Regions

I would encourage all of you to check out The Foreign Policy Initiative. So far there is not a whole lot of breadth or depth of Africa coverage, but hopefully that will come. I’m adding it to my blogroll in hopes that it does.

The British government’s attempt to reverse its citizen Akmal Shaikh’s death sentence in China has met with very little sympathy from Chinese, internet reaction suggests. According to the website Global Voices Online, a common if unsurprising reaction seemed to be along the lines of “why should a foreigner deserve special treatment?” More interestingly, one fiery […]

The December 31st NYT had a great in-depth article on the US$2.9 billion Chinese investment in the Aynak mine in Afghanistan. While China’s Aynak investment is not a new story, it is certainly a fascinating case study in China’s bold mode of foreign engagement. With this deal to extract the enormously rich copper reserves in […]

Next week, there’s a conference on Capitol Hill focused on U.S. relations in the Middle East one year into the Obama Administration. The event is sponsored by The Project on Middle East Democracy, the United States Institute of Peace, and Georgetown University’s Center for Democracy and Civil Society and will include a keynote from Sen. Robert Casey […]

Federal officials have developed a sophisticated knack for dodging questions they don’t want to answer. And the State Department is in no way different. The State Department’s response to the Israeli intention of building a barrier along the Egyptian border was quite simple. It read: “Israel has a right to defend itself and to monitor […]

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s recent three day visit to Ankara to meet with his Turkish counterpart symbolizes both the emergence of Hariri out from under the shadow of his father’s legacy, as well as Turkey’s emergence as a major diplomatic player in the Middle East. Rafik Hariri was a self-made billionaire with friends in […]

The Palestinian Liberation Organization reached its heights under former Chairman Yasser Arafat, where the group obtained international legitimacy, became the leading party in the Palestinian Authority, and was regarded the only legitimate voice for the Palestinian people. Since the group’s ‘golden age,’ no other leader has managed to obtain the same level of support among […]

Turkey’s Jewish Community is 24,000 people strong, making it one of the biggest minority groups in Turkey. The Jews in Turkey are descendants of Sephardic Jews who settled there to escape the Spanish Inquisition. The community is some 500 years old. In recent years, numerous acts of anti-semitism such as the November 2003 truck bombs […]

Brazil’s Cash Assistance Program to Reduce Poverty For centuries Brazil promised prosperity amidst the constant plague of poverty and inequality. Forty years ago, the country’s military dictatorship managed to achieve the perplexing “Brazilian miracle” in economic growth, averaging 11 percent a year between 1968 to 1973, in part by concentrating income and deepening poverty to […]

How do you protest criticism of your country by a foreign leader? You summon his ambassador for talks and you offer him the smallest chair in the room. These were the actions of the Israeli Foreign Ministry following a press conference where the Turkish Prime Minister Mr. Recep Erdogan criticized Israel’s morality. Read full article […]

Partisans of the BNP might think the Awami League corrupt; similar a devotee of the Awami League might think the BNP fascistic.  Either way, there is always some ground on which to base these opinions.  The Awami League cannot be thought good, through time all the time.  Indeed, one might do well to always look […]

Radio Liberty, apparently. Yesterday, the first of their three part series exploring the middle class across the former Soviet bloc was dedicated specifically to ‘what it means to be middle class’. Yet without ever defining the slippery concept of middle class itself, Charles Recknagel concludes that, unlike their supposedly heroically liberal and democratic Western counterparts, […]