BY SONIA BEN OUAGHRAM-GORMLEY On December 20, 2011, the press announced that the US government had requested two scientific journals – Science and Nature – to refrain from publishing a full account of an experiment that increased the transmissibility of bird flu virus H5N1.1 Government concerns that bioterrorists might use published data on the experimental details [...]
BY ALLISON MACFARLANE Although touted as looming for the last ten years, the nuclear renaissance has failed to materialize in any substantial way in the United States and Europe. New nuclear build is concentrated in a few countries, notably China, India, and Russia. But in the last five years a new group of nuclear “wannabes” [...]
BY TERRENCE LYONS In April 2011, the Center for Global Studies (CGS), George Mason University, sponsored a conference on Emerging Donors: Shifting Agendas in Development and Security. This conference brought together academics, researchers, and practitioners to investigate one of the central questions relating to one aspect of South-South relationships. This conference followed a 2010 CGS [...]
BY JAIME DAREMBLUM The Organization of American States (OAS), an international institution with headquarters in Washington D.C. consisting of 35 independent states of the Americas, was once the premier democratic forum in the Western Hemisphere. Now it is headed for irrelevance. In recent years, the OAS has been infected with the virus of radicalization, thanks [...]
BY HUGH GUSTERSON In the fall of 2007, I received an interview request from the New York Times journalist David Rohde, who was writing an article about the U.S. Army’s newly announced Human Terrain project – a program to embed anthropologists in military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan and send them out to “map the [...]
BY PHILIP AUERSWALD In the past century of dramatic political and technological change, the centrality of oil in foreign policy has been a constant. Political leaders and governments of all types have been compelled to ensure the reliability of oil supplies for military use, to reduce the potential vulnerability of their economies to fluctuations in [...]
BY VANESSA NOËL BROWN Located at the intersection of Africa and Europe, the kingdom of Morocco has long been a melting pot and a colorful example of globalization. Since the 9th century AD Berbers, Muslims and Jews lived, worked and studied together in this region. Today’s youth bulge in North Africa can be viewed as [...]
BY LOUISE SHELLEY Human trafficking has recently emerged as a major international policy concern. Its consequences are far-reaching and diverse affecting social, political and economic life in countries across the globe. Trafficking is part of the larger phenomenon of international migration that has assumed an enormous scale in recent decades. But it is also a [...]
BY SANDRA I. CHELDELIN AND SUSAN F. HIRSCH In 2004, in collaboration with a local NGO in Dushanbe, our faculty at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution launched a multiyear project to increase conflict resolution capacities of local actors in Tajikistan. We worked with government, religious and academic leaders, created a conflict resolution resource [...]
BY REUBEN E. BRIGETY, II It isn’t every day that I find myself in northern Kenya visiting a camp with 150,000 Somali refugees, or hearing an American soldier talk about the strategic importance of vaccinating sheep in Djibouti as part of the Global War on Terror. But neither is it every day that, as a [...]