Table of contents for July 2018 in Foreign Policy

Christina Larson is an award-winning foreign correspondent and science journalist based in Beijing and a former FOREIGN POLICY editor. She has reported from nearly a dozen countries in Asia. Her features have appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Science, Scientific American, the Atlantic, and other publications. In 2016, she won the Overseas Press Club of America’s Morton Frank Award for international magazine writing. Alexander Zaitchik has written for the Nation, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the New York Times, and the Guardian. He is the author of The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America and currently divides his time between New Orleans and the western Amazon. Molly Kinder is a senior advisor on work, workers, and technology at New America; a…

MASIH ALINEJAD HASN’T LIVED IN IRAN FOR A DECADE. But that hasn’t stopped her from becoming the driving force behind the largest, most sustained civil disobedience movement that the country has seen in recent years. Her focus is the mandatory headscarf, which Iranian women have been obligated to wear since the 1979 revolution. Her followers inside Iran number in the thousands. When Alinejad’s campaign against the compulsory hijab began in 2014, women who joined her first posted pictures of themselves on social media with their heads uncovered but their faces turned away from the camera. Now some even speak directly to the camera in videos that show them walking, unveiled, on Iranian streets or pushing back against the morality police. Men have begun joining as well, voicing their support or…

IN THE SPRING OF 1959, at a secretive meeting at a yacht club in Cairo, Venezuela’s then-minister of mines and hydrocarbons, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, hatched a plan to give big oil-producing countries more control over their black gold—and a greater share of the wealth it promised to create. A year later, his scheme would be formally christened the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. Venezuela, which sits atop what are arguably the biggest petroleum reserves in the world, was the only non-Middle Eastern country to be included—a testament to its importance to the global oil business. Venezuela was considered rich in the early 1960s: It produced more than 10 percent of the world’s crude and had a per capita GDP many times bigger than that of its…

As a nation of creative people that find solutions to any problem, it is no surprise that Mexico is home to numerous innovative companies. This fact received international recognition in April, when it acted as partner country at Hannover Messe, the world’s leading exhibition for cutting-edge technology. Many of Mexico’s new generation of companies target global problems, such as energy generation, in the case of Petrobal. Limiting climate change’s impact is the focus of ArmorTech, a company of civil engineers that has created a system to limit erosion caused by rivers and prevent overflowing. “The great advantage of our articulated concrete floor is that it acts as a flexible mesh, which adapts to changes in the river and sustains the lateral walls without collapsing,” explains Hugo Pinedo Vargas, CEO of…

With ambition and success hardwired into its DNA, BMCE Bank of Africa (BBOA) is an industry titan and pioneer blazing a trail across the region’s banking and financial services sectors. Now the second largest banking group in Africa by geographical coverage, and boasting operations in 20 countries, BBOA covers four of the continent’s five main economic regions. Since privatisation, BBOA has consolidated its position as an international banking institution through the adoption of a universal banking model that has served as a sturdy platform for growth. In addition, a diversification strategy has expanded the SME customer segment and helped BBOA consolidate its position in the corporate arena thanks to its recognised expertise and valuable experience in project finance. Such knowledge will certainly be called on for current, and future, infrastructure…

Morocco’s incredible industrial revolution over the past decade has been a sight to behold, with some of the world’s largest companies battling to secure prime real estate for state-of-the-art factories, support infrastructure, research facilities, and offices. Billions of dollars of FDI have-flooded into sectors such as aeronautics, automobile production — Renault Nissan makes around 1,000 cars daily — and manufacturing operations — where train giant Bombardier is investing heavily — and creating thousands of jobs, so generating huge revenues for the government. Impressive progress has also been recorded in industrial areas like agri-food, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and various free zones, making the industrial sector Morocco’s real growth engine. Between 2017 and 2020, more than 300,000 new industry jobs will be formed. “Morocco is no longer a source of cheap labor, but…

IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, it has felt like every big election has focused on jobs and the threats they (supposedly) face: from trade, from immigrants, and, most accurately, from technology. No wonder. Until recently, the forecasts were almost unanimously grim: The robots were coming, we were told, and they’d soon make us humans redundant. In the summer of 2015, the Atlantic captured the panic with a cover story titled “A World Without Work,” which warned that the moment when machines make workers obsolete “may finally be arriving.” Then, on March 18 of this year, a self-driving car hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona—and the conversation began to shift. Suddenly the fear that humans would soon be superfluous started to seem a little less likely. Around the same…

