BY DAVID H. SHINN Since the end of the Cold War, western political engagement in Africa has tended to be static. There have been some important exceptions such as the international intervention in Somalia led initially by the United States in the early and mid-1990s, support for achieving a comprehensive peace agreement between northern and [...]
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 GITANJALI GUTIERREZ In the wake of September 11, 2001, the United States parted from its traditional adherence to fundamental legal principles, including domestic and international prohibitions against torture, kidnapping, disappearances, and arbitrary detention without trial. Legal memorandum from the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and other government documents disclosed through the Freedom [...]
BY ARNAUD KURZE After over half a century of modern foreign aid practices, a vast literature has addressed the question of aid effectiveness1, particularly with regards to the questionable and perturbing record of poverty alleviation in least developed countries. Since the 1990s, however, post-Soviet countries and the war-torn Balkan region have also appeared on 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 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 [...]
BY JANINE R. WEDEL In the study of foreign policy, aid and nationbuilding, little empirical attention has been paid to the agency of the actors who serve as brokers among parties. Much more attention generally has focused on policies and end results. Yet, the reorganizing, more networked world of the late 20th and early 21st [...]
BY DANIELE ARCHIBUGI The two main wars that opened the third millennium, those in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been justified by the United States (US) and its allies with a mixture of arguments. The first, and perhaps foremost, has been self-defense: to eradicate the terrorist roots in Afghanistan and destroy the alleged weapons of mass [...]
BY DAVID R. IRVINE Not far from Stratford, on the river Avon, stands Warwick Castle. This thousand year-old relic is one of Britain’s premier historical attractions. The dungeons and torture chamber, with the rack and press, the thumbscrews and iron maiden, are popular tour stops as visitors ponder the dark barbarity of the age of [...]