The new secretary-general of the United Nations should make genocide prevention a centerpiece of his reform agenda, concludes a new Council Special Report. "Ban Ki-moon should take the General Assembly's endorsement of the responsibility to protect as a mandate and mission statement for the UN and build a reform program that is designed to implement it."

Micah Zenko and Rebecca R. Friedman argue, "... a fully funded foreign assistance budget is essential to prevent the political instability and violent conflict that harms American security."

Mohamad Bazzi says that without a strong central state that can defend itself, Hizbollah remains the most powerful force in Lebanon.

Micah Zenko asks, "What if Americans were the ones without nuclear weapons, and a well-stocked Iran was insisting that the United States couldn't have such weapons?"

To ensure global stability, Richard N. Haass warns, "... we should be careful not to learn the wrong lesson and rule out helping weak states."

Although Lebanon has a new U.S.-backed Prime Minister, Hezbollah remains the dominant military and political force and it holds the key to both domestic and external stability, writes Mohamad Bazzi.

CFR scholars provide policy options for preventing a major crisis in the territories immediately adjacent to China: North Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Central Asia.

This Center for Preventive Action Working Paper surveys existing approaches to assessing state fragility and failure within the context of development, conflict, and governance. It examines the risk factors that have been identified through systematic inquiry and research with the goal of improving the prospects for successful conflict prevention and management, and argues that the goal of "early warning" relating to state fragility and failure should be more to inform and temper our expectations for policy response than to trigger costly and risky interventions.

This report argues that Angola deserves priority attention in the formulation of U.S. foreign, national security, and economic policies, particularly in the design of policy toward Africa. This report is also available in Portuguese.