Conflict & Conflict Resolution

Stephen Walt writes that those who favor foreign policy restraint believe the United States should trade and invest in other countries, encourage other states to do the same, and be open to managed immigration instead of building walls in a fit of xenophobia.

The plight of Armenians (in Nagorny Karabakh) is not of America's doing. A string of poor leaders in Yerevan, Armenia, are at least partially to blame. Russia's failure to live up to its formal and informal commitments to come to the rescue of Armenia and Artsakh played a significant role, too. But even though the current tragedy is not America's fault, Biden should act to defend America's values and interests by, at the very least, compelling Aliyev's government to immediately offer legally binding, verifiable guarantees of security and safety for Karabakh Armenians as well as of their right to preserve their identity and culture.

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.

International Security Program Fellow Megan M. Turnbull, an international affairs professor at the University of Georgia, discussed the conditions leading to election violence in Nigeria during a virtual seminar hosted by the International Security Program on November 10, 2022.

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.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, at the end of 2021 nearly 90 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide. What makes Uganda's expulsion of 50,000 Asians distinct? Unlike most displaced people, the Asians expelled from Uganda weren't fleeing conflict or natural disasters. Instead, the forced displacement that year is what political scientists call a mass expulsion. That's when a government implements an ethnically targeted policy to remove a group of people, en masse, without individual legal evaluations and refuses to allow them to return.

A state’s declining international status activates two sets of social psychological dynamics that contribute to domestic conflict, alienating some groups and intensifying others’ nationalism. These dynamics can contribute to center-periphery conflict in multinational states after acute status loss.

Kelly Greenhill argues that by exploiting political divisions that exist within targeted states, the threatened or actual deployment of engineered flows of migrants has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail, its use.

Stephen Walt writes: So if some political leader came to me for advice or wanted to know what I thought about some foreign-policy maneuver they were contemplating, I'd ask them if they took nationalism into account, and I'd remind them of what happens when major powers ignore it.

Recap of MEI event "Egypt: Lumbering State, Restless Society."