USIP experts provide the media with unique analysis and perspective on global peace and security issues.
Growing up, in Maplewood, New Jersey, where her father was a narcotics detective and her mother a special-education teacher, Ibtihaj Muhammad competed in softball, tennis, volleyball, and track. “In our family, you didn’t have a choice of whether to play sports,” she told me. “You only had a choice of what sports you played.”
The Obama administration is sending disaster response teams to northern Ethiopia to try to address a humanitarian emergency and avoid a national security risk to the U.S. should the drought there spiral out of control.
For the first time since its blitz across Syria and Iraq, in 2014, the Islamic State is on the defensive in both countries. Its caliphate, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is shrinking. Its numbers are down. It hasn’t launched a new offensive since May, 2015.
A powerful setback for hard-liners in Iran’s parliamentary elections may present President Hassan Rouhani with a golden chance to speed up his country’s reopening to the world and remake an economy long weakened by Western sanctions.
Iranians revel in political humor. Over the weekend, as election results began to show that long-entrenched hard-liners were losing, a new joke circulated in Tehran: Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had called Secretary of State John Kerry with an offer: “John, we have just succeeded in defeating our hard-liners. Let us know if you want advice on how to beat Mr. Trump.”
More than 30 million Iranians voted Friday in parliamentary elections. It is the first national ballot since the completion of a nuclear deal that led to the removal of most international sanctions. The elections are seen as pivotal – a referendum on president Rouhani’s reform agenda, support of the nuclear deal, and opening up more to the west. Preliminary results show reformists and moderates making significant gains.
Carla Koppell, vice president of USIP's Center for Applied Conflict Transformation, appeared on Al Jazeera English’s News Hour to discuss aid priorities for Syrians while the cessation of hostility holds.
Reformists were on the verge of being excluded from Iranian politics. Now they're back at the center of the action.
Afghanistan's budget revenue increased almost 22 percent in 2015, a report by the United States Institute for Peace said, an encouraging turnaround for a cash-strapped government that remains heavily reliant on foreign aid.
Tehran was awash with color this week as the election season began. It’s an enviably short campaign—the vote is tomorrow—and will determine the makeup of both the two-hundred-and-ninety-seat Majlis, or parliament, and, more important, the eighty-eight-member Assembly of Experts, which is like the College of Cardinals in that its members choose the country’s Supreme Leader.