Middle East & North Africa

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.

Dozens of in-depth interviews in Lebanon after its civil war show how wartime displacement transformed localities in ways that transcend religious identity. With more than 80,000 people displaced from southern Lebanon because of fighting since October 7, 2023, the Israel-Gaza war is likely to strengthen Hezbollah’s grip when the displaced populations return and in localities in south Lebanon where displaced populations settle. 

Christopher Darnton responds to Rachel Metz's Winter 2022/23 article, "The Cult of the Persuasive: Why U.S. Security Assistance Fails."

The Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC)dataset measures reports of the conflict-related sexual violence committed by armed actors during the years 1989–2021. The dataset includes information about the prevalence, perpetrators, and forms of the reported sexual violence by each armed actor in each conflict-year. The information used to compile these data comes from three sources: the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. 

Mass killing such as cleansing and genocide is a common occurrence in war. Communities face the terrible choice of leaving their homes ahead of military action, or staying. Analysis of the previously restricted “Village Files,” a Zionist survey of Arab Palestinian communities conducted in the 1940s, finds that the key indicator of whether a community flees imminent violence is social cohesion.

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.

Stephen Walt provides A realist POV on the war in Ukraine, competition with China, COVID, and more in the second part of an interview with Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal.

NPR's Ari Shapiro speak with political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who studies civil resistance movements, about the protests China and Iran.

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.

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