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My family was from Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, but I studied mostly in Santiniketan, in a school in India. My earliest memories, between the ages of 3 and 6, are all of Mandalay in Burma, where my father was a visiting professor in the 1930s. I felt much at home in all these places, and the idea that you can be at home only in one place has never taken root in my mind.

That people could die as a result of stupidity or worse in public policy is quite important in my understanding about the world. The Bengal famine of 1943, which I witnessed as a child of 9, was largely the result of stupid public policy, in a year of relatively good food supply.

[I also remember] the riots that occurred in the 1940s, which were not connected with the famine, but resulted from political cultivation of divisive identities. Suddenly, people who had seen themselves as just Indians, or just Bengalis, or just human beings, redefined themselves as sharply separated Hindus and Muslims. The wave of violence passed soon enough, but left a lot of dead bodies behind.

Functioning democratic societies do not tend to have famines. With free elections and multiple parties and a free press, it is very easy to bring a government down by criticizing it for not preventing a famine. Countries with recent cases of famine—North Korea, Sudan, Somalia—do not have functioning democracies.

Undernourishment is different. You can use democracy to fight it, but it requires a lot more imagination. For famine, all you have to do is print on the newspaper front page a picture of an emaciated mother with a skin-and-bones child on her lap, and you’ve made an editorial [against bad policies]. You need to work harder for an editorial about undernourishment, [which] is not very clearly visible, not killing people immediately.

I wish I could claim some heroism in persevering with my work against adversity, but I fear I cannot, since I have got nothing but encouragement from others—my teachers, my family, my friends, my colleagues, and most importantly my students. There isn’t a story of courage there.

Amartya Sen teaches economics and philosophy at Harvard University. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998.

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Loom and doom: Russia’s gladiatorial posturing worries its neighbors.

An assertive Russia has raised fears of a new Cold War by cracking down at home and flexing its muscles abroad. But to understand those worrisome trends, forget about Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin—certainly most Russians have.

Think back instead to the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who thought that the natural human condition is a “war of all against all”; that the security of a people depends on a strong, even authoritarian, state; and that successful states are those that strike the “posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another.” That sounds a lot like the recipe Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been following for much of the last decade with his slogans about “managed democracy,” “the vertical of power,” and “the dictatorship of law,” as well as his insistence on treating neighboring states as belonging to Russia’s sphere of “privileged interests.”

Now contrast this Russian version of Hobbesianism with the alternative vision of statehood and statecraft associated with Immanuel Kant. That giant of the Enlightenment spent most of his long life (1724-1804) teaching logic and metaphysics at Albertina University in the East Prussian city of Königsberg. Kant is the secular patron saint of today’s Europe. In his political writings, he advocated—and foresaw—a perpetual peace, based on democratic rule at the national level; a “confraternity of trade” among nations (an early version of the Common Market); a federation of like-minded states (much like the European Union); and even an alliance of republics to deter and, if necessary, defeat aggressive empires (a prophecy of NATO).

In our day, the pairing of Hobbes and Kant is often shorthand for the dichotomy between “realists” and “idealists.” But Kant did not come to his vision while dreaming. He was wide awake to the realities of his own time, including the violence and disruption of the Seven Years’ War. For five of those years, East Prussia was gobbled up by the Russian Leviathan. The city fathers of Königsberg had to swear allegiance to Catherine the Great. In the markets and shops that Kant passed every day on his meditative constitutionals, trade was conducted in rubles.

That episode presaged what happened to Kant’s hometown two centuries later. As a result of an agreement between Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill in Potsdam, Königsberg was ceded to the Soviet Union, the city’s Germans were deported, and the ruble again became the local currency. The cosmopolitan port was closed off from the world, in the process acquiring a new name: Kaliningrad.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it has recently been in the news. On Nov. 5 of last year, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened to deploy ballistic missiles targeted against Poland from Kaliningrad. It is hard to imagine a development that more vividly demonstrates how Russia has reassumed the posture of a gladiator, pointing its weapons and fixing its eyes on imaginary enemies. Although Russia has much to worry about, including the devastating consequences of the global recession, it has nothing to fear from neighboring Europe. The EU has been transformed from a region that had experienced a major war every generation since the 17th century into a zone of democratic peace.