WHEN THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY POLITICAL THEORIST JUDITH SHKLAR died in 1992 at age 63, she was better known than she had ever been but still did not occupy center stage of U.S. intellectual life. Unlike the more widely celebrated older generation of postwar political theorists—Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and F.A. Hayek—who were similarly shaped by exile from European totalitarianism, she neither inspired a large school of followers nor did she comment regularly on current events. Shklar’s thought was also out of step with the mood of the years that followed her death. Her intellectual style—a skepticism that occasionally bordered on pessimism—did not find much traction in the post-Cold War years of booming prosperity, deepening international trade, and a rising confidence that a liberal, humanitarian West would improve the…

WHAT DO THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS, the eurozone debt crisis, Brexit, and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out. In Crashed, Adam Tooze presents a grand unified theory of how we woke up to a world in seemingly headlong retreat from the liberal, democratic, free-trading, ever more prosperous globalized order the West broadly promised at the end of the Cold War. The key to it all? The devastating financial crisis of 2008. “The political in ‘political economy’ demands to be taken seriously,” writes Tooze, who earlier chronicled the Nazi economy—for which he won the Wolfson History Prize—and the star-crossed emergence of the United States as the world’s economic superpower. That is to say, the global economy doesn’t run on autopilot, despite…

An indication of Mexico’s increasingly modern and diversified economy is the strength of its manufacturing, which grew by over 6% last year. Its pharmaceuticals sector, for example, is one of the most developed in Latin America. What is already the region’s second-largest pharmaceuticals market is predicted to increase 5.5% a year to 2020, when its value will be over $20 billion. “It is a growing market for the pharmaceutical sector,” confirms Juan José Aguirre Salazar, commercial director of Grupo Bruluart, a leading Mexican-owned pharmaceutical company. “In the last five years, the sector has completely changed,” he notes; “It is well regulated and the requirements to produce, market and transport drugs have strengthened. This makes it a market with a higher added value, as it complies with international quality standards.” Established…

A comprehensive energy revolution is well underway in Morocco as the government harnesses the power of nature to develop infrastructure in the wind, solar, and hydroelectric sectors. “Over the past decade, Morocco has experienced a veritable energy revolution allowing us to achieve ambitious objectives in terms of energy independence and the integration of new technologies for renewable energies,” explains Abderrahim El Hafidi, Secretary General of the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Sustainable Development. “We are building one of the largest wind farms on the continent, with a capacity of 850MW, which will allow us to produce the cheapest energy in the world. “The Moroccan energy model is becoming more attractive, and between 2017 and 2030 will mobilize over $42 billion of investment. Morocco’s rich natural resources include more than 900,000…

PR: How would you describe MEDZ? OE: It is a subsidiary of CDG Group, Morocco’s first institutional investor, that supports sectoral policies launched by public bodies. We have set up more than 20 business parks in high-potential sectors, such as automotive, aeronautics, agro-industry, offshoring and tourism, to provide quality infrastructure for firms and attract foreign investment. We have provided space to over 300 firms and about 100 multinationals, such as Bombardier, Eaton, Lear, Delphi, DELL and IBM. Today, our parks employ more than 60,000 people, meaning that MEDZ has enabled profitable foreign investments in Morocco. PR: What two projects best represent the MEDZ’s business model? OE: We are satisfied with all our achievements and tailor-made solutions. In the industrial sector, MEDZ offers equipped lands and turnkey plants in strategically located…

FROM JAPAN TO THE UNITED KINGDOM, developed countries face a two-pronged problem: aging populations and a deepening hostility toward the immigrants who could keep their aging economies growing. One country may have found the answer to both. In South Korea, a top-down campaign begun in 2005 to remake the nation’s ethnic self-image has had remarkable results. In less than a generation, most South Koreans have gone from holding a narrow, racial concept of nationality to embracing the idea that immigrants of Chinese, Nigerian, Vietnamese, or North American descent can be as Korean as anyone else. Part of what makes South Korea’s story so striking is its speed. Until the early 2000s, the country’s textbooks, immigration policies, and national imagery had placed a heavy value on the purity and unity of…

WHEN THE HISTORIAN WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, in a FOREIGN POLICY article published in early 2010, sought to criticize the Obama administration and warn it against the risks of “weakness and indecision” and “incoherence and reversals,” the essay’s headline evoked the threat of a “Carter syndrome.” The meaning was clear: a damning allusion to President Jimmy Carter’s famously weak foreign-policy record. But there was a problem with Mead’s comparison: The conventional wisdom about Carter is wrong. Far from the feckless leader he’s often portrayed as today, Carter racked up more tangible successes in just four years than most other presidents have in eight. Consider the global situation that Carter bequeathed to Ronald Reagan when he left office in January 1981. Through assertive diplomacy, the outgoing president had dramatically improved America’s global…

