Reports & Papers

This paper was written by Stephen R. Covington, with a Foreword written by Kevin Ryan.

In Putin’s view, any solution short of changing the European security system—including full integration, separation by erecting new walls, freezing the status quo around Russia, or partnering with other countries to counter-balance the powers in the European system—only means Russia’s inevitable loss of great power status and the loss of his personal power at home.

During the spring 2015 semester, Professor Michael C. Hudson assembled eight leading Middle East scholars under the auspices of the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs to participate in a study group titled Rethinking the Arab State: the Collapse of Legitimacy in Arab Politics. Over the course of the semester these experts used a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to  analyze the crisis of legitimacy of the Arab state in the wake of the 2011 uprisings.

This paper explains changes in NATO's nationbuilding strategy for Afghanistan over time as an internal push-and-pull struggle between the major NATO contributors. It distinguishes between he "light footprint" phase, which had numerous problems connected to limited resources and growing insurgency (2003–2008), NATO's adoption of a comprehensive approach (CSPMP) and counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy (2009–2011), the transition and drawdown (2011–2014), and the Enduring Partnership (beyond 2014). The paper explains NATO's drawdown, stressing both increased budgetary strictures compelling decisionmakers to focus on domestic concerns nd predominant national narratives connected to a protracted stabilization effort in Afghanistan.

The advent of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) signals the international community’s commitment to ending genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, and serves as a declaration that state sovereignty will no longer be a shield behind which perpetrators of mass atrocities can hide. Despite achieving consensus for RtoP’s vision among UN member states in 2005, efforts to move RtoP from words to action have stalled.

This article addresses the question of why religion becomes a central issue in some civil wars whereas in others—even many of those whose primary combatants identify strongly with a particular religion—it has not.

"...Leaders of the Georgian, Abkhaz, and Ossetian national movements even consider Soviet federalism to be one of the main causes of the exacerbation of ethnic conflicts in Georgia and are not eager to reinstitute a federal structure. From the Georgian perspective, the Moscow leadership used federalism as an instrument to divide and rule and weaken the Georgian movement for national independence. From the Abkhaz and South Ossetian perspectives, Soviet federalism has put the various national communities in a hierarchical relation toward each other. This kind of ethnic stratification runs contrary to the principle of national self-determination, which pre-supposes the equality of all national communities. The exacerbation of ethnic conflicts in Georgia during the first half of the 1990s and the failure of existing federal arrangements to address these problems led to war in South Ossetia and then in Abkhazia. These wars resulted in the creation of two de facto states in these regions...."

A discussion about recent events in the Russian-Chechen conflict and possible connections between Chechen fighters and international Islamist organizations.

Book by Ashton Carter, Desmond Ball, Hans Bethe, Bruce Blair, Paul Bracken, Hillman Dickinson, Richard Garwin, Kurt Gottfried, David Holloway, Henry Kendall, Lloyd Leavitt, Jr., Richard Ned Debow, Condoleezza Rice, Peter Stein, John Steinbruner, Lucja Swiatkowski, and Paul Tomb.

Islamist organizations are generally considered to be the strongest and most credible opposition to incumbent regimes throughout the Arab world. Fear of Islamic takeovers has led regimes and other outside powers to justify not holding free elections, citing examples that include the Algerian election of 1991, the Iranian Revolution, the AKP victory in Turkey and the perceived popularity of Islamist opposition groups throughout much of the Arab world (Brumberg 2002). Yet, other analysts have questioned the actual strength of Islamist movements within the Arab world, noting that although Islamists may be the main challenger, few have actually been successful in taking power (Roy 1994).