Banafsheh Keynoush is an international geopolitical consultant, foreign affairs scholar, and author of “Saudi Arabia and Iran: Friends or Foes?” (Palgrave Macmillan, February 2016).  The book is based on dozens of interviews with Saudi and Iranian leaders, politicians and decision makers, and rich archival material collected and made available for the first time in English. […]

  BY CHANTE LANTOS-SWETT On Monday, March 7, at 11:30 a.m., more than 3,000 students from schools all across the Boston Public School District stood up from their desks and joined their peers in front of the State House to protest a proposed $50 million cut to the 2016-2017 school year budget. Armed with protest […]

Problem Thirty-five percent of women worldwide have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes[1]. In Nigeria, domestic violence is pervasive across socioeconomic and cultural contexts. Forty-five percent of affected women suffer abuse from their current husband or partner[2]. According to a US Department of State Human Rights Report, the practice of domestic violence has “remained widespread […]

Ban Ki-Moon’s criticism of Morocco’s 40-year “occupation” of Western Sahara during his visit to the territory on March 8, 2016 has sparked the most serious crisis in the region in decades. Morocco denounced the Secretary General’s “biased” rhetoric, and “irreversibly” expelled U.N. peacekeepers stationed in Western Sahara. The U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western […]

BY JUSTIN REYNOLDS The bus trundled to a stop in front of a dismal looking barbed wire gate. The vodka from the previous night still featured prominently in my thoughts as I struggled to build a picture of a place I never thought I would visit: Russia.  It was the third day of a week-long […]

Living Under ISIS Under existing United States law, asylum-seekers having given material support to designated terrorist organizations cannot apply for asylum in the United States. This is called the material support statute under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and is meant to protect the United States from admitting potentially dangerous refugees. In the Syrian […]

BY KATIE PARRY Over the last month Germany has quietly moved to make family reunification harder for many recently arrived migrants.  New rules will mean that migrants given “subsidiary protection” status, which includes at least one in five Syrians, will not be able to bring their families to join them in Germany for at least […]

On Wednesday, April 6, 2016, the Fletcher School’s Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Program in International Negotiations and Conflict Resolution hosted Lebanese statesman and businessman, Fouad Siniora.  Mr. Siniora served the Hariri government as Finance Minister in two separate stints, eventually rising to the position of Prime Minister between 2005 and 2008. Known […]

BY NATALIE UNTERSTELL The world is currently watching Brazil fight the “longest recession in a century, the biggest bribery scandal in history, [and] the most unpopular leader in living memory,” and that’s not even counting the Zika virus epidemic. An equally severe but less visible crisis is also facing the country right now:  discrimination against […]

BY JESSICA CUSSINS The Harvard Kennedy School encourages us to ask what we can do. At a time when a U.S. government shutdown is an ongoing and legitimate concern, the importance of getting things done should not be underestimated. But as graduate students taking time away from the confines of the workplace, we are in […]

“Until very recently Singapore’s past was a matter of supreme indifference for most Singaporeans simply because they believed this island never really had a history worth remembering…” – S. Rajaratnam, ‘The Uses and Abuses of the Past’, 1984. A quick Google search for “slavery in Singapore” returns references to “Modern-day Slavery”, as many have termed […]

In Spring 2016, JMEPP Guest Interviewer Federica du Pasquier of the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard interviewed Pierre Krahenbuhl, Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) during his visit to the Middle East Initiative at Harvard’s Belfer Center. Below is an excerpt from the […]