Global Politics

As anyone who has spent any length of time travelling in India will attest, it is a country of stark contrasts. In few ways is this more obvious than the vast disparities in wealth between 500 million of India’s total 1.27 billion citizens living on less than $1.25 per day and a small but increasingly wealthy elite […]

Read the full story

The main source of hostility in the modern world is the widening gap between the most and least developed segments of human civilization. While some societies are exploring potential life on other planets, life has not changed much for others over the past millennium. Unlike in previous centuries, the permeation of modern day technologies makes […]

Read the full story

This isn’t a new video but in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo and the standard rush to judgement on the nature of Islam, Reza Aslan is worth listening to.  

Read the full story

I haven’t been wildly impressed by how Angela Merkel has handled the eurozone crisis, but this speech to the German people shows why (for my money) she’s easily the most impressive political leader in Europe, if not the world, right now. At a time when too many UK politicians have been pandering to extreme tendencies in a craven attempt […]

Read the full story

Robert Tollast sits down with Joel Wing, author of the excellent Musings on Iraq blog, to discuss the coming year in Iraq. Joel has made his blog an expansive online resource for Iraq analysis and it is now one of the main on-line forums for academic discussion of Iraq, recently hosting a 24 expert review of the […]

Read the full story

Once the fourth largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea has shrunk by 90% over the past 50 years. Perhaps a paragon of unsustainable development and mismanagement, it has been described by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as ‘one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters’. Is there hope for the people and the environment affected […]

Read the full story

Since overrunning swathes of Iraq from its strongholds in Syria earlier this summer, it has been made relatively clear how American defense and counter-terrorism officials feel about the Islamic State (a.k.a. IS, ISIS, ISIL). In a word: spooked. The Islamic State is not only well organized but it is incredibly well financed and is now well equipped with American-made weaponry. This […]

Read the full story

The established templates of international peace operations are under threat, because the core premise of these operations, consent, is eroding . Filipino and Fijian troops serving with the UNDOF mission in the Golan Heights were targeted by the Nusra Front last week (30 Aug). A number of Fijians have been captured while the Filipinos managed […]

Read the full story

Three weeks ago, a Taliban commander named Mohammad Ashan turned himself in to Afghan police. Ashan had noticed wanted posters around his native Paktika province promising a $100 bounty for his capture, and he surrendered himself hoping to collect it. Needless to say, he collected nothing and was detained on the spot. Ashan’s comically simple […]

Read the full story

The destruction wrought, hatred spread, and lives lost on and after 9/11 are travesties. But the War on Terror has created another immediate problem: financial calamity. Two wars—costing U.S. taxpayers well into the trillions of dollars—have surely had an impact on reducing the threat of terrorism around the world. But outside of specific military efforts, […]

Read the full story

Every December, California based analyst Joel Wing and I discuss the coming 12 months in Iraq. Joel has been the author of the Musings on Iraq blog since 2008, providing detailed analysis of political, economic and security developments in Iraq. His work is frequently cited by leading journals and news outlets. The last year in […]

Read the full story

How is democracy faring in Afghanistan these days? Not well, as far as Afghan women are concerned. While many of its familiar trappings are in place – such as a constitution that promises equality before the law – the practice of democracy ranges from deeply flawed to nonexistent when it comes to women’s rights, especially […]

Read the full story

The ongoing conflict that has been running in Syria for more than two years, and the brutality of the Syrian regime in suppressing the uprising has encouraged the emergence of radical Jihadist movements in the country. The most important of these movements and one which has raised significant controversy and discussion among the Syrian intelligentsia […]

Read the full story

In a speech on the occasion of the opening of the World Youth Festival in Baghdad on the 12th of August last year, the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki described the Syrian revolution as a fire, ignited either by ignorant haters or by external wills for the purposes of their own policies and interests. However, […]

Read the full story

Ever since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, the idea of conspiracy has permeated the language of the official Syrian media, the Assad regime’s proponents in Lebanon, and has been reflected in discussions within Arab intelligentsias. As soon as the Syrian revolution started, the Syrian regime claimed that the country had been exposed to an […]

Read the full story

One of the most popular grievances associated with the Arab Spring in Egypt and Yemen was about increased food prices – a grievance that has caused upheaval in these countries before, and has significant potential to do so again. Admittedly, food price inflation may not be a sufficient condition for Arab Spring-esque revolutions to occur […]

Read the full story

The violence in Syria is escalating and the international community’s efforts to resolve the situation through the United Nations peace plan have failed, leading to Kofi Annan’s resignation as the UN’s Syria envoy. Syrians are in dire need of a peaceful, sustainable resolution but owing to the number of factions involved and the serious human […]

Read the full story

“It is reasonable to argue that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup’s legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. Embassy. The hostage crisis, in […]

Read the full story

The South Caucasus is a tribally divided region, rich in natural resources, that could wield considerable influence if unified, and could economically compete with Russia and the West. When asked to describe “the Caucasus”, most people reply with a blank stare. Some might guess you are referring to one of the more unusual facets of […]

Read the full story

The numbers are in and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has secured a dominant position in the parliamentary make-up of post-Mubarak Egypt. For a long time, in addition to scare-mongering by right wing media, we were told by any number of commentators and academics that Islam and democracy are entirely compatible. This debate moved up a […]

Read the full story