Regional Studies 
Recommended
Dismantling Al Qaeda
"Because we use the shorthand phrase 'war on terrorism' to describe the U.S. response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it is easy to believe that this war-like all previous wars-can be won simply by killing the enemy, wearing them down until they are broken and capitulate. Given that suicide terrorists are, by definition, undeterrable, it seems that we have no choice but to kill them before they kill us. But this is a different kind of war that requires a different paradigm."
Preliminary Conclusions From The War In Georgia
By Andrei Illarionov: "It is already possible to outline some theses related to the conflict between Russia and Georgia."
Poverty and Economy in Mugabe's Zimbabwe
A new, deeper poverty has gripped Zimbabwe and the formal economy has utterly been destroyed under the rein of Robert Mugabe. Rejoice Ngwenya, head of the Zimbabwean Coalition for Market and Liberal Solutions, discusses the realities of life in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Seeing China Whole
By Steve Chapman: "Anyone contemplating the thuggish repression still prevalent under the Beijing government may find that hard to imagine. But if the last 30 years have taught us anything, it is not to underestimate China's capacity for positive change."
Swedish Myths and Realities
"Johan Norberg, author of In Defense of Global Capitalism, sits down with reason.tv's Michael C. Moynihan to sort out the myths of the Sweden's welfare state, health services, tax rates, and its status as the 'most successful society the world has ever known.'"
FARC Politics, FARConomics
By Ibsen Martinez: "Shortly after noon, on Wednesday, I finally sat down to write my monthly column when I received news that 15 hostages, including three U.S. defence contractors, held for years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the infamous drug-trafficking guerrilla, branded a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union, had been rescued by a successful army operation. Most eminent among the hostages was the 46-year-old former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt."
Munger on the Political Economy of Public Transportation
"Mike Munger and Russ Roberts deliver one of the best podcasts ever. Munger describes the way in which moving from a private bus system to a public system in Santiago Chile made essentially everyone in the city worse off. The puzzle that Roberts keeps pushing Munger to resolve is why the political incentives do not work to abolish the public system and revert to a private system." - Bryan Caplan
A Matter of Life and Death
By Karol Boudreaux: "By some estimates South Africa has taken in over three million illegal immigrants in the past year - not just people in search of better jobs, but also Zimbabweans fleeing Robert Mugabe's reign. The unfortunate byproduct of this influx of immigrants is a longstanding and mostly dormant xenophobia that has reared its head. "
From Breadbasket to Basket Case
By Mary Anastasia O'Grady: "As the presidential campaign drones on, Barack Obama and the Democrats are fleshing out the promise of "change" with some specific, big-government policy proposals. Many are familiar, perhaps because they already have been tried – in Argentina."
Government, War, and Libertarianism
By Justin Logan: "Why has the war—and post-9/11 foreign policy generally—been so controversial for libertarians? And now, more than six years after 9/11 and more than five years into the war in Iraq, what can libertarian insights tell us about how we got here and what to do next?"
McCain Talking Too Tough on Russia, China
By Malou Innocent: "There is no question that China and Russia have objectionable policies. China's deplorable human-rights record and Russia's authoritarian structure leave much to be desired. But McCain's policy prescriptions will prevent the U.S. from working with them in areas of common interest, and preclude cooperation in meeting shared threats."
The Global Food Crisis : Political Factors
AfricanLiberty.org produced this short video about the political factors behind the Global food crisis.
Kidneys for Sale: Iranian Organ Donation
By Kerry Howley: "'What can Iran teach us about good governance?' is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need."
Milton Friedman Prize Selection Committee Member Arrested
The Ugandan government has arrested Andrew Mwenda, a member of the 2008 International Selection Committee for the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, along with his fellow journalists Odobo Bichachi and John Njoroge. Andrew Mwenda is a brave journalist who tells it like he sees it. He is well known for standing up for the rights of others; his involvement in the Milton Friedman Prize is only one element of his long commitment to human rights.
Venezuelan Student Movement Leader Awarded $500,000 Milton Friedman Liberty Prize
Yon Goicoechea, leader of the pro-democracy student movement in Venezuela, has been awarded the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Under Goicoechea's leadership, the student movement organized mass opposition to the erosion of human and civil rights in Venezuela and played the key role in defeating Hugo Chávez's bid for a constitutional reform that would have turned the country into a dictatorship.
The Biofuel Brew Ha-Ha
By Peter Suderman: Reason contributor Peter Suderman writes that the biofuels craze is boosting the price of beer, because farmers are shifting away from barley to biofuel crops made more lucrative by mandates and subsidies.
Coyne on Exporting Democracy after War
"Christopher Coyne of West Virginia University and George Mason University's Mercatus Center talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his book, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy. They talk about the successes and failures of America's attempts to export democracy after a war."
Don't 'Pull an Iraq' in Afghanistan
By Benjamin H. Friedman: "This week at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romainia, American officials asked Europeans to send more troops to the war in Afghanistan. Leaders in both the Democratic and Republican Parties agree that higher troop levels and a deeper commitment to state-building are the path to victory in Afghanistan. But both sides are wrong, and Iraq shows why."
