In The News

China’s Tianxia: Do All Under Heaven Need One Arbiter?

June Teufel Dreyer October 30, 2014
Some Chinese scholars point to the 5th century BC as possible model that “under a virtuous China one could return to the golden age,” explains political science professor June Teufel Dreyer in her excerpt from a longer paper to be published by The Journal of Contemporary China. As suggested by Confucius, “To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue …...

Global Problem Solving Without the Globaloney

Pankaj Ghemawat October 29, 2014
Many challenges, like climate change, are global in scale, but citizens often have an exaggerated sense of other global connections, including internet use and immigration. Pankaj Ghemawat refers to outsized estimates as globaloney: “It obscures the potential gains from additional globalization, swells fears about its adverse consequences, and causes companies to adopt strategies of ‘bigger and...

Surrogacy: Human Right or Reproductive Exploitation?

Joseph Chamie and Barry Mirkin October 28, 2014
With the spread of reproductive technology, surrogate parenting has risen sharply in recent years; it's estimated that half of all such births since 1978 occurred during the last six years. Regulations and costs for the practice vary worldwide, report demographers Joseph Chamie and Barry Mirkin, and with globalization of travel and communications, cross-border arrangements are on the rise. “...

American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist

David Edwards October 23, 2014
Education must prepare students for a fast-changing world, argues David Edwards for Wired. The world must handle 2 billion more people over the next 20 years along with a stressed food supply and climate change. “The many rich and varied human cultures of the earth will continue to mix, more rapidly than they ever have, through mass population movements and unprecedented information exchange, and...

Putin, ISIS, Ebola: How Globalization Harms Us More Than Helps

Melik Kaylan October 16, 2014
Upheaval over geopolitical rivalries, religious strife and disease raises questions as to whether greater interconnectedness is destabilizing the world. Melik Kaylan, writing for Forbes, suggests that Russia’s President Putin is at the helm of a worldwide reaction against globalization: “The multicultural poly-sexual utopia without borders that American-style globalism sells as a matter of...

Complexity Marks Asia’s Use of Social Media

Thomas Crampton October 13, 2014
Myanmar is reengaging with the world, a sudden immersion in the era of social media. “Using the benefit of hindsight from social media adoption in other Asian countries, it is safe to predict that Myanmar will benefit in terms of education, accountability and transparency,” writes Thomas Crampton, of Ogilvy & Mather for GlobalAsia, who examines social media trends throughout Asia. “There will...

New Theater of Cruelty: Beheadings Demand Civilization’s Response

Joji Sakurai October 9, 2014
Islamic State extremists burst forth on the world scene with brutal acts, with all the absurd petulance of an angry, bullying yet powerless adolescent desperate for attention. In an era of rapid communications, images and messages spread instantly. The depraved put on a performance – a new theater of cruelty – perverting a centuries-old religion, and globalization ensures instant judgment....