Mary Ellen O’Connell In the wake of 9/11 the United States adopted a new approach to countering terrorism, an approach made possible by two developments: adding missiles and bombs to unmanned drones and asserting the legal right to use these weapons outside combat...
David Cortright The nature of armed conflict has changed dramatically in recent decades. Gone is the old paradigm of industrial interstate war. Instead, conflicts have risen sharply within and beyond states. In the world today there are 37 armed conflicts (as measured...
Andrew J. Bacevich When it comes to America’s role in the world, the 2012 presidential campaign was notable chiefly for what was left unsaid. Other than uttering platitudes or striking postures aimed at particular domestic constituencies, neither candidate had much to...
Scott Appleby The war being waged in mineral-rich Mindanao, the southernmost island region of the Philippines, is a perfect storm of contemporary violent conflict. It is about land and resources, religion and clan, sovereignty, governance, and corruption in high and...
Gerard F. Powers Later this month, the U.S. State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group will submit its recommendations to Secretary Hillary Clinton after a year of work. With subgroups on development, religious freedom and democracy, and conflict...
Sumanto Al Qurtuby In 1999, in response to bloody communal violence that broke out in eastern Indonesia, a handful of Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim women leaders and activists established the interfaith alliance Gerakan Perempuan Peduli, the Concerned Women’s...
Mariam Safi Two years after President Hamid Karzai’s consultative Peace Jirga and creation of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme, the peace process continues to receive criticism for the ambiguity that surrounds the role of women. Civil society...
David Cortright and Kristen Wall The U.S. is set to withdraw the bulk of its forces from Afghanistan by 2014. This transition period is fraught with risk for Afghan women, many of whom have benefited during 10 years of improved access to education, health care, and...
The Afghan Women’s Network The Afghan Women’s Network is a non-partisan network of women and women’s groups working to empower Afghan women and ensure their equal participation in Afghan society. This post summarizes the Network's presentation at the NATO Summit in...
Peter Wallensteen In January 1990 I received a phone call from the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. The island was experiencing an intensive armed conflict, a war that was small by international standards, but which we included in the Uppsala Conflict Data...
Madhav Joshi and John Darby Peacebuilding scholars and practitioners often emphasize the importance of achieving sustainable peace accords, but few have attempted to examine comprehensively the provisions of peace accords and how they are implemented. The Kroc...
Kristen Wall and David Cortright Conflict data sets enable peace scholars to identify key practices that make a difference in peacebuilding. Take, for example, the practice of peacekeeping. One of the strongest findings to emerge from empirical research is that...
Stephen W. Bosworth I have been dealing with North Korea since the 1990s, when we tried to implement the Agreed Framework, and later when I served as the U.S. Ambassador in Seoul. When I returned to active service as the Special Representative to North Korea in...
George A. Lopez The new North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has come to power in a fledgling nuclear state that thus far has resisted pressures from the West and the Security Council to denuclearize. As he scans the political horizon, Kim may arrive at several conclusions...
David Cortright and Linda Gerber-Stellingwerf The history of nonproliferation teaches that nations must be persuaded rather than forced to give up nuclear weapons capability. This is a difficult challenge with a regime as truculent as North Korea, where the primary...
Ryne Clos The United States has adopted a static and stark picture of al-Shabaab that has magnified the truly dangerous aspects of the organization and alienated dimensions of the movement that could contribute to a solution to Somalia’s problems. Al-Shabaab is an...
John Paul Lederach The U.S. government’s list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” is a central part of a counter-terrorism strategy based on the isolation of individuals and groups who espouse violence defined as terrorism. This strategy makes it illegal to provide...
Laura Weis In July 2010, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment does not protect groups or individuals who provide “expert advice or assistance” or “training” to proscribed terrorist groups, even when they do so to...