Transforming Haiti into a consumer nation, ultimately meant that a short-supplied world would force its population into mass starvation, a recurring nightmare Haitians are currently experiencing amid the recent global food crisis, which caused a wave of sporadic protests to erupt throughout the country last month. Rampant inflation sent food prices hovering well beyond the […]
With the uneasy ceasefire in Gaza holding (for now), there is opportunity to reflect on the controversial and closely scrutinized Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) social media campaign which accompanied Operation Pillar of Defense. The IDF has used Twitter prolifically in the days since November 14th, when an Israeli airstrike killed senior Hamas military wing commander […]
Could Nazi Germany happen again? Could an autocracy take hold in a democratic country? These are the questions posed by a teacher in modern Germany, a teacher who is forced to teach about autocracy to high school students for one week. When he asks those questions, many of his students say they believe the sway the Nazis […]
On November 20th, the M23 rebels entered Goma, the capital of the North Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — positioned on the border of Rwanda and the shores of Lake Kivu. By seizing the city with a population of one million people, the rebels struck their biggest blow since they mutinied […]
Operation Pillar of Defense appears to be over, thanks to a ceasefire brokered by Egypt. There have been flareups in the few days since the ceasefire was agreed upon, but for now it seems to be holding. There were significantly less Israeli and Palestinian casualties from this conflict then there were in the last full […]
In the recent U.S. election, Cuban-Americans voted for President Obama in record numbers, reflecting in a most convincing way the demographic shift that we have already been watching for years: newer immigrants and younger Cuban-Americans do not prioritize a hard-line U.S. policy toward Cuba, or do not support it at all. In fact, on November […]
Israel’s attack on Hamas in the Gaza Strip has not elicited a strong response from the Arab world. It is as if the Arab Spring has not yet brought an intense focus on one of the core issues of Arab politics, as many assumed it would. While Egyptian president Mohammad Morsi and his Tunisian […]
“One Vision, One Identity, One Community.” That is the motto of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Very utopian. Some might say naïve. And yet this regional organization has, up until this year, always spoken in one voice with member states that always seemed to prize cooperation. But this quixotic approach to regional relations is […]
Heads are rolling in Moscow. Over the past two months, two Russian ministers and the chief of the army have lost their jobs. The October resignation of regional development minister Oleg Govorun was but a prelude to the recent high profile ousting of the reformist defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov. The latter ostensibly fell victim to a corruption investigation […]
This film is not only powerful but also excellent in every way. It centers on a Muslim woman, Ajla, and a Serb soldier, Danijel, during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. Ethnic tensions, long suppressed by Tito, come to a head as Yugoslavia disintegrates. The brutal ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs is shown […]
Over the decades the opportunistic Turkey has dictated its Middle Eastern relations based on shifts in the regional balance of power. In the early 1990s up until around 2006, Turkey was finely enmeshed in Western sentiments and policies. But beginning in 2006 it recognized a leadership vacuum in the Middle East and began attempting to […]
Two and a half years after the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU showed up with a new human rights face for its external relations. The often repeated words of Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, stating that human rights have to be a “silver thread” that runs […]
Today marks the start of the East Asia Summit, an annual forum where the leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and their counterparts from eight other nations, including China and the U.S., meet to discuss security and economic concerns. One issue which may take center stage concerns conflicting claims over the […]
In Russia, indigenous peoples have encountered a major setback. The Ministry of Justice has ordered the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and Far East (RAIPON) closed until next April because their charter and operations ostensibly conflict with federal law. RAIPON, one of the six indigenous organizations that is a Permanent Participant of the […]
U.S. President Barack Obama is returning to Asia for his first overseas trip since winning re-election. He will attend, for the second consecutive year, the East Asia Summit which is viewed by the U.S. as the emerging eminent multilateral forum for regional leaders from 17 other states to discuss salient strategic and security issues. The […]