COVID-19, Chat-GPT and International Development Assistance
The COVID-19 pandemic created an incredibly challenging situation in the international development space. On the one hand, developing countries were going through an extraordinary crisis, which increased the global demand for international development assistance. On the other hand, COVID-19 slowed down the economies of the donor countries, which faced new socio-economic challenges at home. This…
Blockchain solution to advance conscious consumerism
A couple of hundred years ago, an average person’s food source radius was around 10 miles. Today our food basket is a product of a complex web of farmers, freighters, trailers, retailers, and suppliers, that stretches into thousands of miles long supply chains. In the last few years, many ideas have emerged about how to…
Podcast | Data & Truth with danah boyd
The topic of this episode is data and truth. There is a popular saying that we live in a data driven world? But where is data driving us? According to some estimates the amount of data generated over the next 3 years will be more than the amount of data created over the past 30…
Can AI be creative?
More than 2000 years ago, Plato made several interesting references to the notion of creativity, in the Socratic dialogues. For example, in Meno, Socrates claims that “when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired” by the Muses”. In another dialogue, Socrates contemplates the…
Privacy Regulations: EU’s GDPR vs China’s PIPL
Many countries have followed the example of the EU and adopted privacy legislation similar to GDPR, which some observers call another “Brussels effect.” In August 2021, the National People’s Congress of China adopted the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), which entered into force November 1, 2021. Essentially, PIPL is quite similar to the GDPR and…
Russian Expectations for Post-Sanctions Iran
Published by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Joint support of Basher al-Assad’s regime has highlighted Moscow and Tehran’s developing political alliance. In contrast, the level of economic cooperation between the two states has historically been very modest: 2014 trade between the two countries amounted to $1.68 billion and was just 0.2% of all…
Will Iran Keep Its Promises?
Published on the The Diplomat magazine. When the P5+1 struck a deal with Iran on its nuclear program in July 2015, general expectations were that the sanctions could be lifted as early as spring 2016. Within the agreed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iranian Foreign Ministry signed several obligations that needed time for…
Where Does the Caspian Sea Figure in Russia’s Strategic Calculus?
Published on Eurasianet.org. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced in early October that Russian warships in the Caspian Sea launched 26 missiles against targets in Syria. The revelation caught Western analysts off guard, and demonstrated that the Kremlin has developed in recent years a significantly enhanced ability to project force.
Data explains: who’s to blame for the Syrian Crisis?
The unfolding crisis in Syria is a subject of intense scrutiny in the global media landscape, yet the root causes remain poorly understood by the public. The narrative propagated by the Assad regime and its allies, which accuses vaguely defined Western forces, distracts from the more substantive issues at play. A detailed examination of three…
NATO Needs an Emergency Council for Timely Crisis Management
Published on the NATO Source blog of the Atlantic Council. At the 2014 NATO Summit and as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the leaders of the Alliance agreed on a Readiness Action Plan (RAP) to improve NATO’s ability to deal with immediate security threats. The RAP includes a Very High Readiness Joint…
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