By Dhaval Desai
Urbanisation in Asia and Africa will intensify pressure on land and infrastructure amidst worsening climate hazards and the growing need to curb carbon emissions. The defining innovation of this urban century will therefore be institutional: building the authority, fiscal capacity, and governing systems that cities need to adapt before unsustainable urban form and inequality become entrenched.
By Soumya Bhowmick
Countries that invest in portable, industry-relevant skills will be better placed to build domestic capabilities and to engage global labor markets on more equal terms, whichever way the politics of migration turns.
By Caroline Arkalji and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury
By Taruka Srivastav
For American policymakers, a sports partnership with India is an opportunity to expand commercial engagement, strengthen educational partnerships, advance sports governance, and deepen people-to-people ties with one of the world’s fastest-growing sporting markets.
By Dhaval Desai
Urbanisation in Asia and Africa will intensify pressure on land and infrastructure amidst worsening climate hazards and the growing need to curb carbon emissions. The defining innovation of this urban century will therefore be institutional: building the authority, fiscal capacity, and governing systems that cities need to adapt before unsustainable urban form and inequality become entrenched.
By Andre Nicola and Caroline Arkalji
As political campaigns increasingly depend on digital platforms to reach voters, private technology companies have gained considerable influence over how political information is distributed. At the same time, electoral authorities often lack the tools to investigate their decisions.
By Kabir Taneja and Siddharth Yadav
Relying on AI models to identify and refuse to act on dangerous prompts — a measure that largely worked in the Houthis’ case — is not sufficient protection. AI labs now have to work against elaborate campaigns by resourceful and persistent groups that are actively bypassing safeguards.
By Dhruva Jaishankar and Ammar Nainar
Despite a political thaw with China, India will double-down on efforts to indigenize its own industrial capabilities in certain sectors, while seeking new markets for exports, new defense and technology partners, and new and diverse sources for raw materials, investment, and intermediary goods.
By Medha Prasanna
As countries race to connect renewable generation, expand transmission, and meet surging demand from data centers, electricity grids are being built at unprecedented speeds. Building quantum-safe cryptography while equipment is being designed and procured is far easier than retrofitting it later.
By Anit Mukherjee
In the 20 years since BRICS was formed as a loose agglomeration of developing countries, the New Delhi Summit demonstrated that its value lay in providing a space for some overlapping approaches to economic management and development. The challenge is one of coordination, reconciling national priorities with the wider objectives of balanced trade, efficient cross-border payments, and effective development finance.
By Marta Bengoa
Tariffs can be withdrawn by proclamation as quickly as they were imposed, and the September 8 measures may well be traded away in the review that begins next summer. The conclusion Canada has reached about the reliability of its largest customer will take considerably longer to reverse.
By Shailesh Mishra and Uma Vatsa
What quantum computing could change, if it works, is the ceiling on what the decades after that can build, because the limits on ammonia, energy storage, and electricity transmission are set by chemistry we cannot currently calculate. Those limits are already known. Describing them precisely enough to hand to a machine is work that can start now.
By Jeffrey D. Bean
While the Pax Silica initiative has been criticized for being non-binding, unfocused, U.S.-centric, and inconsistent in its membership, it is nonetheless the best-placed plurilateral initiative to advance what has been a bipartisan consensus in the United States on U.S. technological leadership.
Observer Research Foundation America, 1100 17th St. NW, Suite 501, Washington DC 20036 USA
