One hundred years after the start of World War I, the legacies of decisions made by colonial powers during and after the period cast a long shadow over the Middle East.
Despite his sweeping electoral victory, it seems that Egypt's new president, General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has learned little from the past mistakes of Mubarak and Morsi.
Talk of a “pivot to Asia” that supposedly would mark President Obama’s second term is “misplaced and even simplistic,” writes fellow Kristian Coates Ulrichsen. In a globalized world, “key U.S. relationships with strategic and commercial partners … cannot be addressed in isolation from one another. The convergence of U.S. ties and Asian ties with the Middle East is a case in point highlights how regions and issues are interconnected as never before.”
Despite mounting efforts toward achieving gender equality, the Middle East and North Africa region continues to rank the lowest worldwide when it comes to women's economic participation and opportunity.
While much media attention recently has focused on the geopolitical fault lines that connect Syria’s violence to wider region-wide trends, the plight of individual women, men, and children displaced within Syria or living in camps beyond its borders shows no sign of ending. As Secretary of State John Kerry has stated, the humanitarian situation in Syria is "an outrage" but the violence only looks set to worsen as opposition groups turn on each other and radical trans-national elements feed off the resulting vacuum of authority and control. This is the task as the international community prepares to reconvene in Switzerland on January 22, writes Baker Institute fellow Kristian Coates Ulrichsen in the Baker Institute Blog.
With the Yemeni government in a state of transition, the time is right to propose legislation that would protect young girls from the physical, emotional and economic harms of early marriage.