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NATO summits have always been exceptional events. In fact, some of the most recent ones went down in history for both positive and negative reasons. The one to be held in Chicago will be no exception, especially as it will be the first NATO summit in the United States in 13 years. Central Europe, with the Baltic States included, is one of those regions in the transatlantic sphere that in particular awaits summit’s outcome. Indeed, being a hingepoint on the Euro-Atlantic fringe – with deep uncertainties about America’s long-term regional commitment in the face of politically unpredictable or military muscular neighbors – makes you long for clear declarations. Will the NATO summit in Chicago bring any security affirmations to the Central European states?

As we’ve heard far too many times from Iraq, “the situation is bad, and we’re expecting the worst.” To update the piece I wrote back on March 7th regarding the targeted killings of members of the LGBT community in Iraq, the violence has metastasized. Now the victims are “emos,” a term once reserved in the […]

Few days after its release, amid controversies, the 30-minute documentary about Ugandan’s warlord Joseph Kony, viewed by over 80 million on Youtube, went viral online. The NBC Nightly News’ reality check section announced that it was sending a team to Kony’s village in remote Uganda east of Gulu to check the facts on the ground. […]

Here is Peter Alegi’s most excellent YouTube promo for his online Global Soccer course at Michigan State University: Meet Dr. Futbol Alegi is the doyen of African football scholars. As you can tell, he also has mad skillz.

The documentary When China Met Africa sheds light on the relatively new relationships China is creating in Africa. It focuses on three key characters: a Chinese entrepreneur who starts a farm in Zambia, a manager for a multinational Chinese company, and Zambia’s trade minister. China now invests more in Africa than the World Bank. Funding […]

Colombia is now Latin America’s fourth-largest oil exporter, but production seems to have hit a ceiling just shy of 1 million barrels per day. “Gushers and Guns,” a piece in this week’s Economist, delves into the security dimensions that initially cleared the way for Colombia’s oil boom, but now impede rapid advances. This may be […]

This documentary reeks of desperation. It spends the first third showing the lives of Cubans in the early to mid-1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union made for hard times in the communist country. Balseros (2002) Trailer As many as 50,000 balseros (literally, “raft people”) took their chances in flimsy rafts to reach the […]

This following post is from Nazim Can Cicektakan, a PhD candidate at the University of Essex, Department of History, who recently returned back from a research visit to the Turkish province of Hatay, on the border of Syria. I asked him whether he could write a summary of his thoughts for the FPA blogs and […]

You know, I promised myself I wasn’t going to write about this. Promised. The fact is I heard about it yesterday, so we’re talking, what? 24 hours? But this is the Foreign Policy Association global blog site, right? And despite my focus on crime and corruption, I like to think I bring a certain (educated) perspective to events too often triggered by what even I, an east coast elitist, can only describe as bad, bad craziness. Boundaries–or their absence–can be important cultural markers, and I knew–I know–even as I write, that this is a name guaranteed to set a lot of very straight, very white teeth on edge: Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa Country, Arizona.

A few weeks back we discussed on this FPA blog how Brazil was likely to choose the French candidate as its new fighter jet over its American and Swedish rivals. Part of the decision to choose the French Rafale jet was based on past restrictions by the US on Embraer and Brazil to sell its […]

Geoff Porter’s op-ed in the International Herald Tribune provides an outstanding discussion on Libya’s new electoral law (view the law in Arabic) and its implications for the government’s ability to democratically represent citizens, encourage political unity, and further disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of former fighters. In sum, Porter highlights concerns that surround the law’s exclusion of […]

Dr. Lloyd Jeff Dumas is a Professor of Political Economy, Economics, and Public Policy in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the UT-Dallas. Dr. Dumas sat down with Reza Akhlaghi, Senior Writer at FPA, to discuss his new book, “The Peacekeeping Economy: Using Economic Relationships to Build a More Peaceful, Prosperous, and Secure […]

This article, appeared on the Political Reflections Magazine, vol.3, n.2, is the second part of my review of FPA’s Great Decisions episode on the Arab Spring: The first part, providing a general overview of the debate can be found here. ********************************** As the uncertainty of the Arab Spring continues, the debate on the future of […]

A debate this week on CNN between Naftali Bennett, former chief of staff to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Hooman Majd, a former adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, included no new talking points or information. But it was certainly remarkable nonetheless. As evidence by a major narrative in the news cycle for last […]

ICC Press Release Today, 14 March 2012, Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided unanimously that Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is guilty, as a co-perpetrator, of the war crimes of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of 15 and using them to participate actively in hostilities from 1 September 2002 to 13 […]