Is "Islamic democracy" a contradiction in terms, a big fat oxymoron? Years ago, a sympathetic French scholar wrote that Islam was inherently "totalitarian," and Bernard Lewis, when asked by Presi...
Five days of fierce rebel-on-rebel infighting in insurgent-controlled towns in northern Syria, involving al Qaeda groups taking opposing sides, has prompted an intense debate between jihadist rel...
This coming spring will mark the 20th anniversary of the Rwanda Genocide, when as many as a million innocent civilians were butchered to death by Hutu tribal extremists in an orgy of bloodshed th...
While the debate continues on the administration’s apparent slip of tongue...
In serving their patrons in Saudi Arabia, ultraconservative religious Salafis are stirring violent protests and flexing political muscle in North Africa and fledgling Arab democracies. But the in...
The Assad dynasty is not content with slaughtering its own people in great numbers. It is also destroying Syria's rich archaeological past. Writing last month in the US Weekly Standard...
On April 30, Sidi Ould Sidna, a.k.a. Abou Jendel, an al-Qaeda-linked militant who was escaped earlier in the month from the courthouse in Nouakchott, Mauritania, where he was being tried for the...
The end of one year and the beginning of another is a good time both to take stock of where we have been and to look ahead at the paths we are likely to take and the battles which we will have to...
While the world has been watching the pathetic spectacle being played out in Harare, Zimbabwe, as Robert Mugabe clings desperately to the levers of power he has held for nearly three decades (see...
If, outside the atypical case of South Africa, any country in Africa was viewed as an island of stability with a real shot at breaking free of the "development traps" which have ensnared the most...
On February 6, 2007, President George W. Bush launched a major evolution in American military posture when he formally announced that he had directed the Pentagon to establish a new unified...
This past week, the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair became a figure of ridicule for suggesting that the United States doesn’t have photos of Osama bin Laden’s body — presumably...
As battle lines crisscross between the rebels marching west to overthrow him and loyal military units taking the offensive against rebel-held towns in the eastern Libya, Colonel Muammar al-Qadhaf...
Democracy has been the dominant form of political organization in Canada and other English-speaking countries for so long that we often forget just how historically unusual it is. Until the estab...
In my review last week of Africa's likely top flash points for 2011, I expressed my concern that The year that was supposed to be Côte d'Ivoire's "ann...
When, in the years following the end of the Cold War, it gradually emerged that terrorism for religious ends rather than violence linked to nationalist or revolutionary movements was to be...
Focused on the final stretch of the midterm elections at home, policymakers and pundits in the United States have hardly evinced any interest in concerning themselves with electoral politics abro...
After one year in office, the Barack Obama administration has started to delineate more clearly its policies towards the Arab world. The George W. Bush administration of 2001-2009 had, at least i...
By Dr. J. Peter Pham For much of Africa's post-independence history, "African unity" was more an aspiration than a reality. Consequently, even when, as I...
Americans watched helplessly as oil reached an all-time high of over $145 a barrel in July 2008. The climb in prices was relentless: after oil broke $100 a barrel for the first time in January 2008, it seemed that each day of commodities trading brought it to a new high.