Despite their prominence in America’s daily news cycle, the leaders of the Islamic State remain misunderstood.  Many pundits and analysts seem to fail in differentiating their brand of Salafi Islam from the practices and beliefs of the vast majority of Muslims, while others overcorrect and artificially separate the Islamic State’s actions entirely from religion. In […]

BY ANDREA BLINKHORN AND DANIEL TOSTADO Washington, D.C. – As the asylum interview dragged into its second hour, Sandrine became very sleepy. In my office in D.C. sat two sisters, Sandrine and Camille, ages 15 and 17. During political unrest, government militias killed their parents, and so over the course of 18 months, they fled […]

Indonesia’s forest is burning. Around 8,100 square miles of land, almost equivalent to the size of New Jersey, is in flames. According to the World Resource Institute, the daily emissions from the forest fires since the first week of September are larger than the average daily emissions produced by the entire U.S. domestic economy. Forests […]

Chapter 1: Why are Russian troops in Syria? Putin has always been in Syria’s civil war. Long before Bashar al-Assad’s troops fired the first shots that set off the Syrian rebellion, Russia was stocking the armories that assured the Assad family’s minority Alawite sect’s grip on power. When Syrian blood flowed through the streets of […]

There are more refugees in the world today than ever before, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The UN figures show that roughly 60 million people were forcibly displaced in 2014. The UN report says the number of individuals forced to leave their homes due to conflict and persecution increased […]

The Fletcher School’s Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies had the pleasure of hosting Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Representative to the United States, this past week. Her father, Sami Abdul Rahman, was a former deputy prime minister of the KRG and a leader in the Kurdish struggle against Saddam Hussein. Ms. […]

On October 21st, 2015, the first round of the first parliamentary elections held in Egypt since 2011 came to a close. A majority of available seats were won by loyalists to President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, in an election in which approximately one-fifth of the electorate voted. The election has been hailed by Al-Sisi as the […]

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has operated in Yemen since 2006, when it was called al-Qaeda in Yemen (AQY). While al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been dubbed “al-Qaeda’s greatest direct threat to the United States” and is responsible for numerous attempted attacks on the U.S., the al-Qaeda branch has only expanded in the […]

Israel has experienced tremendous natural gas findings over the past 6 years, and there is currently debate over its future as an exporter, with an expressed desire by the government to export 40% of its offshore finds. While contracts have been signed with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, Israel has begun a campaign to encourage […]

Ashes of Hama by Raphael Lefevre provides a chronological description of the progression of the Syrian Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood). The book discusses the establishment of the Brotherhood and its evolution in Syrian politics. Lefevre does a fascinating job analyzing the Muslim Brotherhood institutionally and organizationally, provoking the reader to move beyond stereotypes about the Syrian […]

BY DAVID PAYNE Packed seats, people standing wherever they could find space, and a rush towards the stage at the end to meet the event’s stars. That scene, characteristic of a pop star’s reception, unfolded on October 27th when NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and 100-Year Starship Principal Dr. Mae Jemison spoke at Harvard’s JFK Jr. […]

  On the morning of October 9th 2015, I woke up to the news that the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet won the Nobel Peace Prize. In a time when terrorism, political bickering and popular discontent were threatening the legacy of the Tunisian revolution, the Quartet stepped in and engineered a nationwide dialogue. It worked. Tunisia […]