The United States is asking countries in the Western Hemisphere to step up pledges to tackle the immediate challenges of irregular migration as it expands eligibility for legal migration to the U.S. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held talks Wednesday with more than a dozen officials from Latin America at a regional migration ministerial in Bogota, Colombia. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas joined the gathering virtually...

Mediation, Negotiation & Dialogue

As soon as the first gunshots echoed across the courtyard from the street outside, the congregation began to scatter. The worshippers at Kandahar’s Bibi Fatima mosque were all too aware of the fate of their fellow Shia Muslims in Kunduz a week earlier and immediately started running. The warning came too late. Suicide-bombers had shot their way into the building. Seconds later a cloud of dust engulfed the scene as they blew themselves up...

Violent Extremism

Global Policy

The former rebel commander once sat across a table from Secretary of State John F. Kerry. He signed the historic peace deal that ended Colombia’s 52-year internal conflict. He accepted responsibility for kidnappings and killings by his guerrillas, apologized to the victims, became a member of a legal political party and was elected a senator in the country’s Congress...

Peace Processes

The U.S. has been trying to help Sudan emerge from decades of a brutal regime that was accused of genocide and terrorism. This week, the U.S. envoy for the region thought he was making progress in keeping a transitional government on track. But Sudanese generals had other ideas and launched a military coup just as he left...

Civilian-Military Relations

Jeffrey Feltman’s plane took off in the early hours of Monday morning after a frantic weekend of high-stakes diplomatic meetings in Sudan. Feltman, U.S. President Joe Biden’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa, was in Khartoum meeting with top Sudanese power brokers to try to shore up the country’s shaky transitional government and try to salvage its uneven path to democracy...

Civilian-Military Relations

In their national election earlier this month, Iraqis took the unprecedented step of rejecting an Iran-backed coalition of armed Shiite militias while showing a clear preference for Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric who promotes a nationalist agenda. Fatah or Conquest Alliance, an umbrella organization of various militias or Popular Mobilization Forces (PMUs) that was led by Pro-Iran Hadi al-Amiri, fell from 48 parliamentary seats in 2018 to merely 15 seats this year. Sadr’s Sairoon coalition, meanwhile, emerged as the biggest winner, upping its tally from 54 seats to 73 seats. Sadr is now a kingmaker in the formation of Iraq’s next parliament...

Democracy & Governance

Attacks on Nigerian school students from December 2020 to August 2021 saw hundreds of children abducted and prompted a national outcry at the state’s seeming inability to prevent such events. This recent wave of abductions follows other notorious incidents of mass abduction and murder of students, most prominently the cases of the Chibok and Dapchi girls. In assessing the more recent abductions, the authorities and some analysts have made a distinction between contemporary and earlier episodes on the basis of the perceived identity of the perpetrators...

Conflict Analysis & Prevention