Maritime Southeast Asia, the area circumscribed by the Malaysian peninsula, the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines, is vital to US strategic concerns for two primary reasons. First, this region includes the South China Sea where American and Chinese ambitions may be heading toward direct conflict as China continues to press forward with its agenda of extending its reach. Second, the region is of crucial importance for world shipping routes that are vulnerable to potential disruption due to the geography of the narrow passages at the Sunda Strait (between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra) and the Strait of Malacca (between Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula). It is important that these ocean ways remain open to unencumbered passage and free trade, subject to the rule of law, and it is crucial that the US, as guarantor of the free seas, retain its capacity to project its power in the region and avoid being shut out by a competing power.

The article introduces the All Minorities at Risk (AMAR) data, a sample of socially recognized and salient ethnic groups. Fully coded for the forty core Minorities at Risk variables, this AMAR sample provides researchers with data for empirical analysis free from the selection issues known in the study of ethnic politics to date. We describe the distinct selection issues motivating the coding of the data with an emphasis on underexplored selection issues arising with truncation of ethnic group data, especially when moving between levels of data. We then describe our sampling technique and the resulting coded data. Next, we suggest some directions for the future study of ethnicity and conflict using our bias-corrected data. Our preliminary correlations suggest selection bias may have distorted our understanding about both group and country correlates of ethnic violence.

Some see the popular vote in the UK to withdraw from the European Union as a major blow that diminishes the future of Europe. But Brexit is a distraction from the core threat to Europe: policy driven by business strategy in response to a looming demographic crisis.

Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner’s study of the European refugee crisis shows broad support across Europe for the proportional allocation of asylum seekers.

On January 27, true to his campaign promise to suspend Muslim immigration, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting all immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and indefinitely barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States. By doing so, the Trump administration has taken a definite stance on what it holds as the threat posed by immigrants and refugees to U.S. security. As we argued in April 2016, however, democracies like the United States “are not opening their doors to terrorism when they let in Muslim immigrants.”

By most measures, the West ought to declare victory in the process of globalization. Political institutions that developed in the West—representative government, liberal democracy, the rule of law, and the core catalog of rights—have become normative throughout the world. While few societies always meet all these expectations, and some fail miserably, the standards by which political systems anywhere are measured are products of western historical developments.