Experts from the U.S. Institute of Peace provide the latest analysis and perspective on the world’s critical hot spots, U.S. and global security and issues involved in violent conflict, based on the Institute’s work on the ground and with key individuals, governments and organizations. They give interviews and background briefings to journalists and write for news outlets around the world.
Dystopian novels are a difficult genre: They need to be imaginative, edging on the far-fetched, while being just plausible enough to terrify. Omar El Akkad’s American War, which interprets the American South by way of the Middle East, challenges Americans to imagine what it might be like to die for, but also kill, their fellow citizens.
Mansour Omari, a Syrian journalist in his mid-thirties with wavy hair and sideburns, spent a year documenting the names of detainees who disappeared after the inspiring days of the Arab Spring devolved into a chaotic civil war. Then he became one of the disappeared.
In the early days of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini famously dismissed an aide’s concerns about rising inflation. Economics, the Supreme Leader quipped, was “for donkeys. The 1979 revolution was not about the price of watermelons.”
... retaining legitimacy—and, ultimately, power—if they can't take a joke. Wright, a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is the author of Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the ...
"It's always the wild card," said Wright, a former diplomatic correspondent for the U.S. Institute of Peace, referring to North Korea supreme leader Kim Jong-un. "Does he interpret what the United States has done as something that makes him worry even ...
The field of candidates may be limited, but the outside world can still learn a lot from Iran's 2013 presidential poll. The election will provide three pivotal metrics about the Islamic republic now that the Ahmadinejad era is ending.
The celebratory fireworks at Tahrir Square are likely to be short-lived. The next year may well be more turbulent for Egypt than the last one, with greater political tension and economic trauma.
Hassan Rouhani is set to be sworn in as Iran's new president this weekend. Does this signal a turning point for Iran?
"Egypt has already returned to military rule," says Robin Wright, a Middle East scholar with the Woodrow Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace. "The question is will they dig in. The military is thumbing its nose at the U.S., its most important ...
Robin Wright, distinguished scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and the U.S. Institute of Peace, says the growing political divide in Egypt reflects a broader trend throughout the Middle East.