By Wadah Khanfar CAIRO: Last year’s events in Egypt and Tunisia drew the curtain on a tottering old order and delivered much of the Arab world into a long-awaited new era. But what that new era will look like remains very much an open question, given the many challenges that the region’s countries still face. The …

By Bruce Riedel The danger of war is growing again over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran is rattling its sabers, the Republican presidential candidates and others are rattling theirs. But even if Iran gets the bomb, Israel will have overwhelming military superiority over Iran, a fact that should not be lost in all the heated rhetoric. Former …

By Aryeh Neier NEW YORK: For months now, it has been clear that no peaceful, even satisfactory, resolution of the conflict in Syria is possible without external intervention. Paradoxically, too many Syrian civilians have been tortured, wounded, and killed to stop the demonstrations seeking the ouster of President Bashar Al-Assad. The victims’ families, friends, and neighbors …

By Anya Cordell CHICAGO: Martin Luther King, Jr., the renowned American civil rights activist, said, “Men hate each other because they fear each other, they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they are often separated from each other.” Americans commemorated his legacy on Jan. 16, a …

By Martin Feldstein CAMBRIDGE: European political leaders may be about to agree to a fiscal plan which, if implemented, could push Europe into a major depression. To understand why, it is useful to compare how European countries responded to downturns in demand before and after they adopted the euro. Consider how France, for example, would have …

By Sanjaya Baru NEW DELHI: As Asia’s rising powers seek to sustain growth and ensure stability, energy security has moved to the forefront of Asian geopolitics. The recent visit by China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar was as much about ensuring energy security for China as it was …

By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Apt lines from The Phoenix. Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? If not, you will never really change. The phoenix renews her youth only when she is burnt down to hot and flocculent ash. Approaching January 25 prods sober reflection. Martyrs are in our everyday vocabulary. Lives …

By Omar El Sabh After December’s brutal crackdown on protestors near the Cabinet building by military forces, some are taking it upon themselves to deliver the message to those who are unaware of the infamy that took place at the time. The recent 3askarKazeboon (The Military are Liars, also known as Kazeboun) campaign has attracted much …

By Juliet Torome NAIROBI – The news that Yale University has agreed to return thousands of artifacts that one of its researchers took from Peru in 1911 reminded me of a party that I attended recently — one that I had to leave prematurely. An African friend had invited me to the event, at an acquaintance’s …

By Michael Spence MILAN: In the 66 years since World War II ended, virtually all centrally planned economies have disappeared, largely as a result of inefficiency and low growth. Nowadays, markets, price signals, decentralization, incentives, and return-driven investment characterize resource allocation almost everywhere. This is not because markets are morally superior, though they do require freedom …

By Justin Yifu Lin and Apurva Sanghi WASHINGTON, DC: Despite all of the gloomy economic news nowadays, if we thought that things couldn’t get much worse, we had a grim reminder this month that that no country is immune to the forces of nature and the havoc they wreak. Two years ago, on Jan. 12, 2010, …

By Dani Rodrik CAMBRIDGE: The world economy is entering a new phase, in which achieving global cooperation will become increasingly difficult. The United States and the European Union, now burdened by high debt and low growth — and therefore preoccupied with domestic concerns — are no longer able to set global rules and expect others to …

By Daood Hamdani OTTAWA: This May, as Muslims mark the 20th anniversary of the induction of Al-Rashid mosque in Fort Edmonton Park, the country’s largest living history museum, the spotlight will be on the leadership role of Muslim women in this historic event. Fifty years after they burst onto the front line to help complete the …

By Yariv Oppenheimer At first glance, this election year in the United States does not bode well for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. President Barack Obama will be occupied all year with a political struggle against a Republican nominee. Accordingly, he will have to continue appealing to the right wing wherever Israel is concerned and to avoid …

By Frank Fredericks NEW YORK: In the November 19, 2011 issue of The Economist, the cover story, called “The magic of diasporas” outlines the benefits of mass immigration, particularly to the West. However the changing demographics in major metropolises can also be a highly destabilizing force. This is especially true in the United States in cities …

By Rabbi Gideon Sylvester JERUSALEM: Across the world, people were outraged by the news that mosques in Israel had been desecrated and racist graffiti scrawled across their walls. Israeli Jews felt ashamed. We asked ourselves: do the perpetrators have any understanding of Jewish history and theology, — which clearly teach respect for every human being and …

By Ana Palacio MADRID: While the world anxiously awaits the climax of the eurozone drama, its leaders’ behavior resembles the political equivalent of what physicists call “Brownian motion,” with officials bouncing randomly from one crucial bilateral consultation and vital European summit to the next. The impact of make-or-break declarations that are supposed to solve the monetary …

By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: I think people miss the real story in Egypt. People were trying to convince themselves during the revolution that Egyptians were going to turn out to be a bunch of fluffy liberals — Shadi Hamid, the Brookings Institute’s Doha Center research director appearing on FRONTLINE, American public television’s acclaimed current affairs show. …

By Erik Solheim OSLO: Poverty is not only about not having enough money. It is also about exploitation and oppression, and about armed conflicts and wars that make it impossible to run a business, visit the doctor, or send children to school. In short, poverty is about politics, and the need to devise political solutions to …

By Barry Eichengreen BERKELEY: The euro crisis shows no signs of letting up. While 2011 was supposed to be the year when European leaders finally got a grip on events, the eurozone’s problems went from bad to worse. What had been a Greek crisis became a southern European crisis and then a pan-European crisis. Indeed, by …

By Fatemeh Fakhraie PORTLAND, Oregon: People, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, often tell me that I can’t be both a Muslim and a feminist. At a recent book reading in Oregon, for example, a male audience member asked me, “How does that even work?” These questions demonstrate some of the rigid misconceptions individuals have about Islam and …