Geography Archives: Turkey

We want to draw your attention to a brilliant piece, “Iran’s Foreign Policy Strategy After Saddam,” just published by Kayhan Barzegar, an Iranian scholar and foreign policy analyst currently at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.  We have previously posted about an Op Ed that Barzegar published on Iranian perspectives about […]

Iran is not going to the 2010 World Cup, but there is another football being kicked around in the domestic Iranian media: the extent of poverty in Iran. Last month, the Statistical Center of Iran reported that 70 percent of Iranians earn less than a monthly income of $450 for a household of five.  This […]

The defeat of the Marxist emancipatory project has brought an end to radical secular universalism.  The result has been twofold: identity politics and their post-modern ideologies of difference have become the legitimating motifs of Western democracies, whilst radical political Islam has taken the anti-systemic baton of secular Marxism, but subverted it with a brand of […]

  Michael Axworthy.  A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind.  New York: Basic Books, 2008.  352 pp.  $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-00888-9. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a large number of Iranians joined the ranks of expatriates living in Europe and the United States.  Suddenly uprooted and finding themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, some of […]

The original title for the article that follows was “Response to ‘Raoul Djukanovic’.”  “RD” is the Internet pseudonym of Daniel Simpson, who we mention in our second paragraph (below), and who, as a member of what we refer to as the Bosnia Genocide Lobby, assails us wherever we publish something related to the former Yugoslavia.  […]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has definitely had a very good crisis.  Just over a year ago, it was an institution on life support: ignored by most developing countries; derided for its failure to predict most crises in emerging markets and its often counterproductive responses to such crises; even called to book by its auditors […]

OK, so the Palestinian Authority will not unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state.  In fact, the whole issue seems a misunderstanding.  Concerned that the US has backtracked on a two state solution based on the 1967 borders and that Israel was getting the world used to the “fact” that the settlements and the Wall, rather […]

Is it just me, or is the pontification of Western leaders about corruption in Afghanistan growing rather tiresome? There is something very Captain Renault about it.  We’re shocked, shocked that the Afghans have sullied our morally immaculate occupation of their country with their dirty corruption.  How ungrateful can they be? But perhaps we should consider […]

  The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies University of London, 2009 I feel both honoured and gratified to be offering the 7th Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture.  This gives me the opportunity to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Tony for his unwavering support and friendship over the years.  When I […]

The decision to behave in Geneva like the made-in-Oslo Palestinian Authority (PA) was but an extension of the Israeli occupation was the final nail in the coffin of international solidarity with the Palestinian cause in its customary sense.  Those who took this decision knew this.  International solidarity was confounded by the questions stirred by the […]

Analytical Monthly Review On Monday, October 12th, it was reported that Manmohan Singh — despite the request of air chief marshal P. V. Naik to permit IAF personnel in helicopters to attack inhabitants of the hilly regions — had announced that the armed forces would not be deployed against the domestic left-wing opponents of the […]

“Medvedev-watching” graduated from pure science to applied science during the four-day visit by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to New York and Pittsburgh last week. The Western perception that the famous Prime Minister Vladimir Putin-Medvedev “tandem” in Moscow would inevitably transform and the Russian president would incrementally create his own power center in the Kremlin received […]

RELATIONS WITH THE US 1. Diplomatic Ties Six in ten Iranians favor restoring diplomatic relations with the US.  An equal number favor unconditional negotiations between the countries.  Many favor cooperation on dealing with the Taliban. Thirty years after the United States and Iran broke diplomatic relations, Iranians overwhelmingly support repairing that longstanding breach.  Both governments […]

  The Obama administration’s decision to scrap the Bush era anti-missile defense plans in Eastern Europe was actually expected.  Nonetheless, this was a very pragmatic move on the part of Washington.  However, the immediate talk and plans for a different American-led “stronger, smarter, and swifter” anti-missile strategy was not helpful.  I will reserve judgment on […]

Umut Özkırımlı, Spyros A. Sofos.  Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.  viii + 220 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-70052-8. Tormented by History by Umut Özkırımlı and Spyros A. Sofos provides a comparative approach to Turkish and Greek nationalisms from the late nineteenth century to the present.  The […]

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose daughter is married to a son of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the President’s Chief of Staff.  Mr. Mashaei is known for actions that have appalled certain conservative quarters of the Iranian political establishment, such as attending a ceremony in Turkey where women danced and hosting a ceremony in Tehran where women drumming […]

In serious contention for Dumbest Washington Consensus for September is the idea of cutting off Iran’s gas imports to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium.  A majority of Representatives and Senators have signed on to legislation that seeks to block Iran’s gas imports, a top legislative priority for the so-called “Israel Lobby.”  But it’s a […]

Like the star gazers who last week watched the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, diplomatic observers had a field day watching the penumbra of big power politics involving the United States, Russia and China, which constitutes one of the crucial phenomena of 21st-century world politics. It all began with United States Vice […]

Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York,  23 July 2009 The discussions about Responsibility to Protect (R2P), or its cousin “humanitarian intervention,” are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have […]

Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Simon Reich, eds.  Immigration, Integration, and Security: America and Europe in Comparative Perspective.   The Security Continuum: Global Politics in the Modern Age.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.  xi + 480 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8229-4344-0; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-5984-7. Migration and security have always been linked, but, as Ariane Chebel […]