Cyberweapons: Bold Steps in a Digital Darkness?
June 8, 2012 2 min. read

The following piece was originally published in on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  by  R. Scott Kemp R. Scott Kemp is an associate research scholar with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Before this, he was science advisor in the Office […]

Read more
A Candid Discussion with Payam Akhavan
June 7, 2012 21 min. read

Dr. Payam Akhavan is a Professor of International Law at McGill University, co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre, and the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunals at The Hague. Dr. Akhavan sat down with Reza Akhlaghi, senior writer at Foreign Policy Association, to discuss the following issues:  […]

Read more
Fractional Frictions Grip Iraq
June 6, 2012 4 min. read

Over at the Huffington Post (via AP), Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Brian Murphy raise an interesting point regarding the political crisis currently gripping Iraq’s fragile parliamentary patchwork. They note leadership in Iran is desperately clinging to their power proxy in Baghdad – Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, and his factional allies in the Iraqi National Alliance. Their […]

Read more
Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions and Political Theory
June 3, 2012 4 min. read

Political liberalism emphasizes the effectiveness of diplomacy and cooperation to solve international problems. Under the principle of liberalism, countries’ interactions to solve shared problems can result in mutually beneficial resolutions. Contrastingly, liberalism’s counterpart, political realism, emphasizes the maintenance and use of power in a country’s domestic and international agendas. Stressing countries’ individual struggles for power, […]

Read more
“Flame” and Smoke
June 1, 2012 1 min. read

Me culpa. Yesterday I speculated about the origins of Flame and noted at the outset that Stuxnet generally is attributed to Israel, perhaps with the United States as an accessory. In an exhaustive report published this morning, the New York Times reports that Stuxnet was in fact a U.S. product, part of a cyber-sabotage program […]

Read more
The Iranian Women in American Journalism Project (IWAJ): Kelly Golnoush Niknejad
June 1, 2012 7 min. read

How at the time a recent graduate of Columbia Journalism School, from her parents’ living room in Boston, launched one of the most trusted and sophisticated sources of news and commentary on Iran? Born in Iran, Kelly Golnoush Niknejad moved to the United States when she was 17. She holds a B.A. in political science and writing and a law degree […]

Read more
There’s “Flame,” But Where’s the Smoke?
May 31, 2012 3 min. read

Upon hearing of Flame, the recently discovered computer malware sometimes described as the most insidious and sophisticated ever, one’s first thought is bound to be of Stuxnet. Upon discovery of that virus a year and a half ago, analyses by top cyber-security firms soon yielded smoking-gun proof that Stuxnet was custom-made to knock out uranium […]

Read more
Is Turkey Moving Away from the West? A Critical Redux (by Miguel Vargas)
May 31, 2012 23 min. read

Dear FPA Blog followers, You might know that I feature some analyses and articles not published elsewhere for the benefit of this blog. This post is one of them; it is written by an exceedingly capable student of mine at Princeton – Miguel Vargas, whose final article for the course ‘International Relations of the Middle […]

Read more
A Candid Discussion with Michele Dunne of the Atlantic Council: Egypt’s Prospects for Democracy
May 30, 2012 5 min. read

Dr. Michele Dunne is director of the Atlantic Council‘s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. She has served in the White House on the National Security Council staff, and on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She was also a diplomat in Cairo and Jerusalem. She sat down with […]

Read more
The Iranian Women in American Journalism Project (IWAJ): Nazila Fathi
May 25, 2012 5 min. read

Nazila Fathi is a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Before her current role at Harvard, she was a Tehran correspondent for The New York Times for 17 years. As one of the first female journalists in post-revolutionary Iran working for a major Western news media outlet, Nazila worked with some of the […]

Read more
Iran is Mad at Google but Likes Wikipedia
May 23, 2012 3 min. read

If you go to Google Maps and type in “Persian Gulf,” you will be taken to the waterway between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It will put a marker in the middle of the waterway. But it will not inform you the name of said waterway. If you go to Google Maps and type in “Arabian […]

Read more
U.S. Preparing Carrots and Sticks for Iran
May 23, 2012 2 min. read

The U.S. is preparing both carrots and sticks for Iran heading into the P5+1 talks with Iran today in Baghdad. There is an art and a science to good negotiating and it’s clear that Team Obama is making a conscious effort to to define the parameters of this unfolding narrative. Take, for example, this report […]

Read more

Popular from Press