Medvedev made his threat on Barack Obama’s first day as U.S. president-elect. After eight years of George W. Bush’s Euroskepticism, today the United States has a president committed to the transatlantic coordination of strategy toward Russia. The essence of that strategy should be, over time, to convince the Russians that their post-Marxist, post-Soviet, Hobbesian experiment is, in fact, unrealistic: Playing geopolitics as a zero-sum game simply won’t work to Russia’s advantage in an age of interdependence, global challenges, and transnational governance. The 21st century must be, if we are to survive it, an age that all nations, including Russia, understand as ill-suited to gladiators and leviathans—an age that will reward countries that share a commitment to transparency, cooperation, and mutual benefit. The search for common solutions to common problems—including the global economic crisis and climate change—will require a rule-based, consensual international system to which Russia will have to adapt if it is to be a full beneficiary of what that system has to offer.

One piece of Lenin’s otherwise discredited worldview still applies. He liked to say that history and the future both could be reduced to two pronouns: “who—whom.” That is, “Who will prevail over whom?” If Russia’s future is to be better than its past, then Kant will have to prevail over Hobbes.

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Rossiya Tower Moscow, Russia

Ambition: Russian oil and real estate magnate Shalva Chigirinsky and British architect Norman Foster shared a dream of erecting the tallest building in Europe. Intended as the centerpiece of a new business district, the planned 2,008-foot Rossiya Tower would have had 118 floors, featuring luxury apartments, office space, and a five-star hotel.

Reality check: The credit crunch hit Chigirinsky’s portfolio hard, and the project lost most of its financing. The completion date has been pushed back four years to 2016.

Bottom line: Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is especially keen to see the project move forward; he has been urging Chigirinsky to sell his stake to a rival developer. It remains to be seen whether municipal aspirations will trump the personal pride of one of Russia’s most successful capitalists.

Nakheel Tower Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Ambition: Dubai’s vaunted state-run developer Nakheel—famous for creating the emirate’s palm-shaped islands—announced plans three years ago to build a 3,280-foot skyscraper, the highest in the world. The tower, already under construction, was designed as the centerpiece of a massive $38 billion, 5,800-square-mile waterfront development project.

Reality check: Cranes stopped moving in January. With Dubai’s economy in free-fall, Nakheel announced that construction would be suspended for a year as the company adjusts its financing to “better reflect the current market trends.”

Bottom line: The developers’ halted efforts will exist in the shadow, literally, of rival developer Emaar Properties’ nearly completed Burj Dubai tower, currently the world’s tallest building.

The New World Trade Center New York City, United States

Ambition: After years of political bickering following the September 11, 2001, attacks, New York finally agreed on an ambitious plan for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center. The final blueprint includes the 1,400-foot, Daniel Libeskind-designed Freedom Tower, as well as smaller skyscrapers conceived by star architects Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.

Reality check: The slumping New York real estate market has forced developer Larry Silverstein to delay construction on most of the towers indefinitely.

Bottom line: Instead of the Foster and Rogers towers, Silverstein now plans to erect two small buildings for retail space that could one day be converted to “pedestals” for the towers whenever the market recovers.

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A coup d’état can only mean that a country is going from bad to worse, right? Perhaps it’s time to reexamine what happens on the morning after.

Hein Goemans, a political scientist at the University of Rochester, has compiled an index of the causes and outcomes of 202 unconstitutional seizures of power since 1960. Recently, he teamed up with Nikolay Marinov, a political scientist at Yale University, to hunt for patterns.

