Over the next decade, a massive wave of new oil and gas discoveries will transform Africa. If the resource curse plays out as it usually does, this oil boom will only serve to entrench authoritarian rule and inhibit democracy. Unless, that is, African governments embrace a radical approach: handing a large share of the new […]
India’s early engagement with post-Taliban Afghanistan was considered by the United States, Pakistan and the Afghan government to be a strategy to undermine Pakistan. While this may have been true at first, in recent years India has come to accept that Pakistan has a ‘special interest’ in Afghanistan that overshadows its own. The main driver […]
As the Pakistani anti-terrorism court prepares to indict former President Pervez Musharraf over the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the UN official who conducted the special investigation into her death recounts his own search for answers. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
The divisions in Egypt are deep. Whereas reconciliation had seemed possible, though difficult, until last week, there are now two irreconcilable camps facing off against each other: the military and its secular supporters, on one side, and the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, on the other. The young activists and the liberals no longer play […]
Riyadh was a close ally of Egypt’s former leader Hosni Mubarak, toppled by a popular uprising in 2011 that brought Mursi‘s Muslim Brotherhood to power, and has long feared the spread of the Islamist group’s ideology to the Gulf monarchies. Read Here – Reuters
Yet again the Western world gazes baffled and powerless at the ever more tragic mess unfolding across the Middle East. The wishful-thinking euphoria that greeted the “Arab Spring” two years ago seems a million miles away as Egypt plunges into bloody chaos… Read Here – The Telegraph, London
Iran has positioned itself as an important regional actor in Central Asia and is committed to playing a role in neighboring Afghanistan. As U.S. troops draw down their numbers in Afghanistan, Washington should consider how improved U.S.-Iranian relations could further long-term U.S. policy goals in Afghanistan and in the region. Read Here – Carnegie Endowment […]
Imagine a government dominated by paranoia, convinced of conspiracies around every corner. That, in short, was the most defining aspect of the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power in Egypt. Though the country’s first democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup in July, the Brotherhood made its fair share of critical mistakes. Read Here […]
Thursday of this week was a bad day in modern Arab history. The four leading Arab cities of recent eras – Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo – were simultaneously engulfed in bombings or urban warfare, mostly carried out with brutal savagery and cruelty against civilians in urban settings. Even more problematic is that the carnage was predominantly the work […]
Humans, and perhaps their pre-human ancestors, have engaged in murder and mayhem, as individuals and in groups, for hundreds of thousands of years. And, at least since the advent of recorded history, violence and politics have been intimately related. Nation-states use violence against internal and external foes. Dissidents engage in violence against states. Competing political […]
looking beyond borders 