Understanding politics across borders and divides
Last Updated: September 2026 Overview Every country that holds elections has to answer the same handful of questions: who may vote, whether they must, how a vote becomes a seat, who draws the lines, and how the count is verified. The answers vary more than most voters realize. More than 130 countries elect their lower … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview The Middle East is building solar capacity at speed with money earned from selling hydrocarbons, which is the central fact and the central ambiguity. Saudi Arabia added roughly 7.8 GW of solar in 2025 alone, more than most European countries manage, and the United Arab Emirates has built some of … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview The African renewable energy debate is organized around electricity access, not around decarbonization, and importing the framing used in Europe or North America produces a misreading of almost every policy dispute on the continent. Roughly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity connection at all, and Africa’s contribution … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Three European countries have legalized adult cannabis use since 2021, and none of them created a shop you can buy it from. Malta, Germany and Czechia all permit possession and home cultivation, and all route supply through non-profit associations or personal growing rather than retail. That design is not a … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Asia contains the widest legal range on this issue of any world region. Thailand’s marriage equality law took effect on 23 January 2025, making it the third jurisdiction in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage after Taiwan and Nepal. Brunei retains Sharia provisions prescribing death by stoning, and Afghanistan under Taliban … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Africa is moving in two directions at once on this issue, and any account that describes only one of them is incomplete. Roughly 32 of 54 African states criminalize consensual same-sex conduct, and several have tightened their laws since 2023, with Uganda adding capital and life sentences and Ghana passing … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Europe is the only region in the world where an international body can withhold large sums of money from a member state over how it appoints judges, and the past decade has been a test of whether that works. The European Union suspended around 19 billion euros in funding to … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Asian migration policy is built around employment, not protection. Most of the region’s major destination countries have never signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, so there is often no legal category for a person fleeing persecution at all. What exists instead is a dense architecture of temporary work permits tied to … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Migration in the Americas is organized around one displacement event and a set of national responses to it. Roughly 7.9 million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015, and about 6.9 million of them live elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, not in North America. That distribution is the … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Latin America has the world’s highest firearm homicide rates and some of its strictest gun laws, and those two facts sit together because the guns doing the killing are mostly illegal. Firearms are involved in roughly 70 percent of homicides in Latin America and the Caribbean, against a global average … Read more