The Long Fall of Robert G. Mugabe
By Marian L. Tupy: "Mugabe is in this position primarily because he has turned Zimbabwe into one of the world's poorest countries--the result of his worsening political repression, frontal attack on the independence of the judiciary, confiscation of property, and evisceration of the once-thriving private sector. With health, education, and incomes in freefall, Zimbabweans are ready for change."
Who Says the Surge Is Working?
By Terry Michael: "When it comes Iraq, neoconservative true believers have been allowed to set the bar of "success" below ground level. In this, they're aided by media siding with power instead of challenging it, all while congressional Democrats cower in their cloak rooms."
Peace Won't Come to Zimbabwe
By Marian L. Tupy and David Coltart: "The case against Mr. Mugabe and the ZANU-PF for crimes against humanity would be compelling. They have turned one of Africa's most prosperous and relatively free nations into an Orwellian nightmare. Since 1994, the average life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen to 34 from 57 for women and to 37 from 54 for men. Some 3,500 Zimbabweans die every week from the combined effects of HIV/AIDS, poverty and malnutrition."
Health, Africa’s struggle
By Thompson Ayodele: "Foreign aid in the form of hard currency is flowing in unprecedented quantities into the ministries of health of many African countries.
"But despite this generosity things are not improving: medical staff are demoralised, access to essential medicines remains low and corruption remains a serious problem."
Ohio Needs More Foreign Trade
By Daniel T. Griswold: "But tinkering with a 14-year-old trade agreement [NAFTA] will not bring an industrial renaissance to Youngstown and other Rust Belt cites. The relative decline of those regions dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the American economy began a transition from heavy industry toward an information-based service economy."
NATO's West Bank Nightmare
By Ted Galen Carpenter: "Washington is sending up a trial balloon about stationing NATO troops as peacekeepers on the West Bank. The Jerusalem Post reports that former NATO supreme commander General James Jones, now the Bush administration's special envoy to the Middle East, is floating the idea to various European countries.
"It is a spectacularly bad idea."
Letter to Our European Friends
By P.J. O'Rourke: "America is in the midst of an all-important electoral campaign. But, talking to Europeans, I've discovered that there is puzzlement and misinformation on your continent about what's happening on ours. Europeans feel an understandable confusion when faced with a political system consisting of two houses of Congress and a White House, and nobody is home in any of them."
Paths to Property
By Karol Boudreaux and Paul Aligica: "The study finds that the “easy option” of agencies entering less-developed countries and using blueprints to try to recreate institutions in Africa that work effectively in the West often fails miserably. Indeed, the failures of such approaches can give the whole privatisation and property rights process, vital for sustainable economic growth, a bad name."
Iraqi Allies Deserve Better than Red Tape
By Malou Innocent: "Many Iraqis, desperate to earn decent wages and bring stability to their country, support American forces by working as Arabic interpreters. "Terps" are paid a modest sum, and they enable soldiers to communicate with Iraqi civilians and track down insurgents. But working with the Americans can come at a high cost."
Enabling The Kremlin
By Andrei Illarionov: "For the past few months, the official Russian media have shown little warmth for the Bush administration. Taking their cue from the Kremlin, the Russian press has been happy to denounce Washington when it criticized, even very cautiously, authoritarian actions. But Washington's own cold shoulder turned into a warm embrace this week when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice openly endorsed President Vladimir Putin's anointed successor, Dmitry Medvedev, and effectively undercut her past statements urging Russia to adopt a more democratic course and to hold truly competitive elections."
Cato Launches Innovative Web-based Freedom Programs for World Audience
"The Cato Institute believes that the promotion of the classical liberal ideals of liberty, free markets and peace is an essential effort. As a result, on December 12, Cato launched six innovative foreign-language web-based programs. These new programs will publish in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Persian, Kurdish, and on the continent of Africa in English and Swahili. They join our other three highly-successful programs in Spanish, Arabic and Russian."
Mugabe's Apologists
By Marian Tupy: "Robert Mugabe's participation in the European Union-Africa summit in Lisbon over the weekend was a triumph of Zimbabwean diplomacy. Both African and EU leaders must share the blame for this farce. Zimbabwe's foreign ministry managed to portray the octogenarian dictator, who has presided over widespread violations of human rights and an astonishing economic collapse, as the victim of a Western conspiracy."
A Bill of Rights Europe Did Not Need
By Anthony de Jasay: "Even if it were less woolly and silly, the Charter of Fundamental Rights could hardly become a force for good."
Economics in Many Lessons: A Better Brew for Rwanda
By Donald J. & Karol C. Boudreaux: "In some parts of the long-suffering continent, good things are happening and too few people, in Africa and elsewhere, know about them."
Free Kareem!
Dr. Tom G. Palmer, Cato's Vice President for International Programs, speaks out against the imprisonment of a young Egyptian blogger. November 9th marks the one year anniversary of Kareem's incarceration. For more information about the global effort to free Kareem, and about rallies in your area, visit www.freekareem.org .
