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.
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.”
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.
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.
Despite the deaths of as many as half a million people, dozens by chemical weapons, in the Syrian civil war, the Trump Administration is now prepared to accept President Bashar al-Assad’s continued rule until Syria’s next scheduled Presidential election, in 2021, according to U.S. and European officials. The decision reverses repeated U.S. statements that Assad must step down as part of a peace process.
Woodrow Wilson Center’s Robin Wright comments on Trump’s announcement calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel and it calls it a “diplomatic bomb in the middle of the peace process.”
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, a wilderness of deserts and raw mountains about the size of West Virginia, is famed for its Biblical history, Bedouin tribal life, and Red Sea resorts. But, now that the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria has been destroyed...
The Middle East is consumed with a real-life thriller over the fate of Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, who abruptly resigned—on a Saudi television station, on November 4th, after being summoned to Riyadh. Hariri cited fears of an assassination attempt and blasted Hezbollah and Iran for...
The Ulysses S. Grant who emerges from Ron Chernow’s new biography, “Grant,” is a man with quite a story to tell. I could easily imagine the pitch for a modern-day memoir: Grant’s struggles with alcoholism, his difficult relationship with his father, his improbable journey to...
Robin Wright of the U.S. Institute for Peace provides an update on the arrest of dozens of Saudi Arabia’s most influential figures.
Shortly after the terrorist attack in New York on Tuesday, a new account, @cnnbrea, which described itself as “CNN Breaking News,” appeared on Twitter. Its crude, explicit and ungrammatical tweets vowed more...