Publications

We live in an age of identity politics.  We define ourselves by one or more objective measures: measures of race, ethnicity, gender, politics, religion, sexual orientation, to name just a few. Those measures then define who we are to...

On Sept. 28, in the village of Dadri in the state of Uttar Pradesh, barely 50 miles from India’s capital of New Delhi, a Hindu mob beat a Muslim laborer, Mohammed Akhlaq, to death. The mob had attacked Akhlaq...

During the recent Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders suggested that Americans “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.” Hillary Clinton, however, thought the policy solutions would be found...

The current surge of violence among Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 is highly unusual in many respects. It is demographically heavily concentrated among youths, primarily aged 13-16, and geographically concentrated in East Jerusalem. It is largely leaderless...

The term “post-colonial” has presented a seminal problem for historians of the 20th century Middle East. As this essay will detail, debates over the term have provided an important axis around which discussions of political identity revolve. Following World...

SUMMARY On 19 October, Canadians went “back to the future” by defenestrating a nine-year Conservative Party (Tory) regime and giving the Liberals a strong majority. Led by Justin Trudeau, the Liberal victory was not totally unexpected; however, it was...

Middle East Institute In the Middle East, academic trends often mirror the ebb-and-flow of regional politics. During the 1990s, many researchers took inspiration from the burgeoning Western scholarship on civil society, which saw voluntary associations and social capital as...

During three weeks in September, Russia deployed its air force in Syria to support Bashar al-Asad’s increasingly weak and vulnerable regime in the civil war that began following the 2011 rebellion. Officially, Vladimir Putin explained the new Russian intervention as...

  No matter how the current wave of violence evolves, it is abundantly clear that those who talk of variants of a one-state solution can now have a foretaste of what it would really look like. What awaits the...

About a year ago Edward Lucas, a journalist and political commentator of The Economist, invited the NATO and the West to treat the three Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as they treated West Berlin during the Cold War....