Policy Analysis

The electoral threshold intended to keep Kurdish nationalists out of the Turkish parliament now excludes almost everyone else from the legislature.

Following a year in which homegrown terrorist activity increased sharply, the 2010 holiday season witnessed a spate of attacks, plots, warnings, and arrests around the world, from Sweden to India to Portland, Oregon. As a result, efforts to combat violent extremism are being hotly debated. In Britain, the "Prevent" counterradicalization

In December 2010, violence increased significantly along Israel's border with Gaza, manifest by high-trajectory fire (rockets and mortars) on southern Israel, counterstrikes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and clashes along the border security fence. The Gaza situation since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in January 2009 has

On December 29, 2010, Houston-based Noble Energy announced a "significant natural gas discovery" in the Leviathan offshore license area eighty miles off the northern Israeli port of Haifa. According to the company, recent measurements confirmed initial estimates for the field of 16 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas, making it

The CHP has to reinvent itself as the party of secularism, to find a place where it can be at peace with religion but also promote socially liberal values.

President Obama assumed office in 2009 with an ambitious Middle East policy agenda. Atop the list of his campaign pledges, then Senator Obama vowed to pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace and re-engage in diplomacy with Tehran and Damascus. Given these grand plans, perhaps not surprisingly the first two years of the Obama

On December 17, 2010, Andrew Natsios and Richard Williamson addressed a special Policy Forum at The Washington Institute discussing the ramifications of the upcoming Sudanese referendum. Mr. Natsios, a former U.S. special envoy to Sudan, is currently on the faculty of Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has never been happy about the status of the Iranian presidency -- neither during his own tenure, from 1981-1989, nor during the terms of his three successors. Tension between the president and the Supreme Leader is built into the Islamic Republic's core. The Supreme

Recent WikiLeaks revelations about the discrepancy between the public and private views on Iran voiced by Gulf Arab leaders have been widely covered by the pan-Arab media without provoking policy shifts or internal tensions in Gulf Arab states. U.S. officials should therefore be encouraged in their policy of pressing for

Beijing's reaction to the November 2010 North Korean attack on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong is a case study of how China's continuing support of the North Korea-Iran axis is intimately linked with its fears of a U.S.-Taiwan alignment, among other possible scenarios. This paper explores how that axis

The recent announcement that the Obama administration has ended efforts to negotiate a ninety-day extension of Israel's moratorium on West Bank settlement construction is more opportunity than embarrassment. After twenty-two months of near-fruitless efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian negotiations conditioned on a total cessation of Israeli settlement activity, the administration can

Amid the latest setback in the peace process -- the ongoing failure to agree on a "peace talks for settlement freeze" deal -- Palestinian public opinion trends reveal unexpected flexibility on short-term tactics, but also troubling long-term intentions. Five public opinion polls of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians taken by

On November 30, 2010, Daniel Serwer and Mithal al-Alusi addressed a special Policy Forum luncheon at The Washington Institute. Mr. Serwer, a visiting scholar, senior fellow, and professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, previously led U.S. Institute of Peace teams working on rule of law

Negotiations between Iran and the world's leading powers in Geneva wrapped up yesterday, with a pledge by the parties to resume talks in Istanbul at the end of January. Here's what Foreign Policy contributor Simon Henderson, who released a paper on the talks and traveled to Switzerland to see them

On November 23, 2010, David Makovsky, along with Robert Satloff and J. Scott Carpenter, addressed a special Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Mr. Makovsky is the Ziegler distinguished fellow at the Institute and director of its Project on the Middle East Peace Process. At the forum, he offered fresh

On November 23, 2010, Robert Satloff and J. Scott Carpenter, along with David Makovsky, addressed a special Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. The speakers offered fresh observations from the Institute's 25th anniversary study tour to Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, and Jordan in mid-November. Dr. Satloff is executive director

J. Scott Carpenter, director of The Washington Institute's Project Fikra, gave remarks at an event marking the release of "Unfinished Business: An American Strategy for Iraq Moving Forward," a report to which he contributed as coauthor. In highlighting the report's conclusions, Mr. Carpenter emphasized both the centrality of Iraqi domestic

On December 6, representatives of the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany will meet with Iranian delegates in Geneva for two days of renewed talks on Tehran's nuclear program. The aspiration of the P5+1 -- the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany -- is to

On November 22, 2010, Dina Guirguis, David Schenker, and Leslie Campbell addressed a special Policy Forum luncheon at The Washington Institute to discuss the context surrounding Egypt's parliamentary elections. Held a week after the forum, the elections were reportedly marred by irregularities. Ms. Guirguis is a Keston Family research fellow

On November 30, 2010, The Washington Institute celebrated its 25th anniversary and paid tribute to Founding President Barbi Weinberg with a presentation at the 2010 Los Angeles Symposium, featuring her grandsons, Ari Weinberg and Daniel Zakowski, and dinner chair Jonathan Mitchell. In her first public address on policy in many