Category: World

Fifteen seats, five vetoes and a set of rules written in 1945. Here is how the Security Council reaches decisions, and why it so frequently reaches none at all.

Water shortages rarely start wars on their own. What they do is amplify every other pressure a society is already under — and the arithmetic is getting harder.

Sanctions have become the default response to almost every international crisis. The research on whether they achieve their stated aims is considerably more mixed than the policy consensus.

The phrase gets used loosely and often pejoratively. The analytical frameworks behind it are more precise, and more useful, than the headline label suggests.