CAUCASUS
2007
Iran
Book Chapter
By Abbas Maleki, Former Senior Research Associate, International Security Program
Iran has not acted as a dragon breathing ideological fire across the region, but rather as a traditional entrepreneur and reliable trader.
2007
Iran
Book Chapter
By Abbas Maleki, Former Senior Research Associate, International Security Program
Iran has not acted as a dragon breathing ideological fire across the region, but rather as a traditional entrepreneur and reliable trader.
AP Photo
June 2009
"Improving Russia-U.S. Relations: The Next Steps"
Policy Memo
By Thomas M. Nichols, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom
There is no endemic reason for Russian-U.S. relations to be as tense as they have become over the past several years. Th is situation is largely due, on one side, to mishandling of Russian affairs by both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and on the other by the obvious manipulation of anti-Americanism for domestic gain by the Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev administrations in Russia. Unfortunately, this means that only unilateral U.S. action can undermine the cynical policies of the Russian leadership and restore dynamism to the Russian-U.S. relationship.
AP Photo
January 29, 2009
"Iran's Islamic Revolution and Its Future"
Journal Article, Viewpoints, The Iranian Revolution at 30 Special Edition
By Abbas Maleki, Former Senior Research Associate, International Security Program
"Regime sustainability despite different internal crises and foreign threats underlines the fact that Iran enjoys a relatively rational decision-making process. The central slogan of the Iranian Revolution was "Independence, Freedom, and Islamic Republic." Today, Iran is an independent state, as it does not belong to an Eastern or a Western bloc. Although the country has not realized its ambition of economic independence, the revolution has provided economic welfare. Rural development has improved people's lives by providing villages with water, electricity, and infrastructure. The essence of independence also
referred to the specific relations between the Iranian monarchy and the United States. The US-sponsored 1953 coup against the popular Muhammad Mosaddeq government made Iran an American client state, leading to Iranian dependence in all aspects."
AP Photo
January 29, 2009
"The Geopolitical Factor in Iran's Foreign Policy"
Journal Article, Viewpoints, The Iranian Revolution at 30 Special Edition
By Kayhan Barzegar, Research Fellow, Project on Managing the Atom/International Security Program
"Revolutions either expand to export their ideologies or preserve themselves from the outside world. The 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran is no exception. A careful reading of Iran's actions in the region shows how and why Iran has shifted its policies to meet the latter aim. Since the revolution, Iran's leaders have faced the challenge of balancing their ideological (idealism) and geopolitical (pragmatism) approaches to foreign policy. Gradually, the Iranian leadership has come to focus on the geopolitical factor in the conduct of foreign policy; today, ideology one factor among many other sources of Iran's power, and serves the aim of preserving Iran's national security and interests...."
AP Photo
January 11, 2009
"The Dark Side of Self-Determination"
Op-Ed, Daily News Egypt
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"Self-determination has turned out to be an ambiguous moral principle. Woodrow Wilson thought it would solve problems in central Europe in 1919, but it created as many as it solved. Adolf Hitler used the principle to undermine fragile states in the 1930's. Today, with less than 10% of the world's states being homogeneous, treating self-determination as a primary moral principle could have disastrous consequences in many regions."
AP Photo
Summer 2008
"Identities, Interests and the Resolution of the Abkhaz Conflict"
Journal Article, Caucasian Review of International Affairs, issue 3, volume 2
By Ondrej Ditrych, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 2007-2008
"The recent crisis in Abkhazia reveals a fundamental qualitative change in the conflict in which the balance among three main actors is shifting, and increasingly the conflict plays a more important role in the triangular relations between Georgia, Russia and the West. The search for a new equilibrium in the conflict, one that would be an optimal outcome for the actors involved, will require rethinking the mutually constitutive roles (identities) and interests they want to assume with respect to the conflict and the entire South Caucasus...."
Michael Bronner
August 16, 2008
"When the War Ends, Start to Worry"
Op-Ed, New York Times
"EVEN as Russia and Georgia continue their on-again, off-again struggle over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a frenzied tea-leaf reading about the war's global political ramifications has broken out across airwaves and think-tank forums. But as the situation on the ground recedes inevitably to some new form of the pernicious "frozen conflict" that has plagued the region since Georgia's civil wars of the early 1990s, few are paying attention to a less portentous but equally critical international threat: an increase in the longstanding, rampant criminality in the conflict zones that is likely to further destabilize the entire Caucasus region and at worst provide terrorist groups with the nuclear material they have long craved."
July/August 2008
"Separatism's Final Country"
Journal Article, Foreign Affairs, issue 4, volume 87
By Richard N. Rosecrance, Adjunct Professor; Senior Fellow, International Security Program; Director, Project on U.S.-China Relations and Arthur A. Stein
"Muller argues that ethnonationalism is the wave of the future and will result in more and more independent states, but this is not likely. One of the most destabilizing ideas throughout human history has been that every separately defined cultural unit should have its own state. Endless disruption and political introversion would follow an attempt to realize such a goal. Woodrow Wilson gave an impetus to further state creation when he argued for "national self-determination" as a means of preventing more nationalist conflict, which he believed was a cause of World War I...."
December 2007
"On Classifying Terrorism: A Potential Contribution of Cluster Analysis for Academics and Policymakers"
Journal Article, Defense and Security Analysis, issue 4, volume 23
By Erica Chenoweth, Associate, International Security Program and Elizabeth Lowham
The authors argue that classifying terrorist groups based on their motivations (i.e. Islamic, nationalist-separatist, left-wing, etc) causes analysts to ignore important similarities between such groups. This article suggests using cluster analysis to classify terrorist groups based on their motives and their tactics. Using the U.S. State Department's list of Significant Terrorist Incidents through 2003, the authors demonstrate that trends in terrorist attacks among groups with seemingly disparate motives and locations provide insights into dynamic nature of terrorism over the past several decades. Specifically, certain terrorist incidents in places as diverse as Lebanon, Georgia, and Colombia have more in common than is typically suspected, suggesting that such groups monitor and learn from one another's activities.
