Experts from the U.S. Institute of Peace provide the latest analysis and perspective on the world’s critical hot spots, U.S. and global security and issues involved in violent conflict, based on the Institute’s work on the ground and with key individuals, governments and organizations. They give interviews and background briefings to journalists and write for news outlets around the world.
After decades of activism, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced on Tuesday that it was lifting a longstanding ban on women driving. The change, which is set to take effect in June 2018, was welcomed news to many, but women are still denied a variety of rights in the Kingdom.
Pity the Kurds. Theirs is a history of epic betrayals. A century ago, the world reneged on a vow to give them their own state, carved from the carcass of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The rugged mountain people were instead dispersed into the new states of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, with another block left in Iran. Since then, all three countries have repressed their Kurds. Saddam Hussein was so intent on Arabizing Iraq’s Kurdistan that he paid Arab families to unearth long-dead relatives and rebury them in Kurdish territory—creating evidence to claim Arab rights to the land. He also razed four thousand Kurdish villages and executed a hundred thousand of the region’s inhabitants, some with chemical weapons. Syria stripped its Kurds of citizenship, making them foreigners in their own lands and depriving them of rights to state education, property ownership, jobs, and even marriage. Turkey repeatedly—sometimes militarily—crushed Kurdish political movements; for decades, the Kurdish language was banned, as was the very word “Kurd” to describe Turkey’s largest ethnic minority. They were instead known as “mountain Turks.”
“It’s not a binary choice. There are some pretty significant downsides – politically and in terms of delivery itself – with the current approach to humanitarian assistance,” said Payton Knopf, coordinator of the South Sudan Senior Working Group at the US Institute of Peace, and former head of the UN Panel of Experts on South Sudan.
Today's conflicts seem equally intractable. But even now, peace efforts are moving forward, often at the local level and through the extraordinary efforts of ordinary people. Not surprisingly, the best approaches usually involve helping citizens and governments solve their own problems.
Healthcare and humanitarian workers are increasingly in the crosshairs as hospitals and aid centers have become part of the battlefield in today’s wars. So far, there has been little to stop the profound surge of violence seen across several open-ended conflicts which has claimed thousands of lives, destroyed health systems, triggered mass displacement and state collapse, and exposed the crisis facing the norms of international humanitarian law contained in the Geneva Conventions.
On a scorching day in August, 2006, Wajeha al-Huwaider threw off her abaya, the enveloping black cover worn by Saudi women, and donned a calf-length pink shirt, pink trousers, and a matching pink scarf. She then took a taxi, from Bahrain, to a signpost on the bridge marking the border with Saudi Arabia. She got out and, with a large poster declaring, “Give Women Their Rights,” marched toward her homeland. Within twenty minutes, she was picked up by Saudi security forces, interrogated for a day, and officially warned. An intelligence officer, she recounted to me later, had pointed at her mouth and said, “Control this, and we won’t have a problem.”
Remarks by Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia, on the Occasion of a joint program sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), with the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), hosted by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) with the participation of Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“It gets to this notion of ethnicity in the Myanmar mind that I think the West doesn’t quite understand,” Derek Mitchell, who served as U.S. ambassador to Burma from 2012 to 2016, said. “We in the international community see the Rohingya as innocent people who just want to call themselves a name and who are uniquely abused for it. And, of course, it’s true they are largely innocent and uniquely abused. But to people in Myanmar, the name suggests something much more.”
What role should religious ideas, actors and institutions play in the formation and implementation of policy to counter violent extremism? To answer this question, Peter Mandaville and Melissa Nozell look at 1) how religion serves as a driver of violent extremism; 2) how this role depends on the relationship between religion and varying local and contextual factors; 3) when engagement with religious actors should take place in policy formation processes; 4) how such engagement should not just focus on religious authorities or in countering extremist interpretations of religion, and much more.
The last couple of weeks have seen the Line of Control (LoC) and International Border (IB) between India and Pakistan light up with more than usual frequency. Starting around September 10, incidents of firing were reported almost every night. On the night of September 14, a few hours after security forces killed two top Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists, Abu Ismail and Chhota Qasim on the outskirts of Srinagar, a BSF constable was killed along the IB in Jammu.