Christine Lagarde visited Brazil on Sunday to buoy her candidacy for the IMF’s top post. At a press conference Lagarde stated: “I will ensure that the Fund represents the diversity of all its members.’’ She went on to indicate that a European should not automatically head the IMF. Perhaps this should be the last time? […]
The most difficult thing to countenance when one is an analyst-watcher-critic of Afghan politics and society is the nearly weekly news that some child or innocent woman has been killed in NATO airstrikes or nightly door to door counter-terrorist operations. This, any time of the year, any year at all. But this is a different […]
Japan’s opposition parties, the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito party, have arranged to submit a no-confidence motion against Democratic Party of Japan Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his cabinet, possibly as early as Thursday. By presenting the motion, the two parties are protesting Kan’s handling of the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake […]
I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. on the way religious education structures pluralism in Pakistan. Matthew Nelson, a Lecturer at SOAS, University of London and a Fellow at the Wilson Center, offered a deeply interesting discussion on ways to think about religious “madrasa” […]
Several days ago, my co-blogger, Finn Maigaard, and I were chatting via skype with Ms. Giji Gya of ISIS Europe and her team on their latest project: CSDP Maps. This excellent think-tank, well known for its European Security Review series, has been working for several years in developing an extremely useful tool for researchers, practitioners, […]
If, as the report prepared for the U.S. Agency for International Development estimated, the death toll resulted from Haiti’s January 10 earthquake was between 46,000 and 85,000, many people wonder where Haitian leaders found the additional 231,000 bodies in their revised figures of 316,000 published earlier this year on the anniversary of the devastating earthquake. […]
Imagine if tens of thousands of young Americans marched on The Mall to protest the Electoral College, the appointment of Supreme Court justices and the two-party system because they suddenly decided these institutions were not democratic enough. Something roughly equivalent to that is now taking place in Spain. While the country’s unemployment rate and general […]
It was not easy being Sergei Bagapsh – the late, gregarious and moderate Abkhazian leader trapped between Georgia’s gun-sights and Russia’s self-serving, smothering embrace: even his last name suggests an exhalation of frustration. But it will be even harder to find a successor able enough to lead the tiny, mostly unrecognised country towards territorial security […]
According to a Newsweek Japan feature, stress and lack of privacy is taking its toll on victims of the March 11 quake and tsunami living in evacuee shelters in Japan’s Tohoku region. As the media and politicians are spouting slogans like, “Tohoku people are strong,” “We are all one,” “You will never walk alone,” “One […]
“But, of course she was so fine. Once in her prime, she was sublime! She kept a flow that brought the fellows to their knees.” While few people still honor her existence with such passion, grace and enthusiasm, attendees filled the ballroom with praises and gratitude because it was her night. Exhausted and hurt, her face bears scars of […]
The Following piece is written by a Yemeni-based journalist who writes for the Foreign Policy Blogs network and, due to serious security concerns, remains anonymous. In a recent interview with Reuters, Hisham Sharaf Abdullah, the Minister of Industry and Trade said that Yemen’s uprising had cost so far an estimated US$5 billion. “We have reports […]
The Following piece is written by a Yemeni-based journalist who writes for the Foreign Policy Blogs network and, due to serious security concerns, remains anonymous. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal In a recent interview with news channel al-Alam, Naif Alsharabi, a Yemeni political analyst and member of Yemen’s Public Committees revealed that in his […]
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