TOK Teacher
Finding a new globally acceptable tool to measure the ups and downs of our economic activity will remain a challenge – but one that must be tackled urgently to ensure the world’s economic recovery is on the right course.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/gdp-new-measure-economic-growth/
More than just a set of free-market policies, neoliberalism has always sought to alter society’s balance of power in favor of bosses. Its assault on democracy and undermining of unions is now playing straight into the hands of the far right.
Sovereign states have been mythologized as the natural unit of political order. History shows how new they are—and how we can think beyond them.
Much more is a stake in our talk about international order, then, than quibbles over historical periodization. Misrepresenting the history of the states-system plays into the hands of nationalist strongmen, who depict themselves as saving the world from a descent into stateless anarchy, controlled by globalist corporations who couldn’t care less about national allegiance. More broadly, getting this history right means having the right conversations. Giving power to actors other than states is not always a good idea, but we must resist the false choice between resurgent nationalism on the one hand and the triumph of undemocratic entities on the other.
https://bostonreview.net/politics/claire-vergerio-beyond-nation-state
New techniques have made predictions more useful, and we used one to look at violence in Ethiopia since the election of Abiy Ahmed, the new Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In the world of conflict prediction, there is a truism: the best predictor of violence is a history of violence. One illustration is the Early Warning Project’s 2019 predictions for the sites of new mass killings, defined as the death of over 1,000 civilians in a year due to the deliberate action of armed groups (2020 figures weren’t available at press time): the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, India, and Myanmar rank among the 30 highest-risk countries.
Why do leaders in the West persist in getting China so wrong? In our work we have come to see that people in both business and politics often cling to three widely shared but essentially false assumptions about modern China. As we’ll argue in the following pages, these assumptions reflect gaps in their knowledge about China’s history, culture, and language that encourage them to draw persuasive but deeply flawed analogies between China and other countries.
https://bg.hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china#
At dozens of internal checkpoints across the country, Border Patrol agents stop and question passing motorists on their citizenship. Elsewhere, officers engage in roving traffic stops aimed at interdicting illegal immigration inside the United States. Agents at checkpoints require neither a warrant nor individualized suspicion to stop passing motorists and inquire about the occupants’ citizenship, or to inspect private lands within twenty-five miles of the border. Taken together, these “defense in depth” measures amount to an extraordinarily expansive law enforcement effort carried deep into the U.S. interior.
What led Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to conduct a military campaign in the Tigray region, and how has the fighting affected Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa?
Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/nso-spyware-pegasus-cellphones/
Nationalism” is rapidly overtaking even “populism” as a foremost political bogeyman. Yet progressives will often still embrace “patriotism.” The elevation of the last term is meant to deflect Trump-style accusations that the left hates the United States and wishes it ill. Liberals often maintain that true love of country means calling the nation to its best self and thus subjecting it to criticism.
Once the richest country in South America, Venezuela is now in deep economic crisis.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p051zkj8
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