Marinov points to a common assumption: “Everyone knew what happened after coups. The people who took power would retain power and rule autocratically.” Indeed, coups have historically led far more often to brutal dictatorships—think Chile’s Pinochet or Indonesia’s Suharto—than democracies.

Yet the researchers think that a new pattern has emerged since the end of the Cold War. Coups occur far less frequently today, according to their work. Between 1960 and 1990, an average of six coups took place annually (1963 was a high-water mark, with a whopping 12 coups). But in the last dozen years, the frequency has dropped to roughly half that.

Perhaps more importantly, the strongmen who’ve ridden recent coups to power have enjoyed less political longevity. Between 1960 and 1990, the majority of these leaders (8 in 10) held onto power autocratically for at least five years. But since 1990, more than two thirds of governments resulting from coups have allowed competitive elections within five years. In most cases, these elections have resulted in governments changing hands.

What’s different today? Goemans and Marinov speculate that one factor is external: Since the end of Cold War rivalry for spheres of influence, Western powers have become less willing to tolerate dictatorships—and more likely to make aid contingent upon holding elections.

As Marinov explains, “What’s changed these days is that once these guys are in power, they now actually have to rule.”

If you want to say someone is not to be trusted in Fon, a language spoken in coastal Benin and Togo, the best phrase to use translates as “This person will sell you and enjoy it.” The Fon region was, tellingly, one of the historical epicenters of the transatlantic slave trade. That era’s legacy of mistrust endures today.

Economists Nathan Nunn of Harvard University and Leonard Wantchekon of New York University recently compared historical data on the slave trade with contemporary household surveys on community relations. They found that in regions of Africa where the slave trade was most concentrated, people today extend less trust to other individuals: not only to foreigners, but also to relatives and neighbors. Nunn thinks the trauma associated with the slave trade continues to stall economic development in affected regions of Africa. Major shocks, he says, can “change people’s behavior in ways that seem pretty permanent.”

In desperate moments, where does one turn for help? Poor countries are often assumed to have relatively weak government safety nets, but also strong social networks—extended families and friends who can pitch in during hard times. Yet when Gallup asked respondents in selected countries, “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them?” the results pointed to a different conclusion: The strength of informal support networks roughly mirrors a country’s economic and political stability.

Below are percentages of poll respondents by country who answered “yes”:

• 48% Pakistan
• 54% Afghanistan
• 62% Cambodia
• 62% Iran
• 80% China
• 95% United States
• 98% Ireland

Economists have suffered a collapse in credibility since the global financial crisis began. Faith in the efficiency of markets and the invisible hand is out; “behavioral economics,” which stresses that humans are fundamentally irrational actors, is in. We are blind to risk; we make decisions on a whim; we prefer consuming now over saving for later. Human fallibility seems to be the perfect explanation for an unfathomable crisis. Here’s how—after years of being considered a quaint subfield—behavioral economics has finally stolen the limelight.

Courtesy of Mathew Burrows

It wasn’t announced with any great fanfare from the White House. There was no declaration of victory or “mission accomplished” moment. Yet when future historians look back on Feb. 12, 2009, they may identify it as the day the war on terror ended.

That was the day U.S. intelligence chief Dennis Blair told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the “primary near-term security concern” facing the United States was now fallout from the global economic downturn. Terrorism ranked second.

The unassuming man who helped shape Blair’s testimony didn’t himself make headlines, yet Feb. 12 wasn’t the first time his distinctive intellectual imprint has moved Washington. Last fall, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) released the unclassified “Global Trends 2025” report. In it, the U.S. government departed starkly from past forecasts in predicting the country’s impending decline. And it got noticed: Shortly after Barack Obama was elected in November, its lead author flew to Chicago to personally brief the president-elect.

