FPRI Insights Issue 1

• Barak Mendelsohn
• August 12, 2014

Recent Publications by FPRI

E-Note
Jordan: Between Stability and Spillover
Andrew Spath

As ISIS expands in number and territory, and ambitiously declares the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate, anxiety is growing among leaders and citizens in neighboring Jordan. The key U.S. ally is precariously situated on the frontline of ISIS’s violent campaign.

 

Geopoliticus: The FPRI Blog
Ukraine Crisis Timeline: Talk of Peace, Acts of War
Adrian A. Basora and Aleksandr Fisher

Despite the most recent round of significant sanctions, we can expect several more rounds of peaceful statements and gestures from Moscow, followed each time by further de facto escalation in support of the Russian-led separatists in eastern Ukraine.

 

Geopoliticus: The FPRI Blog
Hunger for Power in Hungary? The Alarming Nature of Viktor Orban’s New “Manifesto”
Maia Otarashvili

The recent rise of authoritarianism in Eurasia and elsewhere seems to be encouraging further destabilization of other fragile democracies. This time Hungary’s brash Prime Minister Viktor Orbán spoke to local students and made a series of bold statements about his vision of a new Hungarian that is a “work-based society that will abandon liberal democracy.”

E-Note
“Dirty Bombs:” Reason to Worry?
John Haines

The recent report that ISIS seized a quantity of previously unreported material from a university laboratory in Iraq sparked much commentary about the possibility of a malefactor fashioning and detonating a so-called “dirty bomb.”
 

E-Note
Freedom of the Skies:  A Toothless Distant Relative of Freedom of the Seas
Lawrence Husick

Freedom of the Seas is one of the central principles of American foreign policy. In what should be a parallel concept, Freedom of the Skies, the international community has adopted a more complex and primarily commercial framework that lacks both clarity and any means of enforcement.