Conflict & Conflict Resolution

Mariana Budjeryn reflects on the tenth anniversary of her native Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity.

Peter Ajak argues that the strength and principles of democracy—and the resolve of the international community—are being tested in South Sudan.

Calder Walton recounts the succession of intelligence failures against the West over which Russian President Vladimir Putin has presided, the greatest of which being his decision to invade Ukraine.

Why does the U.S. Army rely on persuasion to influence military partners to improve their forces despite repeated failures that undermine U.S. foreign policy goals? The army prioritizes its role as a fighting force, not an advisory group. U.S. leaders have developed an ideology—the cult of the persuasive—to advance army bureaucratic interests.

Meghan Garrity details the history of mass expulsions since the centennial of the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.

Meghan M. Garrity, an International Security Program postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center discussed her research on government-sanctioned mass expulsion events at a virtual seminar on November 3, 2022.

Charli Carpenter comments on  U.S. President Joe Biden's executive order, issued in February 2022, releasing $7 billion in frozen, U.S.-held Afghan central bank reserves. It has been proposed to use half of the funds to pay reparations to the families of 9/11 victims.

Charli Carpenter elaborates on three important reasons to believe that the systemic mass rape allegations in Ukraine are highly likely to be evaluated by U.N. war crimes investigators and prosecuted in war crimes courts.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, war refugees have been flooding across the country's western border into Poland, greeted by local Poles, international volunteers, and a few small NGOs operating in the country. How is this effort going three weeks into Europe's biggest refugee crisis since World War II? In Poland, Charli Carpenter asked these questions of journalists, aid workers, and Polish citizens.

Stephen Walt offers a tentative and far-from-comprehensive survey of what scholars have to say about the war in Ukraine.