In mid-September, 2015, JMEPP Co-Editor-in-Chief Kristin Wagner interviewed Mahmoud Jibril, Former Prime Minister of Libya and president of the National Forces Alliance (تحالف القوى الوطنية) political party. Watch the discussion of Libya’s post-Gaddafi transition, reflections on leadership, and the role of external actors and foreign assistance in Libya during and since the revolution, below:

BY JESSICA ZUCKER Standing side-by-side in the White House rose garden on September 25, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that they had reached a “common understanding” to combat “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property.” In a widely anticipated announcement, the two leaders also agreed to respond to requests for law enforcement […]

BY DAVID PAYNE Within 50 years, human beings will go on one-way journeys to permanent settlements on Mars. That claim is audacious but is being increasingly echoed by the likes of Elon Musk and supported by the plans of various companies, governments, and non-profit organizations. With the premiere of The Martian this week and as […]

BY ORGA CADET This week, more than 150 heads of state will convene at the UN’s headquarters in New York for the 70th session of the General Assembly. The theme? “The United Nations at 70: the road ahead for peace, security and human rights.” One of the session’s objectives is to “draw lessons from the […]

BY PAUL CHEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  Seven-hundred million Chinese have grown out of poverty since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched economic reform programs in 1979. Harvard’s Tony Saich summarizes the reform efforts as introducing economic liberalization while retaining political control, a governance model that […]

Introduction The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is unlike any other Middle Eastern country in its vision for a clean energy future. Its status as a top oil producer has not enticed the UAE to rest on its resource-rich laurels. Instead, its creative public/private partnerships for power generation, attractive regulations for foreign investment, and ambitious renewable […]

Introduction The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) is a product of Iraq’s and Syria’s sectarian polarization, political dysfunction, and the alienation of the local Sunni population from the Iraqi and Syrian regimes. The US-led anti-ISIS coalition was triggered by the jihadists’ capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June 2014.[i] While dramatic, […]

President Obama’s Middle East policy record in his first six years in office was mixed and lacked significant achievements. Overall, Obama’s approach was cautious, as the United States reacted to fast-moving events. U.S. strategy predominantly focused on degrading terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula (AQAP) to prevent a major attack on […]

Growing Prevalence and Influence of Arab Migration Trends In recent years, Arab emigration has been growing. Arab expatriates constitute approximately 6 percent of the local population in the countries across North Africa and the Levant, a percentage that is twice as high as the world average.[i] Notwithstanding such significant patterns of out-migration, the impact of […]

BY KHALED K. Last week, an 18-month-old baby was burned to death in an attack by Israeli settlers in Douma, a village in the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. The settlers left graffiti that read ‘Revenge’ and ‘Long Live Messiah’. The incident made international headlines; however, it is far from unusual. Every week, […]

BY TYLER S. THIGPEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  The conversation that most haunted Marshall Chambers—former director of strategic initiatives for Barrow County Schools, a rural district in Georgia—happened in 2001 at one of the district’s high schools. Chambers, himself a graduate of Piedmont College in Demorest, […]

A global response will be the next test of civilization. BY DEREK PHAM In July 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale addressed 65 countries’ delegation heads at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. They had convened to discuss the Indochinese refugee crisis, which, earlier that year, had reached a breaking point. The then-five members of the […]