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 sentencing Myanmar’s iconic democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to prison, the country’s generals have effectively exiled her from electoral politics. But that doesn’t mean the Southeast Asian nation is back to square one in its stop-start efforts to move toward democracy...
Three years ago, American investigators produced a 15,000-page analysis of atrocities committed in 2017 against the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority group in Myanmar. The report documented survivors’ accounts of gang rapes, crucifixions, mutilations, of children being burned or drowned and of families locked inside...
From small villages to city offices, an open rebellion is steadily spreading in Burma, drawing together citizens outraged by the Feb. 1 coup that overturned a national election and crushed a popular democracy. Pro-democracy advocates inside Burma and abroad describe how defectors from the disgraced army — the hated Tatmadaw — as well as...
After nearly 18 months, two Reuters journalists have left prison in Myanmar. The crime that put them there: Revealing information the country’s government wanted to suppress, about its persecution campaign against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority...
The United Nations has reiterated its call for voluntary repatriation of Rohingyas from Bangladesh saying Rohingyas need to feel that the situation is safe enough for them. “It is up for people to choose to go home. No one should choose for them. Any repatriation of Rohingyas back to Myanmar needs to be voluntary,” said Spokesman for the UN Secretary-General Stephane Dujarric in regular briefing at the UN headquarters.
Without mentioning the Rohingya by name, Pope Francis spoke out in Myanmar of the need to respect all ethnic groups. It was unclear whether the pope pressed leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has downplayed the severity of the attacks in the past, on the issue of persecution. William Brangham talks to Priscilla Clapp, former...
Was he wrong for not specifically mentioning the Rohingya? What should Aung San Suu Kyi be doing to right the crisis? Amanpour speaks with a former ambassador and Amnesty's Crisis Response
Priscilla Clapp, U.S. Institute of Peace, says NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyii has made progress by bringing civilians into the peace process.
But Priscilla Clapp, who was U.S. chief of mission in Myanmar from 1999 to 2002 and is now a senior advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said she objects to extreme words like genocide, holocaust, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, “because that is not what this is. This is not Yugoslavia.” Many groups on both sides of the conflict are working “very quietly” in Myanmar to resolve it, Clapp recently told a reporter for Claremont McKenna College’s website.
Clapp is the co-author with Mort Halperin of what I consider one of the most important books you can read about US foreign policy. It’s called Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, and as the title suggests, the book describes the role of the bureaucracy in shaping US foreign policy. We kick off with an extended conversation about that book, and then have another extended conversation about how Clapp, as the State Department official in charge of refugee programs in the late 1980s, used t...