Regions

   Now published! The introduction can be downloaded from Amazon for free.

Dear FPA Blogs followers, Azeri APA News Agency recently conducted an interview with me regarding the French National Assembly’s decision to criminalize the refusal to refer to the events of 1909-15 as a genocide and how this affects Turkey’s Caucasus policy. This is the transcript of that interview:   ————————-   http://en.apa.az/news.php?id=163076   New York. Isabel […]

The following story (part 2, the 1st instalment as it were, was published at https://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2011/11/16/a-window-into-womens-world-in-yemen/) is that of Amal Hassan, a young Yemeni woman who from the time she drew her first breath has had to fight for what many in the West take for granted: freedom, education, pursuit of happiness. Raised in a conservative […]

In recent days, two op-eds on the Arctic have been published in North American newspapers. In the Canadian daily, the Toronto Star, Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia and an expert on the Arctic, penned a piece lamenting Northern Canada’s lack of development compared to Russia. Since he is currently a […]

The state visit to New Delhi by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in December 2010 focused on the potential for mutual economic cooperation. Wen arrived with a large business delegation that promptly signed some $16 billion worth of deals. The two governments also pledged to take their $60-billion trade relationship to the $100-billion level by 2015. […]

Theodor Lessing’s book Der Jüdische Selbsthass (Jewish Self-hatred) was the first work to discuss the concept of Jewish self-hatred, which as the British Journal of Social Psychology states “is often used rhetorically to discount Jews who differ in their lifestyles, interests or political positions from their accusers.” In Austria, this accusation is sometimes labeled against […]

Just weeks after Israel declared Independence in May of 1948, and the ensuing war broke out, the IDF sunk a ship armed with fighters and weapons making its way to Israel. The ship was the Altalena and the fighters and weapons were working their way into Jewish hands, not Arab. The situation was complicated and […]

Happy New Year, everyone. Before you look forward to 2012 it’s time to look back at South Africa’s 2011. 1. Summary of 2011 There were three issues that defined 2011 in South Africa. 1) By far the most significant of these was the controversy over the Protection of State Information Bill. For many years the […]

I received a large reader response to my post about the trapped Beluga whales on December 15. Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations sent the ship, the Rubin, to break up the ice in the Sinyavinsky Channel to free the 100 whales, but severe weather forced the ship to seek safe harbor, as RIA Novosti reports. […]

Anyone watching the end of the year documentaries on stations like the BBC and other international broadcasters likely feel the sense of slight growth in the United States mixed with slowing growth in places like South America and other regions that have thus far resisted the 2008 economic collapse effectively. With the main focus of […]

It was a rough but lucky landing (both “rough and “lucky” are strong understatements here) when a Soviet-built Tupolev (Tu-134) crash landed in dense fog in the city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. According to The Washington Post 82 passengers and 6 crew members were evacuated, 31 of them were injured and 17 hospitalized. Miraculously everyone on board […]

Dancing for the cameras, bulldozed behind them “Mayor Wilson Jeudi has just bulldozed the entire camp,” recounted Connie Watson, CBC Radio’s Correspondent in Haiti. “He showed up with the police at 6 o’clock this morning, stormed through with machetes and clubs, slicing all the tents and knocking down their springy supports.” Watson witnessed the early […]

Japanese prosecutors indicted a Chinese fishing boat skipper for fishing illegally in Japanese waters, a local official said Friday. The arrest is the latest in a long series of events surrounding the tense Chinese-Japanese maritime relations. Zhong Jinyin was arrested in Japanese waters Dec. 20, the second arrest in the area in less than two […]

Part 3 – The Innate Stalemate Also Read – Part 1: Many Barrels of a Gun Part 2: Mood on the Ground Amid a general socio-political churning brought about by rising expectations of people in many South Asian nations, the 17th SAARC Summit in Maldives in November culminated with the ‘Addu Declaration’ (named after Addu […]

Israel has recently been awash in controversy over nothing new in the country’s history — the intersection of policy, society, and religion. The most recent tussle has centered around whether segregating buses based on gender should be permissible. Some in the ultra orthodox community argue that separate seating spaces for men and women would be […]