One day a Harvard economics professor asked his graduate class: “Who has ever been in Sierra Leone?” Students raised their hands, most of them non-Africans and none of them from Sierra Leone. And he continued: “Who has ever seen a cow in Sierra Leone?” This time, no more hands were raised. Believe it or not, […]

On December 9 2014, JMEPP Editor Zane Preston interviewed Dr. Abbas El-Mejren. Dr. Abbas El-Mejren is currently the Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative, within the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Watch the video interview below to hear Dr. El-Mejren discuss economic development challenges and prospects for Kuwait and the broader Gulf […]

BY DEREK PHAM While strategic ambiguity has been a significant instrument of US defense strategy in the Asia-Pacific, emerging regional threats and power imbalances have made this strategy increasingly difficult to justify. Strategic ambiguity insulates us from hard commitments in regional conflicts not directly related to our interests and exacerbates China’s uncertainty about our motivations. […]

In a rare sight this Monday, His Royal Highness Prince Turki bin Saud al-Faisal, former Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States and Dan Meridor, former Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, addressed a public audience together at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The former statesmen discussed instability in the Middle East, potential areas for […]

BY WILLIAM DENN At a friend’s wedding a couple weeks ago, I exchanged introductions with a woman seated next to me. Upon learning that I was an active duty soldier, she said, “Thank you for your service.” She was sincere, but awkwardly confessed that she didn’t quite know what to say when meeting soldiers who […]

“The Turtle’s Rage,” directed by Pary al-Qalqili, is a raw, intimate look into one man’s anguish over the loss of his homeland. That man is Pary’s exiled father, who recounts for his filmmaker daughter what it means to be Palestinian, to be in constant conflict with Israel, and what the realities of return look like […]

“Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone.” Those are the words of Hisham Melham, Washington bureau chief of Dubai-based media outlet Al-Arabiya. In a 2,000-word piece for Politico, Melham argues that Arab civilization has collapsed, and that it won’t be revived in his lifetime. Is this gloomy outlook overwrought, or simply […]

  I am honored to dedicate the APJ’s first blog post to a visionary who gallantly opted to sit on the right side of world history at the cost of his life: President Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. This African hero was killed, dismembered and buried in an unmarked grave on October 15, 1987 during […]

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” Ambassador Robert Ford, former United States Ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014 and Algeria from 2006 to 2008, discusses his experiences with the State Department in Iraq and Syria, US strategy in the Syrian Civil War, and Syria’s future. Ambassador Ford also gave a public […]

BY MELISSA SANDGREN Megan Smith grew up around engineers. Her grandfather helped build roads and bridges throughout the early 20th century and contributed to large portions of the transportation system in Indiana. Yet, when the young Smith enrolled at MIT in the early 1980s to study mechanical engineering, the question her grand- father asked her […]

On Thursday, October 2, 2014, Vice President Biden addressed an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on a range of foreign policy topics. As a special feature, the Kennedy School Review has collected student perspectives on some of the policy issues the vice president covered in his remarks. ———————– The Islamic State of […]

BY ADAM BANASIAK We usually find gas in new places with old ideas. Sometimes, also, we find gas in an old place with a new idea, but we seldom find much gas in an old place with an old idea. Several times in the past we have thought that we were running out of gas, […]