IN DEVELOPED NATIONS, the so-called gig economy has become a controversial and polarizing topic. The argument in favor is well known, especially for consumers: Uber has made it easier to hail a ride; TaskRabbit provides instant armies of plumbers, painters, and cleaners; Postmates delivers gourmet food to one’s door; and so on. The gig economy provides obvious benefits for workers, too: flexible hours, an efficient workday, and a giant marketplace for labor. But it also comes with numerous drawbacks. Workers in the gig economy have no job security and, in most cases, lack common workplace benefits, including pensions, life insurance, and health care. There is no natural career progression as there would be on a typical corporate ladder. Capital expenditures—such as car maintenance or purchasing plumbing tools—are the sole responsibility…

WHAT MAKES A COUNTRY A COUNTRY? And who gets to decide? Those questions are at the heart of Joshua Keating’s new book about places that are almost, but not quite, countries. Keating, a staff writer at Slate and a former Foreign Policy editor, has written a book as informative as it is readable and, yes, funny. Invisible Countries takes us to separatist, breakaway, and occupied territories—places such as Abkhazia in Georgia, Somaliland in Somalia, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Akwesasne, a Mohawk community that straddles the New York-Ontario border. Keating watches 12 teams participate in the little-known World Football Cup—an event like the World Cup but for countries that, as Keating explains, “don’t meet the threshold of statehood required for membership” of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the International Olympic…

“Many assembly plants are arriving in Mexico, companies are automating and robotizing their processes and industry is moving to 4.0,” says Luciano Diorio, Managing Director of Grupo Hi-Tec. As Mexico’s largest supplier of advanced high-performance computer numerical control machine tools, his company is facilitating this change. It has been supplying state-of-the-art equipment from leading international brands for 25 years, as well as servicing, engineering, support and training. “We offer machinery for every type of process,” states Diorio; “We have over 400 collaborators and operate in more than six countries, including Spain and Germany.” 100% focused on client service, Grupo Hi-Tec is the perfect example of a reliable Mexican partner.…

Considered the ideal example for other countries on the continent to learn from, Morocco’s banking and financial services sector benefits from a modern and stable regulatory framework that is a powerful catalyst for socioeconomic development through its considerable contribution to the financing of the economy. “Morocco has had a strong, well-managed banking sector for decades, which contributes to development. The sector is very profitable and plays in the big leagues.”Mohamed Boussaid, Minister of Economy and Finance Strong macroeconomic fundamentals have helped to eliminate shortages of liquidity, and the banking landscape is competitive with around two dozen banks actively serving companies of all sizes, and millions of individuals. Such success has certainly caught the attention of many international experts, as in late 2017, the Central Bank of Morocco (CBM) was named…

“ADM is a catalyst for trade and economic activity. We are always on the lookout for the latest traffic technologies.”Anouar Benazzouz, Director General, Autoroutes du Maroc (ADM) Morocco’s development of an efficient and streamlined logistics network did not happen overnight, but followed decades of significant public and private sector investment in modern transport infrastructure. In addition, for each mode of transport — marine, rail, road, and air — there is a public company whose mission is to develop infrastructure and related services. “Morocco’s goal is to play a key role in the development of the African continent,” outlines Abdelkader Amara, Minister of Equipment, Transport, Logistics and Water. “We have about 40 ports, including large hubs meaning we are well-positioned for global trade, both in terms of transshipment and import-export. “From…

With almost 17 million people aged under 25, Morocco has a huge pool of talent from which to satisfy its growing appetite for energetic, ambitious and skilled workers for all economic sectors. Placing the right individual with the right company is all in a day’s work for leading temporary recruitment agency Tectra. Boasting more than 800 clients, over two dozen agencies and 32,000 temporary workers, the human resources specialist has certainly come a long way in a little less than two decades. With an impressive track record for matching employees with employers, Tectra’s strong client portfolio now includes large multinational operator such as Unilever, and Delphi. “Morocco is positioning itself at the forefront of future technologies.” Hicham Boudraa Acting CEO, Moroccan Agency for the Development of Investments and Exports (AMDIE)…

One of the world’s top kitesurfing destinations, sun-soaked and windswept Dakhla attracts tens of thousands of thrill-seekers and tourists a year, and recently embarked on an ambitious strategic development plan as the region looks to establish itself as the Gateway to Africa. With an enviable strategic location and a fresh focus on economic diversification through greater activities in agriculture, fisheries, and logistics, Dakhla is a hive of activity for economic development and a powerful magnet for major international investment. “Dakhla is undergoing a complete transformation and major economic development,” says Yanja El Khattat, President of the Regional Council of Dakhla-Oued-Eddahab. “In 2015, a new model of development for the southern regions was launched involving investment of $8.3 billion. “This new model represents a key vector for the development of the…