Category Archive: World
The World archive is the main body of reporting on this site: international affairs covered on the assumption that a reader wants to understand a country's situation rather than merely be told what happened in it this week.
What gets covered, and why
Foreign coverage in most outlets is allocated by drama. A war, a coup or a disaster produces saturation reporting; the two years in which the conditions for it accumulated produce nothing. The result is an audience that meets every crisis as a surprise.
The alternative is to follow structural stories at their own pace: constitutional transitions, resource disputes, border regimes, the slow reorganisation of trade. None of these generate a daily lead. All of them determine what the eventual headline will be.
Regions in this archive
Central Asia and the post-Soviet space. The densest coverage here, because the region combines constitutional experimentation, unresolved ethnic geography and the overlapping interests of three major powers in a small space. Kyrgyzstan in 2010 is the clearest case available: a revolution in April, ethnic violence in June, a constitutional referendum at the end of June and a new head of state in July. See Eurasian Chessboard: Kyrgyzstan and the cost of June's riots.
Europe and Russia. Where the archive follows accident investigation, sovereignty disputes and the machinery of intergovernmental process. See Polish Plane Crash: Unanswered Questions and Canada Intercepts Two Russian Bombers.
China. Covered primarily through law and commerce rather than diplomacy, because that is where the practical consequences for outsiders are decided. See Chinese Court Sentences US Geologist to 8 Years.
India. Followed as an economy under two simultaneous pressures — subsidy reform and food inflation — and as a technology producer designing for its own market rather than importing. See the July general strike and India Unveils $35 Computer.
The Americas and the Arctic. Environmental and resource stories that cross borders by their nature: the Gulf spill capping effort and Argentina's killing freeze.
How we handle contested reporting
International stories arrive pre-interpreted. A casualty figure, a damage estimate or an accident finding is usually produced by a party with an interest in the number. The practice here is to attribute every figure to whoever produced it, state the range where sources disagree, and distinguish a preliminary estimate from a settled one — an emergencies ministry's first damage figure and an audited reconstruction cost are different objects and should not be quoted as if they were the same.
Where an international body maintains an independent record, we link to it: the OSCE for European security and election observation, UN OCHA for humanitarian data, and the International Crisis Group for conflict analysis.
Browse
By month: July 2010, August 2010. By subject: Sanctions, Space. Or return to the front page.
The difficulty with foreign coverage
International reporting has a structural problem that no amount of good intent solves. A reader forms an impression of a country from a handful of stories, and those stories are selected for how unusual they are. The country that is stable, boring and improving generates nothing; the country in crisis generates saturation. Over years, the aggregate impression a reader holds is systematically distorted by the selection rule rather than by any individual article being wrong.
The partial remedy applied here is to follow a small number of places over time rather than covering many places once. A reader who has followed Kyrgyzstan through a revolution, an episode of ethnic violence, a referendum and an inauguration has something closer to a model of the country. A reader who has seen only the violence has an impression that will not survive contact with anyone who lives there.
On the language of conflict reporting
Word choice in coverage of ethnic violence is not decoration; it is a set of claims. "Clashes" implies symmetry between participants. "Pogrom" implies organisation and a direction of attack. "Unrest" implies spontaneity. Each may be accurate for a given episode and each is a substantive assertion about causation.
The practice here is to use the most specific term the evidence supports, attribute contested characterisations to whoever is making them, and say plainly when the evidence does not yet distinguish between them.