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Abstract Starting in late 2011, “LGBT rights” became a prominent and contentious part of the international development agenda. While most of the resulting attention has been directed to questions of aid conditionality, this essay instead aims to preliminarily map the range of policies set out by twelve of the largest development agencies on “LGBT” or […]

After years of tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and Iran have held the highest-level talks since the 1979 Revolution to negotiate the status of Iran’s nuclear program and have set a November 24 deadline to come to a deal. The Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy’s Lauren Leatherby asks Dr. […]

The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University hosted a talk by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Tarek Masoud on Monday, November 9. The lecture, entitled “When God Speaks, Does Anyone Listen?” was based on a study Dr. Masoud conducted on one of his recent trips to Egypt. Dr. Masoud began the presentation by […]

BY MITCHELL ALVA Will history judge the 2014 midterm elections a Congressional wave year? The election certainly felt like a repeat of 2006 and 2010. After all, in all three elections, the party of an unpopular sitting President suffered significant losses in both the House of Representatives and the Senate with one chamber of Congress […]

Tunisia’s parliamentary elections, held on October 26, resulted in Nidaa Tounes garnering 39.71% of the vote and Ennahda receiving 31.79%, robbing the Islamists of their leading seat. Nidaa Tounes’s victory has been widely hailed in the media as a victory of secularism over Islamism. This discourse fits neatly into Western conceptions of modernization and secularization […]

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 […]

BY TAYLOR WOODS It has been a love-fest on the campaign trail this year. During weekends in October and the days leading up to Election Day, I’ve been a volunteer canvasser knocking on doors for Mike Michaud’s run for governor of Maine, US Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s reelection campaign in New Hampshire, and Wendy Davis’s run […]

  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 […]

The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research released findings from the most recent California Health Interview Survey (2011-2012) on various health indicators among adult Californians, including insurance status, nutrition, clinical health outcomes, health behaviors, food insecurity, and English proficiency. Health profiles were published for all racial groups and provided disaggregated data for several Asian American […]

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 […]