Foreign Policy Fall 2020

Fatima Bhutto is a writer based in Pakistan. Her most recent books are The Runaways, a novel, and New Kings of the World, a nonfiction reportage on global popular culture. Yashica Dutt is a writer based in New York and the author of the memoir Coming Out as Dalit. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she writes on gender, identity, and culture. Andrew Moravcsik is a professor of politics and the director of the Liechtenstein Institute at Princeton University. He has written more than 250 publications on European integration, international relations, human rights, and other topics. Kristalina Georgieva is the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Previously, she was CEO of the World Bank and the European Commission’s vice president for budget and human resources. Gita Gopinath is the chief economist of the…

IN JULY, A GROUP OF 83 OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST PEOPLE calling itself Millionaires for Humanity urged governments to increase taxes on them to help deal with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Their idea, the latest version of a wealth tax—where the rich are taxed on the assets they already own rather than their earnings—was received as almost revolutionary. This year, figures such as onetime U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and U.K. Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds have likewise called for the exploration of a wealth tax, making it one of the most popular and seemingly new policy ideas on both sides of the Atlantic. Although wealth taxes may seem bold and innovative, the concept is almost as old as money itself. The first known currency was created by King Alyattes…

THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR CAME ONE MORNING IN JULY for Xu Zhangrun. The Beijing-based legal scholar had long anticipated such a day would come, writing more than once that an essay might be his last and keeping a fresh change of clothes by the door of his home. A score of police officers surrounded and seized him, reportedly with an accusation that he had solicited prostitutes—a charge so commonly trumped up against dissidents that Xu himself previously warned it would be used against him. Until recently, he was a well-connected scholar at one of the country’s preeminent universities, Tsinghua. Now, he is in the opaque world of the party-state legal system. While he has been released for the moment, he remains closely monitored and is likely to face future…

PERHAPS NO OTHER SECTORS have been hit as hard by the coronavirus pandemic as those that enrich and entertain us. Concert halls are closed, museums are gathering dust, and cinemas are insolvent. If your favorite sports team is playing at all, it is in an eerily empty stadium—with the effect that the game no longer offers us a thrilling escape from the world but reminds us of its crisis. The cliché of the starving artist has gained new currency, as hundreds of thousands of people in these industries are either out of work or waiting for their furloughs to become layoffs. Then there are the ripple effects: Shuttered attractions make the recovery of tourism even less likely; children no longer learn about culture and history firsthand; and few of us are…

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO THIS SEPTEMBER, delegates from 189 countries descended on Beijing to participate in the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women. This meeting was notable for many reasons, not least because it was, at the time, the largest gathering of women’s rights advocates in history: In addition to official government delegations, some 30,000 activists from around the world attended the conference. The rallying cry that emanated from Beijing, “Women’s rights are human rights”—famously proclaimed in a speech by the United States’ then-first lady, Hillary Clinton—still reverberates today. At the conclusion of the summit, years of activism culminated in a historic inflection point, as governments meeting in Beijing agreed to the most ambitious Platform for Action on women’s rights in history, one that called for the “full and equal participation…

WHEN A STATUE OF FRANÇOIS_MARIE AROUET was dramatically removed from outside the Académie Française in Paris this August, it was by no means only members of the far-right who expressed their outrage. On the contrary, self-styled moderates of all political persuasions said the prolific 18th-century writer best known by his nom de plume, Voltaire, should be untouchable. They were incensed when anti-racist graffiti was repeatedly sprayed on the stone depiction because of his links with the slave trade. In turn, the accusations from those responsible for the vandalism were that Voltaire had personally invested in the French East India Company, founded in 1664 to exploit the products of the New World—a trade that included Africans being bought and sold as commodities for profit. Voltaire had plenty of enemies, and there were certainly as…