The Lie About Where Che Lies
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa: "It is not surprising, of course, that Che Guevara's remains are a myth. Everything about this modern saint is a myth -- his love of justice, his romantic disposition, his goodness."
Let Them Eat Laptops
By Daniel R. Ballon: "The '$100 laptop,' which actually costs $188, can only be purchased at a minimum quantity of 250,000. OLPC targets countries like Nigeria, where one out of three children suffer from malnutrition. There a $50 million minimum investment could instead be used to feed more than a million children for an entire year."
Understanding Insurgency
Malou Innocent, a Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute, describes the problematic nature of insurgency and argues that fighting them is tricky, and should only be undertaken when vital national interests are at stake. The insurgency in Iraq, she argues, does not qualify.
What Can the United States Learn from the Nordic Model?
By Daniel J. Mitchell: "Conservative critics correctly condemn the large welfare states, but often overlook the positive results generated by laissez-faire policies in other areas. Liberals, meanwhile, exaggerate the economic performance of Nordic nations in an effort to justify welfare-state policies, while failing to acknowledge the role of freemarket policies in other areas."
History of Religion
How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? This map gives you a brief history of the world's most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!
What Do We Really Know About the Spread of AIDS?
By Emily Oster. Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa -- and comes up with a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong. We look for root causes such as poverty and poor health care -- but we also need to factor in, say, the price of coffee, and the routes of long-haul truckers. In short, there is a lot we don't know; and our assumptions about what we do know may keep us from finding the best way to stop the disease.
Let's Take a New Look at African Aid
By Andrew Mwenda: "In this provocative talk, journalist Andrew Mwenda asks us to reframe the "African question" -- to look beyond the media's stories of poverty, civil war and helplessness and see the opportunities for creating wealth and happiness throughout the continent. Most important, he says, the solution to Africa's problems is not more aid."
Stockholm Syndrome
By Michael C. Moynihan: "Western Europe's most famously socialist country is slowly plodding toward free-market reforms."
A Dangerous Position on Darfur
By Ted Galen Carpenter and Christopher Preble: "The suffering in Darfur cries out for action, but it is not clear that it calls for military action, much less that U.S. troops should lead the effort. There are dozens of countries that have far greater tangible interests at stake in Darfur than does America, and many of these countries also possess the capacity to deploy forces there."
Getting Kareem Freed
By Tom G. Palmer: "Four years in prison for blogging: three of them for inciting 'hatred of Islam' and one for 'insulting the president.' That's the sentence handed down by an Egyptian judge to a young Egyptian blogger, Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman, generally known in the blogosphere as 'Kareem.'"
China's Legacy: The Thoughts of Lao Tzu
By James Dorn: "China's present leaders are calling for a "harmonious society", but this is impossible without widespread freedom and a rule of law that limits the power of government to the protection of people and property. "
Economic Freedom Breeds Prosperity
By James Dorn: "The key lesson from Hong Kong's "small government, big market" model of development is that economic freedom is the best path toward sustainable development, understood as increasing the range of choices open to people. "
Petraeus, the Surge & History
"Many have repeated the claim that Iraq is Vietnam all over again. History never repeats itself exactly, so no example is perfect. But the American surge in Iraq bears a striking and little-noted resemblance to the Germans' ill-fated offensive in the last year of World War I."
Why Does Latin America Fail?
By Mario Vargas Llosa: "Institutions cannot flourish in a country if the people don’t believe in them—if, on the contrary, people have a fundamental distrust of their institutions and see in them not a guarantee of security, or of justice, but precisely the opposite."
Private Education is Good for the Poor
by James Tooley and Pauline Dixon: "Our findings from a two-year in-depth study in India, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya suggest that these conclusions are unwarranted. Private schools, we argue, can play—indeed, already are playing—an important, if unsung, role in reaching the poor and satisfying their educational needs."
Underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of the private sector and political elites
In this paper, Moeletsi Mbeki explains how economic growth in Africa, as in the rest of the world, depends on a vibrant private sector. Entrepreneurs in Africa, however, face daunting constraints. They are prevented from creating wealth by predatory political elites that control the state. African political elites use marketing boards and taxation to divert agricultural savings to finance their own consumption and to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the state. Peasants, who constitute the core of the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa, are the biggest losers.In order for Africa to prosper, peasants need to become the real owners of their primary asset — land — over which they currently have no property rights.
Infidel: My Journey from Somalia to the West
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "I am sad that women who have inherited this social order, this civilization called the West, with its values of human rights, curiosity, trust, and integrity, might stand by and watch its decline."
Property Rights on Imperial China's Frontiers
By Peter C. Perdue: By looking at how China's Qing dynasty handled several cases of land settlement in the eighteenth century, Peter C. Perdue shows that the state did respect private property rights, but it intervened to change rights to land for political and economic purposes.
Community-Run Fisheries: Avoiding the "Tragedy of the Commons"
By Donald R. Leal: "Community-Run Fisheries: Avoiding the "Tragedy of the Commons" presents case after case of communities that have effectively protected their fishing territories and preserved fish for the future."