Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder
A clear-eyed look from Michael McFaul at how the rise of autocratic China and Russia are compelling some to think that we have entered a new Cold War—and why we must reject that thinking in order to prevail.
Gi-Wook Shin explores how Japan, Australia, China, and India achieved economic power and sustained momentum by responding to risks and challenges such as demographic crises, brain drain, and geopolitical tensions.
A huge increase in engineering graduates from the BRIC countries in recent
decades potentially threatens the competitiveness of developed countries in producing high
value-added products and services, while also holding great promise for substantially
increasing the level of global basic and applied innovation. The key question is whether the
quality of these new BRIC engineers will be high enough to actualize this potential. The
objective of our study is to assess the evolving capacity of BRIC higher education systems
to produce qualified engineering graduates. To meet this objective, we compare developments in the quality of undergraduate engineering programs across elite and non-elite
higher education tiers within and across each BRIC country. To assess and compare the
quality of engineering education across the BRIC countries, we use multiple sources of
primary and secondary data gathered from each BRIC country from 2008 to 2011. In
combination with this, we utilize a production function approach that focuses on key input-,
process- and outcome-based indicators associated with the quality of education programs.
Our analysis suggests that in all four countries, a minority of engineering students receives
high quality training in elite institutions while the majority of students receive low quality training in non-elite institutions. Our analysis also shows how the BRIC countries vary in
their capacity to improve the quality of engineering education.
The Turkish Republic was founded simultaneously on the ideal of universal citizenship and on acts of extraordinary exclusionary violence. Today, nearly a century later, the claims of minority communities and the politics of pluralism continue to ignite explosive debate. The Reckoning of Pluralism centers on the case of Turkey's Alevi community, a sizeable Muslim minority in a Sunni majority state. Alevis have seen their loyalty to the state questioned and experienced sectarian hostility, and yet their community is also championed by state ideologues as bearers of the nation's folkloric heritage.
Kabir Tambar offers a critical appraisal of the tensions of democratic pluralism. Rather than portraying pluralism as a governing ideal that loosens restrictions on minorities, he focuses on the forms of social inequality that it perpetuates and on the political vulnerabilities to which minority communities are thereby exposed. Alevis today are often summoned by political officials to publicly display their religious traditions, but pluralist tolerance extends only so far as these performances will validate rather than disturb historical ideologies of national governance and identity. Focused on the inherent ambivalence of this form of political incorporation, Tambar ultimately explores the intimate coupling of modern political belonging and violence, of political inclusion and domination, contained within the practices of pluralism.
