Sinai Crisis Binds Egypt and Israel
Last week, Sinai-based extremists targeted the North Sinai security headquarters with a massive blast, causing damag...
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sinai’s Volatility Increasingly Unites Egypt and Israel
Militants in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula carried out a cross-border shooting attack on Wednesday, leaving an Israeli female...
Policy Briefs
Do We Have To Destroy Radical Islamism In Order To Save Islam?
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...
Op-eds
Syria’s Al Qaeda Gang Wars
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...
Op-eds
Hail to the French
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...
Op-eds
Has Assad Already Lost Control of Syria’s Chemical Weapons?
While the debate continues on the administration’s apparent slip of tongue...
Op-eds
The Great Salafi Gamble
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...
Op-eds
March on Syria
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...
Op-eds
Criminal Networks in West Africa: An Emerging Security Challenge
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...
Op-eds
The War on Terrorism in Africa: Assessment and Prospects
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...
Op-eds
The Kenyan Tragedy and the Future of Democracy in Africa
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...
Op-eds
Botswana’s Success Sparkles amid African Gloom
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...
Op-eds
Securing Africa
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...
Op-eds
Bin Laden’s Killing Shows Us the Irrelevance of “International Law”
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...
Op-eds
The Battle for Libya: Implications for Africa
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...
Op-eds
Democracy Will Prevail in Egypt and Across the Middle East
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...
Op-eds
Côte d’Ivoire Crisis: Some Lessons to Be Learned
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...
Op-eds
Review: Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, From Christian Militias to
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...
Op-eds
Nigeria at the Crossroads, Again
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...
Op-eds
Waiting for Reform: Arab Citizens and Obama
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...