CONFLICT AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION
June 16, 2013
"Win a Few, Lose a Few"
Op-Ed, The Huffington Post
By Charles G. Cogan, Associate, International Security Program
"The United States and its Allies outsmarted the Russians on Libya — by enticing it into supporting a UN Security Council vote against Qadhafi. So far, Russia has outsmarted the West on Syria, by blocking a move in the Security Council against Bashar al-Asad."
iStock
June 15, 2013
"Apocalyptic Words from Men in Hiding"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
"The fact that both [Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah] must remain in hiding and cannot openly take a stroll among their compatriots in their lovely capital city, Beirut, reflects at one level the seriousness and dangers of this war. They both fear being assassinated, and for good reason: Several of their predecessors and warriors in arms in fact have been assassinated in recent years. This also mirrors the intensity and the stakes of the war, which both sides see as a zero-sum contest in which one side will win and the other will disappear from history."
June 12, 2013
"Insights Into Arab Youth Today"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
"Young Arabs continue to use the new public spheres that they created -- in civil society, on the street, in the communications world -- to achieve the full promises of their revolutions. Many of them define those promises in ways that far transcend merely the end of dictatorship and creating a functioning democracy, to include the central demands for “social justice,” citizen empowerment, equitable access to food and social services, more social trust and less polarization, and a voice in the shaping of the state and its values and policies."
June 11, 2013
"Qusayr Portends Great Danger, Waste and Stupidity for All"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
"Pro- and anti-Syria/Hezbollah groups in Lebanon have been quarreling and shooting each other for decades. That dynamic now will expand, as the Syrian and Lebanese arenas merge into a single battleground, fuelled by the active determination to fight for their survival by both Hezbollah and by Lebanese Salafists and others who see Hezbollah’s bold new militarism as spearheading Shiite-Iranian-Syrian domination of Lebanon. It remains unclear if Lebanon’s heightened tensions and shootouts will remain confined to traditional arenas in the north, northeast and south, or expand into Beirut and other regions."
May 2013
"From Power-Sharing to Majoritarianism: Iraq's Transitioning Political System"
Report Chapter
By Nussaibah Younis, Research Fellow, International Security Program
"The greatest political challenge facing Iraq today is its transition from a power-sharing to a majoritarian form of government without a concomitant depoliticization of ethno-sectarian identities."
June 6, 2013
"Turkey and Jordan Mirror the Citizen-State Challenge"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
The loose parallels between events in Jordan and Turkey reflect the wider reality across the Middle East of citizens and states that have not fully defined their relationships through a social contract that both shape and see as legitimate. We see this in every country in the region, without exception, in Arab countries that suffer their own modern legacy of dysfunctional statehood and citizenship, and in non-Arab Israel, Turkey and Iran.
AP Images
June 5, 2013
"The great powers’ relationship hinges on the Pacific"
Op-Ed, Financial Times
By Robert B. Zoellick, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
The upcoming Annenberg summit between Presidents Barack Obama of the US and Xi Jinping of China could define the strategic relationship between the two most powerful countries in the world for years to come. Mr Xi has called for a “new type of great power relationship”. Tom Donilon, the US national security adviser, has suggested a “new model of relations between an existing power and an emerging one”.
Associated Press
June 5, 2013
"US is Syria’s only hope"
Op-Ed, Boston Globe
By Nicholas Burns, Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics, Harvard Kennedy School
Given the recent surge of assistance being given to the Assad regime by Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia, Professor Burns sees this as a call to action for US intervention, which, he argues, may be Syria's only hope at this point.
International Monetary Fund
June 3, 2013
"Conditioning the Arab Transition"
Op-Ed, Project Syndicate
By Ishac Diwan, Lecturer in Public Policy, Middle East Initiative and Hedi Larbi
"While short-term pain is not unusual following the end of despotic regimes, long and protracted transitions can be terribly costly, requiring decades for societies to recover. Political impasse is not only depressing economies by discouraging trade and investment; it is also preventing the formation of governments that could implement much-needed economic and institutional reforms – and thus threatening to take these countries into a long downward spiral."
iStock
June 1, 2013
"Freedom of Expression Is Our Second Arab Battle"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
The battle for freedom of expression has been waged for decades in many Arab countries, but before the digital age the security-state mind-control colonels could isolate and expatriate those views they did not like and that did not conform to official propaganda, while controlling most of the information that citizens obtained through available public media. The digital age changed this, and millions of citizens can now access news and views from thousands of sources on their cell phones and mobile computers, breaking the monopoly on news and ideas that governments formerly enjoyed.
