Fifty years ago, Harry B. Hollins, a leading banker, publisher, and founder of the World Paper teamed up with C. Douglas Dillon, the secretary of the treasury under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and formed an international organization to develop policies that might prevent war and devastation. This year, the World Policy Institute, the parent of this magazine, is celebrating its half-century by paying tribute to five of our core themes—media and conflict, water scarcity, world financial risk, migration, and new security priorities. In this issue, our cover deals with the first of these themes by focusing on the use and abuse of language and how it impacts democracy.For almost a decade, World Policy Institute senior fellow Susan Benesch has been studying dangerous speech, so it’s appropriate that she should define our agenda in our lead essay. Next, our Anatomy of a Character explores the mutation of a single Chinese character over the last 3,500 years. Zimbabwean Tongai Leslie Makawa, known throughout the music world as the rapper Outspoken, and fellow musician Verity Norman discuss the connotations of the word “freedom” in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Addressing another of our core themes, the Map Room diagrams the forced migrations of the Soviet-era that left scores of languages in Russia on the brink of extinction. Hopping between Germany and Turkey, James Angelos details the ever higher linguistic hurdles European governments are placing in the path of immigrants. In Venezuela, Marco Aponte-Moreno and Lance Lattig describe how President Hugo Chávez has embraced the rhetorical tools of Fidel Castro to maintain power, using an autocratic vernacular and subjecting both supporters and opponents to nine-hour televised harangues. And for our Conversation, World Policy Journal travels to Paris to debrief Assia Djebar, an Immortelle of the Académie Française, on the contrasts between her mother tongue of Arabic and the French language she’s been charged with keeping “pure.”For our Portfolio, we turn to Chechnya where the extraordinary Armenian photographer Diana Markosian has chronicled the resurgence of Islam in this violent corner of the Caucasus, while writer Judith Matloff, who accompanied her on some of her travels, sets the scene. Related to our work on reducing world financial risk, we turn to two who’ve followed the finer points of the global economic crisis. Stanley Pignal, Brussels correspondent for the Financial Times, looks at the impact of the EU’s much-maligned bureaucracy, while Peter Marber dissects the inner workings of the warped metrics of the world’s financial system. In the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, Fulbright researcher Christa Hasenkopf probes the pollution of air and water—in the context of resource scarcity—in one of the world’s dirtiest cities. And in the realm of rethinking security priorities, The New York Times’ David C. Unger explores the meaning of Internationalism and the American role in global politics. Finally, in his Coda, World Policy Journal Editor David A. Andelman, who visited France for the magazine’s Paris debut just as the French were moving into the heart of their presidential campaign, examines this year’s 82-nation strong election tsunami.Throughout the year, we will explore all five World Policy Institute themes in these pages, on our blog (www.worldpolicy.org), and through research, policy papers, network building, programs, and events—not the least being our main anniversary celebration, World Policy Around the Table, on May 3, 2012. We invite readers to join us in rising to the challenges that these issues present to the world.