Koppell will lead USIP’s programs on issue areas such as rule of law and religion, as well as grants, research, education, fellowships and training. She will focus on the design, development and piloting of innovative approaches to conflict transformation and peacebuilding.

When armed groups lay down their weapons, women have rarely been part of the conflict negotiations. But in Colombia, where up to 40 percent of leftist rebels are female, women have had a much more prominent role in the anticipated peace agreement between the Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, who have been engaged in more than a half century of armed conflict.

Wearing a flowing green gown and a string of pearls that hung, flapper-style, below her waist, Narges Mousavi was married Friday, in Tehran. The bride, a painter, was born into the revolutionary élite. Her father, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was Iran’s Prime Minister for eight years.

Beth Cole, a special adviser on violent extremism at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told CQ she liked much of what she was hearing about Lumpkin’s strategy for the Global Engagement Center. She said it was critical for the safety of local actors including citizen journalists, local nongovernmental organizations and sympathetic religious leaders that any aid from Washington be channeled through intermediaries such as larger nonprofits, so as not to expose them for accepting funding from the U.S....

A bomb exploded at an airport checkpoint in Somalia on Monday. But it's what the bomb was in that has the United States worried. The bomb was hidden in a laptop computer and shattered windows at the small airport north of the Somali capitol Mogadishu. 

Growing up, in Maplewood, New Jersey, where her father was a narcotics detective and her mother a special-education teacher, Ibtihaj Muhammad competed in softball, tennis, volleyball, and track. “In our family, you didn’t have a choice of whether to play sports,” she told me. “You only had a choice of what sports you played.”

The Obama administration is sending disaster response teams to northern Ethiopia to try to address a humanitarian emergency and avoid a national security risk to the U.S. should the drought there spiral out of control.

For the first time since its blitz across Syria and Iraq, in 2014, the Islamic State is on the defensive in both countries. Its caliphate, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is shrinking. Its numbers are down. It hasn’t launched a new offensive since May, 2015.