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The eighth Summit of the Americas, which recently took place in Lima, will soon be forgotten. To many observers, that would be considered a success. Expectations prior to the gathering of thirty-three heads of state from the Western Hemisphere had been so low that an uneventful summit was the best possible outcome. When President Donald J. Trump announced that he would not attend—making him the first U.S.

More than two years since the start of COVID-19, the world needs to ask itself whether it has the collective capacity to detect, diagnose, alert, and contain the next emerging or reemerging communicable disease.

Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear weapons use is again moving up the political agenda.

The recent political crisis in South Korea highlights both the vulnerabilities and resilience of its democracy. Among countries that underwent the third wave of democratization in the late twentieth century, South Korea stood out as a relatively successful case of democratic consolidation. Peaceful power transitions through elections have become the norm, and financial and political crises have been addressed through established institutional mechanisms.  

Humanitarian intervention is intervention forced upon a sovereign state. It is either arbitrarily undertaken by one state or collectively by a group of states (at times under the platform of an international organization like the United Nations) with the express purpose of protecting civilians from human rights abuses, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, among other humanitarian imperatives.

It is important that the Brisbane G20 Summit on Nov. 15–16 is a success. In an increasingly integrated global economy, effective forums for economic cooperation are needed.

The fourth and almost certainly final Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) will take place from March 31 to April 1, 2016 in Washington, DC. Washington hosted the first such meeting of heads of states and government in 2010, followed by summits in Seoul (2012) and the Hague (2014). Though the NSS process is about to end, the struggle to prevent nuclear terrorism is not, and at present there is no vehicle with which to carry these efforts forward in a concerted manner. The NSS process has led to significant achievements in securing nuclear materials worldwide, but much more remains to be done.

The world is a safer place thanks to the effective implementation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). The convention, which was opened for signature in 1972, prohibits the development, production, acquisition, and storage of biological weapons. While chemical weapons are being used in Syria and it is uncertain whether the Iran nuclear agreement will continue to block Tehran’s path to the nuclear bomb, all seems quiet on the biological weapons front.

Although overall health has improved in many countries, health care today is still inadequate, unevenly distributed, and expensive, particularly in the world’s poorest nations. This is catastrophic for those who do not have access to essential medicines and treatment and can pose considerable development risks.

The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS) will take place April 19–21, 2016, at the United Nations headquarters in New York. UNGASS 2016 is being convened by Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala—three countries that have suffered the costs of the “war on drugs” and have expressed their discontent with the prohibitionist approach to drug control. The previous UN special session on illicit drugs in 1998 was characterized by a strong prohibitionist approach, which considered illicit drugs as the origin of numerous social and economic problems.