Asia

BY MATTHEW VIGEANT For the first time in two years, Iraq is back on many Americans’ radars. The media has flashed alerts about Al Qaeda taking over cities in Anbar Province, and death tolls being at their highest since 2008. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration and Congress blame each other for the violence as they debate […]

In Ayn al-Hilwe, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, you frequently hear a new term: “Death Convoys” (Qawafel al-Mawt). It refers to the extremely dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean that Palestinian refugees are resorting to after fleeing Syria and failing to find refuge in neighboring countries. In the Lampedusa tragedy in October 2013, dozens if not […]

Before the escalation of the Syrian conflict, general immunization rates for Syrian children were more than 90% [1]. Today, less than 70% of Syrian children are immunized [2]. This deterioration has manifested itself in at least 13 cases of polio as of November 2013 [3], a striking number for a debilitating disease eradicated in Syria more than a […]

This is part one of a two-part series on Saudi Arabia’s fossil fuel subsidies. This post discusses existing problems with Saudi Arabia’s subsidies program. The governments of developing, oil-exporting countries tend to maintain domestic fossil fuel prices at levels significantly lower than the free-market prices. Selling fossil fuels at domestic prices below the market leads […]

BY SHASHANK SHEKHAR SHUKLA As the city slept, the killer silently crept in. From the windows, doors, ledges and crevices, it came in silently, slaughtering not just hundreds but hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. The killer’s name was methyl isocyanate, and in 4 hours it instantly killed 8,000 people and maimed another 200,000. At […]

The follow article is a review of the book, Lustration and Transitional Justice: Personnel Systems in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, by Roman David (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp.312, $62.96  

His Majesty Prince Moulay Hicham of Morocco took the stage at Harvard’s Arab Weekend following Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan, switching the topic from education to the Arab Spring. “For decades we have internalized this feeling of defeat. It has literally kept us from doing anything…the Arab spring has shattered all that,” he said, […]

This post is the first in a series of posts summarizing events that took place at the 2013 Harvard Arab Weekend, the largest pan-Arab conference in North America. For more information about this event, please visit http://harvardarabweekend.org/ On November 9, three practitioners and academics came together at the Harvard Arab Weekend to discuss Syria’s daunting […]

BY DAN MCCONNELL As President Obama made the case for military action in Syria Sunday, he was clear that such actions would be proportional in scope, reiterating, “What we are envisioning is something limited.” Now that the President has placed the onus for a decision on the legislature, it is at least as important for […]

BY IRENE SHIH Much has been made this year about Zero Dark Thirty, Hollywood’s first stab at dramatizing the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) hunt for Osama bin Laden. Even Graham Allison, professor of government and founding dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has written about the Oscar-nominated film. A […]

BY CATHERINE LELAND  She’s the “most hated woman in Israel,” according to Foreign Policy magazine, and it doesn’t bother her at all.[i] Hanin Zoabi—a member of the Knesset, the legislative branch of the Israeli government—is, undeniably, a force. Elected in 2009, Zoabi is the first Palestinian Arab female elected to the Israeli parliament through an […]

BY JACOB KURIEN & BERNARD GEOXAVIER In the decades since it began its economic reforms in the early 1980s, China has experienced impressive growth rates—in some years exceeding 10 percent increases in gross domestic product (GDP). Since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, politician and reformist leader of the Communist Party of China, more than 500 […]