two dear friends, as we began naming the ...

This paper was originally published on tandfonline.comThis study investigates the long-term impact of hosting the FIFA World Cup on unemployment using panel data of 10 countries from 1983 to 2022. The empirical analysis used two estimation techniques namely the Robust Weighted Least Squares (RWLS) and Estimated Generalized Least Squares (EGLS) with fixed and random effects. Our findings reveal that hosting the FIFA World Cup can reduce long-term unemployment by 2.86% to 3.60% over f ...

Developing countries have few options to deal with the ongoing tariff war amid unpredictable shifts in global supply chains. However, regional economic integration offers a strategic path of development in these uncertain and challenging times. Helped by geographical proximity and cultural familiarity, countries in a region can benefit greatly from promoting trade with one another, reaping the benefits of comparative advantages and economies of scale—if they are able to establish a ...

Cet article a été publié initialement sur lopinion.fr"Afrique/Europe : il faut repolitiser pour mieux coopérer", selon Karim el Aynaoui, président Exécutif Policy Center for the New South ...

Dans un contexte international en recomposition, et à l’instar des autres membres permanents du Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies (États-Unis, France, Royaume-Uni), la Chine et la Russie réévaluent leurs positionnements respectifs sur le dossier du Sahara marocain, longtemps relégué à la périphérie de leurs priorités. À travers une lecture croisée des dynamiques historiques, des échanges bilatéraux avec le Maroc et des interactions dans les enceintes multilatérales, notamment à ...

The history of relations between the West and East Asia is deeply rooted in fear, dating back to the 13th century when Mongol hordes swept from Central Asia into the European steppes. This civilizational neurosis took root in the European imagination and has since shaped Western perceptions of the East. The derogatory racial metaphor “Yellow Peril”, which emerged in the late 19th century, was not a new invention but rather a recurring theme invoked whenever politically expedient. It ...

Le retour de Trump à la présidence des États-Unis en 2025 accélère l’effondrement de l’ordre international issu de 1945, déjà fragilisé par ses contradictions internes, ses promesses non tenues et son incapacité à intégrer le Sud global. Dans un monde traversé par une polycrise — climatique, énergétique, financière et alimentaire — Trump 2.0 incarne un tournant vers un réalisme assumé, où les alliances sont conditionnelles, les institutions multilatérales instrumentalisées, et les r ...

The late twentieth-century neoliberal experiment, imposed upon Latin America and Africa under the banner of the Washington Consensus, failed both economically and morally. Though it promised prosperity through deregulation, privatisation, and fiscal austerity, it delivered instead economic stagnation, rising inequality, and the systematic dismantling of the instruments of national development. This was not technocratic wisdom, but a project of ideological enforcement that subordinat ...