Guest post by Tiffany S. Chu, Alex Braithwaite, Faten Ghosn, and Justin Curtis Plans to fund a border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border are troubling D.C. politics. During his campaign for the presidency, candidate Trump promised a wall would be built to reduce security...
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter received his PhD from Georgetown University in May 2013, and was a Fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia during 2012-2013. His...
Guest Post by Lindsay Heger and Wendy Wong. In a recent and rare speech, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad dug in his heels. While nobody could have realistically expected him to simply walk away...
First off, this is my first post. Thanks to Dan and the rest of the crowd for inviting me, though I fear they – and Duck readers – may soon tire of hearing about how building effective control over...
The violence in Syria is spiking. 1,600 killed in the past week and 100,000 new refugees in the past month. After a year-and-a-half of violence, the UN reports that there are now more than 230,000 refugees, 1.2 million internally displaced persons, more than 2.5 million in need of humanitarian aid. Lakhdar Brahimi, the new UN/Arab League envoy called the violence "staggering." Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo yesterday condemned Assad's "crimes against humanity."So what have we learned over the past year-and-a-half? First, despite all the complaints about the era of...
2012 interview with Phil Arena.
He's not alone, of course, but scholar Gilles Dorronsoro is quite pessimistic about the Afghan surge and ongoing counterinsurgency campaign:The current counterinsurgency campaign shows little signs of accomplishing its mission. The surge is not enough to reverse the Taliban’s gains, or the quick decline of the Karzai government. Pakistan’s lack of support makes the Taliban sanctuary there a major strategic problem.More troops and the latest strategy have failed to make progress. The war is not conclusive in the south — where stabilization could take years—and the Taliban is gaining momentum...
This is according to a new policy brief out from the Belfer Center at Harvard, in which Monica Duffy Toft details a study of 137 civil wars fought from 1940-2007. Toft finds that more civil wars are ending in negotiation these days than in stalemate or in victory by one side over the other, possibly reflecting the diplomatic norms promulgated across the globe by the conflict prevention sector. But:Does the trend toward negotiations correlate with improved outcomes? The data suggest that it does not.Civil War Recurrence. Wars ended through negotiated settlement are twice as likely to reignite...