[escenic_image id="5542814"]Last week, Afghanistan held its first major peace conference. It didn’t start out well. The Taliban fired a couple of rockets at the venue in Kabul during President Hamid…

[escenic_image id="5570318"]In March, when the Israeli government defied US President Barack Obama’s peace efforts by announcing it would build Jewish housing blocks in Arab East Jerusalem—with Joe…

[escenic_image id="5567032"]Nawshirwan Mustafa is a prominent Kurdish politician, and currently the leader of Goran, the Movement for Change. The co-founder of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK),…

[escenic_image id="5566251"]Unwilling to yield international real estate under the control of the Pentagon, President Barack Obama has just crushed the political life of Japan Prime Minister Yukio…

[escenic_image id="5564559"]In 2005, Ramzan Kadyrov, the then prime minister of Chechnya famously declared that the republic was “the most peaceful place in Russia”, and would soon be “the wealthiest…

[escenic_image id="5563871"]Prince Turki Al Faisal holds no official position in the Saudi government. But as ex-intelligence chief, former ambassador to Washington and London, and the foreign…

[escenic_image id="5563721"]James B. Smith is a retired US Air Force Brigadier General who has served as US ambassador to Riyadh since September 2009. Prior to his appointment, he held a variety of…

[escenic_image id="5562322"]This week was penciled in to be historic. The heads of state of 43 Mediterranean countries—including Israel, the Palestine Authority, Turkey, Egypt, Europe’s 27 members…

[escenic_image id="5562264"]Despite a relatively democratic legacy when compared to other countries in the region, the past few years have been unstable for Kuwait’s political system. Yet, amid the…

[escenic_image id="5560410"]Contemporary Saudi society is usually described as torn between two competing factions—the Islamists and the Liberals. Yet, while the first group has been the subject of…