The influential brain behind both Blair’s testimony and “Global Trends 2025” belongs to Mathew Burrows, a Cambridge-trained historian in French colonial affairs who drafted sections of the report from his 18th-century farmhouse on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The first-ever counselor for the NIC and the No. 3 official in the U.S. intelligence community’s premier big-think shop, Burrows is a tall, understated official. In person, he calls to mind more Ivy League than Langley. But colleagues say Burrows also has the political savvy to maneuver adeptly within the byzantine corridors of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy.

When I met him for meze at Lebanese Taverna in Washington, Burrows explained his thinking. “It’s the beginning of a different role in the world for the U.S. . . . I hate to use the word ‘decline,’ but it’s the end of the unipolar moment.”

For the often insular intelligence community, his working methods are as unconventional as his conclusions.

For “Global Trends 2025,” he assembled a distinctive team, pulling experts from think tanks and academia, business and the media. Burrows also brought a small group of American analysts to Beijing to share visions of the future with their Chinese and other international counterparts. Intellectual exchanges took researchers to Singapore, Africa, and Europe as well—and saw outside experts on climate change, food security, and demographics meet with analysts from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley.

Despite casting such a broad net, there’s no question that it’s Burrows who shaped the final report. Its “structure and presentation style came out of Mat’s head,” says Richard Cincotta, a demographer at the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit. He describes Burrows as above all a master synthesizer of information.

Some critics charge that peering so far into the future might not be the most pragmatic use of intelligence resources. But C. Thomas Fingar, the former NIC chairman who accompanied Burrows to Beijing last June, defends the endeavor. “If you’re warning, ‘Call the fire department; the house is on fire,’ it’s kind of late to do anything.”

Quiz Answers

1) A, China. For the first time, a Chinese company filed the most international patents. Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company, edged out Japan-based Panasonic in 2008 for the No. 1 spot, filing 1,737 patents, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. In 2008, some 164,000 international patents were filed, a 2.4 percent increase over 2007. But that’s actually a slowdown—the number of patents filed annually grew on average 9.3 percent during the previous three years. The global economic downturn has forced companies to curtail research spending.

2) B, North Africa. Each year since 1998, North Africa has had the highest unemployment rate among the world’s regions, according to the International Labor Organization. In 2008, the agency estimated unemployment in North Africa to be 10.3 percent compared with 6 percent for the world and 3.8 percent for East Asia, the region estimated to have had the lowest unemployment rate. The current economic slowdown is expected to increase unemployment worldwide, with the number of unemployed people in 2009 possibly exceeding 200 million for the first time.

3) B, 46 percent. In 2008, nearly half the world’s people lived in a country rated “free” by Freedom House, which has rated countries on political rights and civil liberties for more than 30 years. The number of countries classified as free—and the number of people living in free countries—has declined for the past three years. Freedom is deteriorating in non-Baltic states of the former Soviet Union, and Afghanistan’s rating dropped from “partly free” to “not free” in 2008.

4) C, Russia. By 2007, China had overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Russia now holds the No. 3 spot, but rapidly developing No. 4 India is set to surpass it in the near future. The top emitter on a per capita basis is tiny Qatar, whose economy is built on exporting hydrocarbons to the world.

5) C, Switzerland. To meet soaring demand for organic food, the share of farmland devoted to growing it has increased in many developed countries. Today, just over 10 percent of Switzerland’s farmland is used to cultivate organic food, according to the OECD. The OECD countries at the bottom of the list are the United States, South Korea, Iceland, and Turkey, all with a fourth of a percent or less of their farmland used for organic foods.

6) B, 371,000. Each year, some 135 million babies—a number greater than the entire population of Japan—are born. That’s 371,000 per day. Sadly, nearly 4 million babies per year, or 10,000 per day, don’t make it past the first 28 days of life, the riskiest part of the human life span. About 152,000 people of all ages die each day, resulting in a net population increase of 219,000 per day.

