In the Issue

• India and the Changing Global Order
• India: Analysis, Articles, Audio, Video, & More
• National Elections Reveal Challenges, Yet India Gains Stability
• Dollars and Despots
• Post-Prague Progress

Features

India and the Changing Global Order. Across politics, economics, culture, military strength, and more, a new group of countries has growing influence over the future of the world. India is one of nine countries the Stanley Foundation sees shaping the global scene. Learn more about the seeming success and enormous challenges India faces as it emerges on the world stage. This article is part of a series related to the Stanley Foundation effort "Rising Powers: The New Global Reality." 

India: Analysis, Articles, Audio, Video, & More. The world's largest democracy is a nuclear-armed, IT-driven superpower vying for a new place on the world stage. But it also faces enormous challenges like the disparity between its fabulous wealth and its devastating poverty that threatens to destabilize the entire nation. What does this mean for India? For the United States? For the world? The Stanley Foundation has a wealth of resources that explore these important questions.

National Elections Reveal Challenges, Yet India Gains Stability. The 2009 national elections in India were the largest democratic voting event in the world to date. While the sheer scale of India's elections is mind-boggling, they also thrust India's most troubling internal issues to the forefront. Stanley Foundation program associate Christina MacGillivray examines the tough challenges India faces beyond the elections, many of which will have to be dealt with by its newly elected parliamentarians.

Beyond the Headlines

Dollars and Despots. Parade magazine recently published its list of the world's 10 worst dictators. Despite chilly diplomatic relationships with most, we provide humanitarian, economic, and security assistance to many of these countries. Washington gave Burma $74 million in humanitarian assistance in April to help with rebuilding after Cyclone Nargis. Just this month Congress approved a spending package that included $151 million in economic and security aid to four east African countries including Sudan and Zimbabwe. Nearly $100 million in US economic aid to North Korea has been put on hold until they agree to continue the six-party nuclear disarmament talks. With many suffering in these countries, providing aid is believed by some to be the right thing to do. Others argue that aid to despots "sustains the status quo and imposes significant costs on ordinary citizens." Meanwhile, the US isn't the only country offering aid to questionable regimes. 

Post-Prague Progress. Last month, President Barack Obama gave a groundbreaking speech in Prague committing the US to a nuclear weapons-free world. In doing so, he addressed the grave threat posed by nuclear weapons and the steps he plans to take to curb those dangers. Specific steps toward achieving this goal were outlined, including negotiating a new treaty with Russia by year's end, "immediately and aggressively" pursuing ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), ending the production of fissile materials that can be used in nuclear weapons, and securing all vulnerable nuclear material worldwide within four years. Veronica Tessler, program associate at the Stanley Foundation, looks at what steps the Obama administration has taken to fulfill the goals he laid out in Prague.