Two days before celebrating the independence of South Sudan in Juba, senior U.S. officials warned Thursday that unresolved issues between the new country and Khartoum, as well as ongoing conflicts along or near their common border, threaten the stability of both...
A few days after Barack Obama's December 2009 announcement of 33,000 more troops being sent to Afghanistan, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Robert Gates advanced the official justification for escalation: the Afghan Taliban...
Recent anthropological studies of the Turkana people, “a nomadic society in east Africa that lacks a centralized government,” find that they can “regularly muster armies of several hundred warriors, most of whom have never met before” by relying on fear of punishment...
Even governments can learn from their mistakes. The United States went into Iraq and Afghanistan with Army and Marine divisions and the result has been disastrous, with hundreds of thousands dead and Washington on the verge of bankruptcy. Nor has the result been...
Despite countless attempts by the Bashar al-Assad regime to subdue the sporadic protests that have appeared across Syria since February, the demonstrations have consistently grown in both size and intensity. Last week, a march in the town of Hama may have attracted...
BERLIN — The decision by the German government to deliver 200 state-of-the-art armored tanks to Saudi Arabia, despite the Wahhabi monarchy’s human rights record and its recent violent intervention in Bahrain to repress the popular rebellion against the local ruling...
As Bahrain's government launches its much-touted "national dialogue" with members of civil society, experts are expressing skepticism that it will defuse growing tensions in the strategically located Gulf kingdom, let alone promote genuine reform. Strongly supported...
