Articles

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian recounts his 544 days in an Iranian prison during a talk with R. Nicholas Burns of the Harvard Kennedy School.

The fall of Aleppo is a human catastrophe. It’s also a demonstration of the perils of choosing the middle course in a military conflict. Sometimes it’s possible to talk and fight at the same time. But in Syria, the U.S. decision to pursue a dual-track, halfway approach made the mayhem worse.

Alliances between local combatants and neighboring rulers played a crucial role in the Congo Wars. Yet the transnational dimensions of the conflicts remain understudied. Case studies reveal that the rulers of Angola, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe intervened in Congo to secure their own political survival. They forged alliances to thwart domestic rebels supported by foreign rulers or to gain access to resources that could ensure the loyalty of domestic elites.

A discussion of the state of play in the apparent final days of the Iranian nuclear negotiations and the stumbling blocks remaining on the path toward a final deal

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator was heading back to Tehran on Sunday to consult with his nation’s leadership, as negotiators remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran’s nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago.

Israeli election results promise more settlements and warnings on Iran, with scant chance of a Palestinian state, Walt says

"The P5+1 should set aside the effort to craft an all-at-once comprehensive bargain and instead adopt a strategy of negotiating incremental agreements. An incremental approach has a number of advantages. The negotiators could focus on one sticking point at a time, without having to coordinate agreement on all of them at once. Negotiators could defer currently intractable issues, like enrichment capacity, until greater trust is built or new opportunities arise. Most importantly, the compromises already achieved under the JPA could be maintained and consolidated, independently of the ups and downs of ongoing negotiations."

Why do states allow and even encourage extremist nonstate actors to intervene in an international conflict in violation of domestic and international law, as well as state interests? Why do states fail subsequently to rein in these actors as the counterproductive consequences of their actions become apparent? This article explores one case of such puzzling state behavior, Israel's relationship with the messianic settler movement. The movement is challenging the state, and its actions regarding the territories Israel captured in 1967 have complicated efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

"The Shia militia has emerged as one of the most powerful and important actors in the Middle East security environment. Despite this trend, they remain poorly understood by scholars and policymakers alike. This article seeks to expand our understanding of the militia as a type of non-state armed group through an examination of Shia militia movements in Iraq between 2003 and 2009."