I have been recently asked by LinkedIn to contribute writing for the professional social networking site. So, for my first piece I decided to write the following on the worsening situation in Iraq. The piece can be accessed in its entirety here. The crumbling of government authority in Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq under the alarming onslaught […]
Editor’s Note: The following is a book review by Reza Varjavand, associate professor of economics and finance at the Graham School of management, Saint Xavier University by Reza Varjavand Even though we still do not know for sure how we got to be on this planet, we have a long history of living on […]
Abdolhamid Masoumi-Tehrani is an Iranian Ayatollah based in Tehran, Iran. He is also a calligrapher and painter, who uses his art works to challenge openly Iran’s ruling clergy and power elite to adopt a more tolerant social and political order. A recent calligraphic art work by Ayatollah Masoumi-Tehrani sent shock waves through Iran’s ruling […]
As Iran and the United States, a key member of the P5+1 world powers, inch toward deicing their 35-year-old frosty and at times traumatic relations, jockeying from all sides of political spectrum target the direction of this process and whether the icy relations should ever start to melt. Regional opponents of improved ties between Iran […]
Kenneth Pollack is a former CIA intelligence analyst and currently a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Pollack’s expertise is on Middle East politics and military affairs with particular emphasis on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Gulf States of the Persian Gulf region. He previously served […]
Lukas Birk is the author of Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom: Old and New World Visions of China, a book released in January 2014 that compiles images he took from diverse parts of contemporary China, using his father’s expired Polaroid films.
Touraj Daryaee is the Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World and the Associate Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. A leading Iranologist, Dr. Daryaee is the editor of the Name-ye Iran-e Bastan: The International Journal […]
In a wide-ranging discussion with Reza Akhlaghi of the Foreign Policy Association, Dr. Ian Bremmer discusses what he considers to be a disengaged foreign policy by the United States. On April 10, 2014 Dr. Bremmer will be speaking at the Foreign Policy Association on the world’s biggest political risks. Dr. Ian Bremmer is the founder and […]
On the evening of Saturday, March 29, people around the world are being asked by campaigners to switch off the lights for an hour to celebrate “Earth Hour”. The question is whether this helps the climate and the challenges it faces around the world. “Global warming is a real problem, but Earth Hour is not […]
Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare, is a renowned investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy. Porter was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for journalism awarded by the Gellhorn Trust in the U.K. His previous book was Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and […]
Editor’s Note: Ian Bremmer is President of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Dr. Bremmer is also Global Research Professor at the New York University (NYU) and author, most recently, of Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. by Ian Bremmer As Russia conducts direct […]
February 11 marks the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a jolting socio-political and geopolitical event that transformed the dynamics of the Middle East, energy security, and global diplomacy. Iran, at the time a key regional ally of the U.S. and the West, became a virulently anti-U.S. and anti-Western state with a state ideology […]
Editor’s Note: The following is a contributing piece by Jahandad Memarian. Mr. Memarian is a senior research fellow at Nonviolence International and a contributor to Al-Monitor and the Huffington Post, He holds an M.A. in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran and was previously an Iranian Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Santa […]
Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University who’s also a columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He recently wrote that efforts by the Obama Administration to reach a deal with the Rouhani Administration in Iran and bring the Iranian nuclear crisis closer to a closure are met […]
Editor’s Note: The following piece was first published in Middle East Briefing (ISSUE 9 VOL 1 Jan 13th 2014), a weekly publication of Orient Advisory Group, a research and risk assessment firm based in both Washington DC and Dubai UAE. __________________________________________________________________ Quiet changes have already been made in the team of Iran’s negotiators with […]