Foreign Policy Spring 2020

Snigdha Poonam is a national affairs writer with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi. She is the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World. She has recently written on Chinese dating apps, TikTok, conflict, and India’s justice system. Raghuram Rajan is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He previously served as the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India and chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind. Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and editor in chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. His most recent book, with Abraham L. Newman, is…

WHEN WE FIRST STARTED PLANNING THIS ISSUE a few months ago, I never imagined that, at the last minute, we would have to make room for discussion of a then-unheard-of virus that would soon circle the globe. Of course, I also didn’t imagine that I’d be making the final edits to this issue from my kitchen table while my stir-crazy 5-year-old practiced tae kwon do over FaceTime; while my wife, who works on technology innovation for New York City, scrambled to somehow find millions of N95 face masks; and while two pounds of venison jerky quietly cooked away in the backyard meat smoker I’d bought a week earlier during a late-night session of online apocalypse prep. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.) But if there’s one thing the coronavirus…

“JAI SHRI RAM!” THOSE WERE THE WORDS 25-year-old Kapil Gujjar shouted as he pointed his semi-automatic pistol at hundreds of unarmed women and children at Shaheen Bagh, a predominantly Muslim colony in New Delhi, on Saturday, Feb. 1. It was a cool, smog-infused afternoon, and Indians from all walks of life had gathered in a peaceful protest against a controversial new citizenship law that especially affected the country’s poor, women, and, perhaps most of all, Muslims. Gujjar fired three bullets in the air. The crowd scattered. Later, while being handcuffed by the police, Gujjar explained his motive: “In our country, only Hindus will prevail.” Jai Shri Ram literally translates as “Victory to Lord Ram,” a popular Hindu deity. But while this seemingly harmless phrase originated as a pious declaration of devotion…

MUCH LIKE THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the coronavirus pandemic is a world-shattering event whose far-ranging consequences we can only begin to imagine today. This much is certain: Just as the disease has shattered lives, disrupted markets, and exposed the competence (or lack thereof) of governments, it will lead to permanent shifts in political and economic power in ways that will become apparent only later. To help us make sense of the ground shifting beneath our feet as this crisis unfolds, FOREIGN POLICY asked 12 leading thinkers from around the world to weigh in with their predictions for the global order after the pandemic. A World Less Open, Prosperous, and Free by STEPHEN M. WALT THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC will strengthen the state and reinforce nationalism. Governments…

IN THE HEYDAY OF SOUTH AFRICA’S APARTHEID REGIME, the country’s white minority government planned to create 10 so-called homelands—also known as Bantustans—where black South Africans could live far away from the cities it hoped to keep white. It was the culmination of what the regime called “separate development”—an effort to deflect attention from racial oppression by claiming black people had been granted independence in their own states and weren’t second-class citizens in South Africa. The apartheid government ultimately created only four ostensibly independent Bantustans (Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei, and Transkei) and six supposedly self-governing territories. Foreign governments for the most part dismissed the puppet states for what they were; South Africa was the only country in the world to officially recognize the Bantustans, and the major decisions regarding their affairs were made…

THERE HAS BEEN NO SHORTAGE OF DEBATE about the killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani and its effects on U.S. foreign policy toward Iran and the broader Middle East. Not nearly enough has been said about whether it can broadly serve as a model for dealing with the problems posed by proxy forces elsewhere in the world. By killing Suleimani, the United States indicated it would no longer tolerate Iran’s use of proxies to circumvent its responsibility for killing Americans and for other acts of terrorism and mass bloodshed. Washington decided to de al with the source of the terrorism, not its emissaries. The same principle should apply to the many proxy regimes established by various states—Russia most prominently—to circumvent responsibility for illegal military occupations. Countries around the world are increasingly…