In The News

Nairobi Foreshadows Tomorrow’s Urban Conflicts

David Kilcullen October 1, 2013
The globe is more urban than ever with more than 65 percent of all people living in cities compared with 2 percent in 1800. Urbanization, the bulk of it near coasts, is a global megatrend challenging world leaders and planners along with climate change and population growth. The patterns expose vulnerabilities and encourage inequality: “The unprecedented pace and scale of urban growth will strain...

Kenya Pays Stiff Price for Intervening

Peter Fabricius September 26, 2013
Kenya’s intervention in the Somali civil war is the reason given for al-Shabab’s terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall that left dozens dead. The terrorist group, described as weakened in recent years by such intervention, controls much of southern and central Somalia, across the border to Kenya’s east. Kenyan troops had aided Ahmed Adobe, a Shabab rival in driving the group out of Somalia’...

Dignity Deficit Fuels Uprisings in the Middle East

Nayef Al-Rodhan September 10, 2013
The Arab Spring has pummeled a region with waves of hope for recovering lost dignity, short-lived success and then despair and more despair. Unending conflict has killed many and left millions more refugees. The international community has long empowered brutal dictators, in pursuit of oil or short-term stability, and then pointedly ignored dire conditions, overlooking blatant violations of human...

Iran’s Unwavering Support to Assad’s Syria

Karim Sadjadpour August 30, 2013
Syria depends on steady military and economic support from Iran. “The surprising endurance of the Iran-Syria alliance is made more striking by the fact that it is based on neither shared national interests nor religious values,” but shared contempt for Iraq under Saddam Hussein, as well as the United States and Israel, writes Karim Sadjadpour in an opinion essay for the Combating Terrorism Center...

New York Police Label Mosques as Terrorist Organizations

Adam Goldman, Matt Apuzzo August 30, 2013
The New York Police Department secretly labeled mosques as “terrorism organizations,” to allow surveillance, reports the Associated Press. “Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance,” write Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo. “Before the NYPD could target mosques...

Egypt Highlights Race Between Trade and Terror

Humphrey Hawksley August 15, 2013
The Arab Spring protests, with demands for representative government and economic stability, have disintegrated into violent power struggles. After one year, Egypt’s military removed the first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, from power and cracked down on protests by his supporters, leaving more than 500 dead. Violence unfolds in Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Iraq, too. Building...

Containing the Fire in Syria

Ryan Crocker July 23, 2013
The urge to do something, anything, to stem the bloodshed in Syria is intense. Ryan Crocker served as US ambassador to six countries including Syria, 1998 to 2001. Now a Kissinger senior fellow at Yale University, he reviews the history and explains how the civil war in Syria began well before the Arab Spring protests. In 1982, the Assad regime decimated the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in Hama and...