Today, Hoover announces the launch of a new video series celebrating and extending the ideas and impact of the one and only Thomas Sowell; Šumit Ganguly explains how widespread corruption and a lack of economic opportunities for young people have fueled popular protest movements across South Asia in recent years; and Joseph Ledford reviews the “transformative” American foreign policy shifts underway in the Western Hemisphere and their implications from Cuba to China.
Celebrating Thomas Sowell
Tomorrow, July 30, the Hoover Institution will premiere The Sowell Legacy, a richly produced original series combining conversations, archival footage, photography, animation, and visual storytelling on the life, work, and enduring influence of one of America’s most consequential economists and public intellectuals, the inimitable Thomas Sowell. Releasing throughout the summer and fall across Hoover’s digital platforms, the series draws on Hoover’s landmark 2025 Thomas Sowell Legacy Conference and brings together leading scholars, policymakers, educators, writers, and public intellectuals to reflect on Sowell’s extraordinary career and the impact of his ideas. Learn more and watch the trailer here.
Politics and Institutions in South Asia
Looking at recent youth protests in Nepal, Bangladesh, and now India, Senior Fellow Šumit Ganguly writes at NPR about a common “fault line” across South Asia: “Elite privilege endures even as youth opportunities stall.” Ganguly notes three structural drivers of this pattern. “First, while a large part of South Asia has achieved impressive economic growth in recent years, the increase in wealth has not translated into equality and opportunities,” the political scientist writes. Second, “widespread official corruption” has exacerbated “young South Asians’ frustrations.” And third, “widespread internet access has not only made the population more informed about their democratic rights, it has also raised aspirations and given protesting youth a powerful tool to overcome the collective action problems that often plague social movements.” Ganguly concludes that establishing genuine stability in the region will hinge on “genuine efforts by the ruling class to address the systemic lack of opportunities facing the young population.” Read more here.
Revitalizing History
In this new essay for the Commons Dispatch series, Hoover Fellow Joseph Ledford argues that the United States is giving long-overdue attention to its geopolitical “neighborhood,” the Western Hemisphere. Actions involving Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela have set the stage for a broad US strategy to reorder the Americas and engage with economic problems, national security, and the encroachment of Chinese soft power, Ledford writes. US–Mexico ties represent the most crucial hemispheric issue, while the Trump administration’s push for regime change in Havana appears the most difficult goal—far harder than simply replacing a leader, as US forces did in Venezuela. Meanwhile, Ledford says, a fresh interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine means that the White House now emphasizes containing, and rolling back, China’s presence in the Americas as a matter of national security. Read more here.
Maritime chokepoints are among the global economy’s greatest strategic vulnerabilities, capable of disrupting vital flows of energy, food, and trade. A new Policy in Brief video featuring Griffin Fellow Ziyi “Emily” Wang shows that, during the current war in Ukraine, the Turkish Straits demonstrate how the 1936 Montreux Convention and Turkey’s wartime authority over warship passage helped limit military escalation while preserving space for Black Sea grain exports. Yet this stability remains vulnerable to Russian ambitions, shifting Turkish-Russo relations, and threats such as naval mines, Wang says. In her view, protecting strategic waterways requires clear and enforceable rules, capable regional partners, and sustained allied vigilance before a crisis begins. Watch here.
Confronting and Competing with China
China’s technological progress in recent decades has been viewed with admiration, alarm, and, in some cases, doubt, argue Senior Fellow Amit Seru and coauthors in this new research paper. To better understand the Chinese innovation ecosystem, the authors compiled a dataset of almost fourteen million domestic Chinese patent publications. They focused on the subset of “critical technologies” identified by the US Department of Defense. Several surprising patterns emerge from the data, the authors say: “Chinese patenting is strongly associated with other measures of innovative progress; patents are not concentrated in corporate giants such as Huawei; universities have played a key role in innovation, much greater than state-owned enterprises or government-owned facilities; and fewer than one in ten Chinese critical technology patents involves an inventor with US experience or training.” The authors also “show that the rise of Chinese patenting in critical technologies has not been associated with a decline in quality relative to the US awards.” Read more here.
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