When grotesque, anti-Semitic remarks made by President Mohamed Morsi in September of 2010 were widely published earlier this week, they were met with appropriate outrage by the Western world. Calling Zionists the “descendants of apes and pigs” is completely unacceptable coming from anyone, let alone the president of a country, despite Morsi’s attempts to explain that his remarks were … Read more
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMa-yfs1rzY&width=665 What is the situation in Azawad, Mali, and what are the lessons that we can learn from there for similarly situated countries? Staff writer Matthew Disler ’16 talks about his article “A Mirage in the Sahara: The Fragility of Azawad” in the 2012 winter issue of the Harvard Political Review. Read the full article here. … Read more
Like most seasoned American disaffecteds, I was anything but excited about sitting through last year’s low-intensity Obama-Romney slugfest. Of much more significance than my night spent at Harvard Obama headquarters (correction: the IOP), I’ve had the fortune of being on the ground to experience two momentous Middle Eastern elections in the last seven months. Studying at Alexandria … Read more
From 1986 to 1989, the Kurds of Iraq suffered through one of the grizzliest genocides in human history. It was the First Gulf War, and Saddam Hussein was executing his al-Anfal campaign –a psychopathic bid to rid an ethnically fractured nation of its ‘Kurdish problem.’ Through the use of chemical weapons, the ‘concentration’ of Kurds … Read more
Beijing has always been good at being ‘off the charts.’ Anyone who has observed China’s remarkable economic growth or watched the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics can attest to this fact. Recent air pollution readings coming out of Beijing keep in step with this tradition. At 8 p.m, on January 12th, Beijing’s Air Quality … Read more
Claims and Concerns The South China Sea has long been a flashpoint for regional rivalries and tensions. Subject to a range of competing territorial claims—including from Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan, the South China Sea is at the nexus of competing and converging interests. Through these contested waters flows over one-third of world … Read more
Presently, the War on Drugs faces crisis. The United States has thrown more money at restricting drug flows than any other nation, and yet continues to suffer high drug use rates. Despite the Obama administration’s rhetorical efforts to adjust the U.S. approach on drugs, our primary focus remains on interdiction and law enforcement. These strategies … Read more
Latvia is usually quite unremarkable: in the words of The Economist, “Even Latvians’ fans rarely call them exciting.” Yet the obscure Baltic nation has recently drawn attention, along with its neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, for its quick recovery from the financial crisis through strict austerity and internal devaluation. Indeed, Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director, has … Read more
It is not every day that half a country secedes, but that is exactly what happened in Mali earlier this year. On April 6, after months of fighting, a representative of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) formally declared independence for Azawad, a region in north Mali. The rebel group drove the … Read more
In June 2012, TrustLaw, a Thompson Reuters Foundation Service organization, released a poll ranking the G20 countries in terms of their overall environment towards women. Canada, not surprisingly, ranked first, while India ranked last, even behind Saudi Arabia. Why the world’s largest democracy has failed to create a safe and supportive environment for women remains … Read more