Brussels was the scene of an international donor conference last week to pledge €340 million in support of stabilizing Mali. The conference comes after a recent United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for a 12,600-strong peacekeeping force in Mali and offers a significant lesson in the intervention calculations at work in the U.N. The […]
Russian Spy Games By Edward Lucas Foreign Affairs The Cold War may have officially ended and the rest may be the new policy, but Russia and the U.S. are still adversaries, says Lucas. While Ryan Fogle’s, the 29-year-old third secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, gamble may seem absurd, the extraordinary thing about […]
Each week the editors at FPA choose five must reads from around the web and five of the best of ForeignPolicyBlogs.com. So if you’re looking for reading for the weekend, we’ve got you covered.
In January 1864, some strangely dressed men with odd accents arrived in the camp of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose troops had been reeling from shortages of arms and supplies. They demonstrate a new weapon – an amazingly high powered accurate “repeater” rifle – and offer it to Lee. He accepts. And the arming […]
Like a Silicon Valley tech upstart company that has shaken the status and market share of technology giants, Your Middle East, an online magazine with offices in Europe and the Middle East, is bent on transforming the Middle East coverage in the media and, as a result, disrupting the way giants of mainstream media deliver news and […]
On Friday, ABC News published all 11 versions of the Benghazi talking points that were written by the CIA at the request of Congress and used by Ambassador Susan Rice on several TV talk shows on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012. It was widely reported for months that the original talking points had been edited […]
Can military and civilians successfully collaborate in conflict zones? This has been an open question for decades, but especially recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, where new approaches and the length of the conflicts provide a wealth of experience to examine. Current and potential insurgencies from Central Asia to Africa in which outside forces may intervene […]
Editor’s Note: Fadi F. Elhusseini is a Political and Media Counselor at the Embassy of Palestine in Turkey. He is an Associate Research Fellow (ESRC) at the Institute for Middle East Studies- Canada. He served as the Director of the Bureau of Palestinian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and as a media adviser at the Palestinian Presidency. Mr. Elhusseini was the […]
Each week the editors at FPA choose five must reads from around the web and five of the best of ForeignPolicyBlogs.com
On Saturday, March 9, 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s richest man and son of the country’s founding president won the presidential election of Kenya and prepared to take the highest office in the nation. However, amid the success of achieving such a high rank ucertainty loomed. This is because Kenyatta was indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) […]
[Image from 99 FM] The current issue of Foreign Affairs has an article, “Africa’s Economic Boom: Why the Pessimists and the Optimists are Both Right,” by Shantayanan Devarajan and Wolfgang Fengler. The subtitle might seem squishy, an attempt at split-the-difference equanimity so popular among the scolding centrists and graduate seminar participants amongst us. But sometimes […]
A hunger strike by prisoners and President Obama’s remarks at a press conference last week have revived interest in the question of Guantánamo, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where 166 men (down from the original 779) have been held for up to eleven years in connection with the war on terrorism. Guantánamo (its nickname, […]
Image Credit: www.catholica.com.au Last summer I was intrigued by a book review about Alain de Botton’s “Religion for Atheists”. In the review, that was partly an interview with the author, Botton explained that being an atheist didn’t mean you had to hate religion, but that you could learn lessons from it, seeking knowledge wherever it can […]
Editor’s Note: The following is a contributing piece by Rajeev Chandrasekhar. Mr. Chandrasekhar is a well-known and independent member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, representing the state of Karnataka. He was elected in May 2006 and was then unanimously re-elected for a second six-year term in March 2012, making him […]
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