7) C, United States. In 2008, the United States blew past Germany to the No. 1 spot when it increased its wind-power capacity to 25 gigawatts (GW), according to the Global Wind Energy Council. Last year, worldwide capacity grew 29 percent, the largest annual increase in six years. After No. 2-ranked Germany, which has 24 GW of capacity, comes Spain, where Don Quixote famously tilted at windmills, with about 17 GW.

8) C, 2.5 percent. In 2007, $1.34 trillion, or $202 per person, was devoted to military expenditures, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In real terms, that amounts to a 45 percent increase since 1998. Yet, as a percentage of the world’s GDP, military expenditures have remained relatively constant, at about 2.5 percent, for the past decade.

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One clear day in February, when Ali Babacan visited Yemen, his hosts brought him to a centuries-old, mud-brick building outside Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. There, about a dozen tribal leaders were waiting for the Turkish foreign minister with curved daggers drawn. If Babacan was at first startled, he soon realized that he was being greeted in a way once reserved for newly arrived Ottoman governors—complete with drums and a traditional dance that had probably not been performed for a Turkish official in almost a century.

Not so long ago, top Turkish officials didn’t bother to visit Yemen, or for that matter most other countries in the Middle East. In the nearly 90 years since the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, its leaders have tended to equate the East with backwardness, and the West with modernity—and so focused their gaze primarily on Europe. Meanwhile, Arab countries, once ruled by sultans from Istanbul, looked upon Turkey with a mixture of suspicion and defensive resentment.

Today that’s changing. Not only is Turkey sending emissaries throughout the region, but a new vogue for all things Turkish has emerged in neighboring countries. The Turkish soap opera Noor, picked up by the Saudi-owned MBC satellite network and dubbed in Arabic, became a runaway hit, reaching some 85 million viewers across the Middle East. Many of the growing number of tourists from Arab countries visiting Istanbul are making pilgrimages to locations featured in the show. In February, Asharq Alawsat, a pan-Arab newspaper based in London, took note of changing attitudes in a widely circulated column, “The Return of the Ottoman Empire?”

This new mood started at home. Since it first came to power seven years ago, Turkey’s government, led by the liberal-Islamic Justice and Development Party, has taken a different approach to its role in the region. The mastermind of this turnaround—“neo-Ottomanism,” as some in Turkey and the Middle East are calling it—has been Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister’s chief foreign-policy advisor. In his 2001 book, Strategic Depth, he argued that in running away from its historical ties in the region, Turkey was also running away from political and economic opportunity. His strategy has paid off, literally, for Turkey. Trade with the country’s eight nearest neighbors—including Syria, Iran, and Iraq—nearly doubled between 2005 and 2008, going from $7.3 billion to $14.3 billion. And, from being on the verge of war with Syria a decade ago, Ankara is now among Damascus’s closest allies in the region.

The Ottoman past is also in the air in Turkey. At a recent government rally, one enthusiastic supporter unfurled a banner proclaiming the prime minister “the last sultan.” Moviegoers have been flocking to see a new spate of Ottoman-themed films, from The Last Ottoman, an action flick set during World War I, to Ottoman Republic, a comedy imagining daily life in modern Turkey if the sultans were still in charge.

Istanbul’s newest cultural attraction is the municipal-run Panorama 1453 History Museum, a granite-clad building just outside the city’s ancient walls that tells the story of the Ottomans’ conquest of Byzantine Constantinople. In the gift shop, visitors can buy everything from cuff links emblazoned with the sultans’ seal to a 1,000-piece puzzle showing Mehmet the Conqueror entering Constantinople on horseback.

On a recent visit, I met a group of head-scarved women who were taking in the sights and sounds of the museum’s main exhibit: a circular diorama depicting Mehmet the Conqueror’s victorious final assault on Constantinople’s walls. “This is beautiful, most beautiful,” said one 28-year-old schoolteacher with a big smile, as the sound of thunderous cannon fire played in the background. “We must know our history.”

Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. Yet for much of the last century, it has meant rejecting the country’s Ottoman history. Today it means claiming it.